So a quick story about how I made this build, it started off as a build designed after a week of theory crafting tainted pact flicker builds and with the discovery of this fringe unique: The Retch. So I jumped into pob and started doing the only sensible thing: slamming leech nodes on Slayer. I'll admit I'm half decent at leech at best and bored at worst so quite a few of my choices came down to "I found one post that suggested it and slammed it into POB till the number went up."

Leech maxing Slayer had me skipping straight past barrage into Vaal Pact. Leaving us with a melee build that dies the second we stop attacking.

The only sensible solution: go CoC of course. This starts with a gentle cast while channelling blade vortex for double phys leech, it flows into a Scold's Bridle to proc a cwdt forbidden rite and ends up at an awakened CoC, with no cdr, proccing FR every 0.132 seconds, triggering a second FR every 0.264 seconds.

Ok premise settled, now what came out the other side?

https://pobb.in/kUedfjKLQ8Mo

A 69k ehp, 21k phys hit CoC cyclone leeching a minimum of 35,506 life per second dealing 13.8mil Full DPS proccing a maxed 6 end charges Immortal Cry off cooldown. A build that hits one enemy 179 times a second, and itself 11 times a second.

!Note that this reflects a build minmaxed almost to the best of my ability, it is more a wishlist than a reality. There is a far more reasonable version on a second loadout (see top right corner of POB) but the cwdt does not trigger smoothly and you will need to finish that version yourself, eg FR might be better even in the CWC setup. Note n2: These values do not reflect what The Retch deals in damage. I have not factored that into the build. You can probably remove the Retch, a large portion of the leech and make a better build. !<

But that wouldn't be fun would it? So this writeup will cover the minmaxed version. Now how should the build play out?

We walk into a map, crit once to proc FR, leech to sustain hp, crit a second time proccing both FR, proc the remaining skills, burn 0-3 end charges, curse an enemy with assassins mark, fire storm starts landing, start generating charges, leech and recoup kick in to sustain mana. Crit again to go again. at some point The Retch might do something, ideally after you have frostblinked to the next pack. 90 seconds into the map you should have capped Frenzy Charges and hit the perfect CoC, and cwdt, breakpoints.

As the build is untested: mana leech may not be enough to sustain the sequence of events, it is best to have enough mana to cast everything once. This pob is currently 3 mana under what it needs to guarentee a full activation, it's probably fine.

Onto items, we're using a few low tier uniques which are surprisingly efficient:

Carnage Heart is a huge portion of the strength for damage, dex for our chestpiece and the int for our spells. It also carries a lot of weight in fixing our starved resists. Damage and Leech are nice.

The Highwayman enables leech on any of our damage types, allowing for phys, fire and chaos while leaving our gloves open and it allows for easy capping of leech on secondary skills.

It also uses a flask I haven't even heard of: Sin's Rebirth, more on that later.

These cheap uniques let us go for very strong corruptions like an additional curse and bleed immunity.

Scold's Bridal is more rare than these but provides almost as much damage as a ravenous passion. It also takes some of the burden away from your life/chaos res when it comes to triggering cwdt. Allowing you to build more chaos resistance or less life.

The Stampede is necessary to play Cyclone of Tumult. There is not enough space in the build to overcome 50% less MS and we want APS.

Why a Staff? A Warstaff comes with a much higher base crit than the other weapons at the downside of a lower attack speed than swords. It also has nice spell damage crafts/rolls. At the high end Overlord grants us Fortify, the same on any other weapon require a corrupt

For Flasks:

Progenesis takes some of the damage we take and delays it. Given our insane regen we don't care about this delayed damage.

We use this neet flask called Sin's Rebirth, no not Original Sin that's a wasted ring slot. It gives us Unholy Might allowing us to skip phys scaling and go straight to chaos scaling, it would make BV a decent skill if FR didn't hit so hard. But it also is the source of our nearly instant, guarenteed 15 wither stacks.

A nice Diamond Flask caps out our crit and leeches some of the damage we take from FR. This ensures we are always leeching. We don't die to cannot be leeched from and we're always affected by while leeching upsides.

Bottled Faith is a very common flask for damage. For us it guarentees consecrated ground against rares, along with our watcher's eye it grants up to 270% inc crit chance for our spells.

Dying Sun gives us more insta leech hits, 21% more damage and fire res. It is also the biggest sink for our flask charges.

For their uptime:

We gain a flask charge on crit our watcher's eye, our 15 cyclone crits a second cap out the 100ms internal cooldown on gaining flask charges. With 30% reduced charges gained from The Retch thats 7 per second. Over 7 seconds we gain 49 charges. Oh look that's enough to perfectly sustain a 49 charges, 54% less duration Dying Sun. Not enough for the rest though.

Afaik Surgeon's rolls separately from the Watchers Eye which takes some of the strain off there. Let's set it to reuse at the end of it's duration so there is no wasted downtime and therefore no wasted charges. With 2 guarenteed uses in the flask we'll have at least 11.5 seconds to cyclone to another pack.

Bottled Faith will trigger on hitting a rare or unique ensuring we waste no charges on white packs and that we have the damage when we need it.

We could also set Progenesis and Sin's Rebirth to reuse at the end of their flask effect and this would ensure the least amount of wasted charges but if you lay them out in the exact order I introduced them... then give them Used When An Adjacent Flask Is Used. When the Diamond Flask is used it will send usage down the chain. It uses more charges but it takes 1/3rd the effort to start and restart the flask setup.

Dying Sun gets Used When Charges Reach Full.

Gems:

To summarise, Cyclone of Tumult to reach the 2x trigger rate, Vaal Pact and for Vibing.

FR to run a CWDT setup, mana sustain through recoup and for huge damage.

Temp Chains makes leeches 25% better. I think... maybe... at worst its a 18-19% action speed slow which is a nice defensive layer.

Despair for dmg, assassins mark for power charges and damage.

Firestorm of pelting for lots of hits.

Zealotry is a decent damage increase. It mostly allows for large spell crit chance and keeps our cyclone crit capped without power charges. It can probably be swapped for Determination or Grace.

Precision can be levelled higher if mana allows for it and crit cap is proving to be a problem.

Frostblink is almost manadtory for a cyclone build, especially a tumult one.

We have infused chanelling because it is 14% less damage taken easily worth the reduced full damage.

For charges:

Lets use those 11 self hits a second to gain 2.83 endurance charges a second. We do this by using one of our two annoints on Inexorable. Now let's gain some power charges with our 179 outgoing hits on assassin mark that's 8.95 power charges per second.

That's a lot of charges... someone could make a discharge build out of that.

Frenzy charges come from 100% increased charge duration, this enables a Searing Exarch implicit on the chestpiece to create and sustain frenzy charges. Getting a +1 min frenzy charge ring reduces the charge time to 70 seconds. Chance to gain frenzy on kill ramps up the CoC breakpoint with the first pack or two.

Immortal Call should have 6 charge effectiveness always with a 2 second duration and a 2.5 second cooldown. That's a huge defensive layer. If mana sustain is sufficient it may be worth it to swap Battle Rouse for Dynamo for improved IC.

Pantheon:

Brine King because I haven't solved ele ailments and am lazy.

Gruthkul because we have always been hit 5 times recently.

Quick Q/As:

Q: Is this league start viable?

A: Nope, 'fraid not. You could play a cwc Vaal Pact Slayer and ditch any uniques but then you are not playing this build nor are you playing a good build.

Q: Will you league start this?

A: Not really, I think I'll transition after watchstones with econc.

Q: Is it HC viable?

A: It's a self-damaging build with too many conditionals and not enough defensive layers, I wouldn't.

Q: What mods brick the build?

A: Less cooldown rate will reduce the build's damage a lot, 70% less reduces it by 77%. Charge Removal will remove 30% of our phys max hit, a large portion of our ele max hit and most of our immortal call's effectiveness. It will also remove around 40% of our damage. These two mods will be miserable. Phys reflect might kill you if your Sin's Rebirth flask is not active. Ele reflect may kill you through fire storm. Swap Crit dmg for Void Manip if it happens more than once, it's a difference of 3% but it costs another awakened gem. 100% Less Recovery Rate should be possible because we have Vaal Pact insta leech. You might die to DoTs though. There are probably more... but I can't think of them right now.

Q: Why are there random gem levels/quality?

A: To reflect the 3.26 values, per the current patch notes.

Q: Why do you have custom modifiers?

A: The 5% leech is for the changed mastery, see below.

The more attack speed is to reach the 450% more attack speed buffed cyclone of tumult will give

Q: Why do you have seemingly useless leech masteries?

A: These are placeholder masteries one is for the 5% leech; so I don't overinflate this pob, see above. The other is earmarked for any standout runegrafts, I'm currently looking at the 20% chance for no cd which may or may not be good.

Q: Why the random abyss jewels?

A: For mana sustain and for wither reduces resistances. Mana recoup is not on standard jewels and reduced resistances are one of the few way to improve The Retch dmg.

Q: Why Oak?

A: It is more efficient than another point of the constitution cluster.

Q: I'm a level 100 player where should I put my last points.

A: As someone who does not level to 100 I'd recommend reduced extra damage from crits and maybe a Brewed for Potency on our medium cluster.

Q: Is this a build guide?

A: No, its theory crafting, assumes a certain level of poe knowledge, like CoC breakpoints and base crit, and it is partially me asking for people to fill in any knowledge gaps they can see.

Q: Shouldn't this be flaired theory or help then?

A: Probably not?

Q: Discharge sounds interesting... thoughts?

A: I would stick with Scold's Bridal for more self hits, swap to discharge in the CoC setup, lower the gem levels in the cwdt setups and add more gems like the Trans Tornado in the cwdt setups for far more self and outgoing hits.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk and if anyone has a reddit formatting guide I'm sure this post could look a lot prettier.

PSA: DO NOT GO POISON

It will not end well and may end up crashing your server instances when you do not kill fast enough. The Retch alone may likely do this. For why this happens please see my favourite YT series.