[3.3] Mock Shock and Smoking Apparel - An Elemental Hit, Inpulsas, AoF, Melee Critquisitor

T14 Shaped Estuary
T15 Sunken City
Both of these are on a 5 link, absent 47% More damage.

Positives:
+ Great Damage on few links.
+ Multiple layers of defense.
+ High attack speed means reasonable map clear.
+ Nothing in the build is rare enough to be expensive to start.
+ Uses Shield Charge for movement, gotta go fast.
+ Immune to shock always, Creates consecrated ground causing full elementail ailment immunity.
+ Strong group build, requires zero auras to function, improved by having allies nearby.
+ PoB Shaper DPS is strong (easily break 1 million in a 6 link)
+ Can level with the skill into maps with a 1 alch weapon.

Negatives:
- Doesn't feel great for clearing until you have locked out lightning and cold.
- Amulet only drops from an Elder boss, you may need to wait 1-2 days at league start for it to become available. (Only required to make Inpulsa's activate)
- Not Tier 1, SSS clear speed.
- Not Stun-immune, can be for HC play if desired.
- Cannot run Ele Reflect.
- Late-game upgrades require crafting.
- Blood Magic means no-regen maps are painful.
- Monster evade elemental ailments is slower but easy still.
- No MTX for main skill.

PoB of Current tree @Level 92
Currently still a 5 link. Disable Ancestral Call for Ruthless and enable Combustion to see damage in a 6 link. I own several 6-links, but I have not been swapping to them for bossing out of convenience. On difficult boss encounters I still would. 1,560k vs. 609k damage difference.

My PoB also currently has no leech on tree, due to Lab enchant boots. THe build requires a source of leech, so without that it must be found elsewhere.

Level 90


In Hideout, in a 5 link with Ancestral call, self buffed.

Leveling up to 90 PoB PasteBin
My character When I reached 90. Shaper/Elder dps, flasks disabled (except diamond), self-buffed. Gem swap for shaper, but feel free to disable all buffs that require kills and leave AC in. 438k vs. 1.55m with zero charges or flask usage & swap, and assuming zero shock on targets despite typically shocking.

This build focuses on maximizing the innate damage potential of Elemental Hit, capitalizing on the chance to cause elemental status ailments with hits innate to the skill, and the Inquisitor's naturally high combat abilities when standing on consecrated ground.

First, lets consider how Elemental Hit damage conversion works:

Every time the attack is used, the damage roll for all three elements commits each type of damage, however only one of the three is chosen. Converting all of the damage in the attack into fire, and locking the skill out of Lightning or Cold forces fire to be selected every time and combines all three sources of damage into one. Damage conversion occurs by utilizing Avatar of Fire, Call of the Brotherhood, and the Cold to Fire gem in our main links. Elemental Hit does not convert any physical damage, and Avatar of Fire only recovers 50% of the total physical damage available, so increases to damage that focus on elemental damage are best for this build.


Call of the Brotherhood only converts 40% of Lightning into cold, which also means that 10% of lightning damage is left behind. For this reason, increases to cold damage and fire damage ultimately produce the greatest return for investment.


Cold to Fire fully converts the 50% of cold damage left behind from Avatar of Fire into Fire, so has no leftover damage. Additionally, it adds a portion of cold damage as extra fire damage, so flat added cold damage or %cold damage is very desirable.

The build also creates an opportunity to shock and explode targets with Yoke of Suffering & Inpulsa's Broken Heart.

Yoke of Suffering allows our purely-fire hits to count as a lightning hit for shock chance, the build has roughly an 80% chance to shock prior to crits, and this is a crit build. Monsters are going to be taking extra damage due to being shocked. Inpulsa's causes all monsters that are shocked upon death to explode for a percentage of their maximum life, which improves pack clearspeed substantially. It also looks great.

My gear at level 90:
Important items to note: Oskarm gloves fulfill our curse on hit requirements, but are far inferior to a strong rare crafted ring with Assassin's Mark on Hit & better rare gloves. Making that ring would be very difficult however, so they are a fine stand-in. a Sulphur flask acts as a shock/freeze/chill/ignite immunity flask for opening strongboxes etc. when you need immunity but do not have monsters to strike to produce consecrated ground. The two jewels needed to lock-out lightning and cold damage are really only needed once the build swaps over to Avatar of Fire.

Main Skill:

Elemental Hit - Multistrike - Elemental Damage with Weapons - Ancestral Call
These four gems are your core, and the priority gems to work with until you obtain a 5 or 6 link chest armour. 5th and 6th links are simply more damage.


Cold to Fire and Combustion
Cold to Fire actually is less 'paper' damage than Combustion, however due to the specific nature and difficulty in correctly coloring an Inpulsa's to include 4 red sockets (see: Challenges), including the red socket should typically be easier than the blue.


For bossing, gem swap Ruthless with Ancestral Call

Helm:

Ancestral Protector is purely a stat-support summon on bosses, however he dishes out 118k dps on his own and is not too shabby for finishing off difficult to reach targets.

Gloves:

This setup serves purely as layered defense. Increasing out block chance and applying blind to targets automatically when taking damage. Pay attention here to the level of CwDT (level 1) and Tempest Shield (level 7) in order to cause maximum uptime, and level blind and inc. duration to maximum. Immortal Call can be socketed instead of Increased Duration if desired, or if players wish to make use of Arakaali pantheon fully.

Boots:

Our boots contain our movement skill, as well as fitting in a nice location to add culling strike into the build. When a high-life boss is low enough, simply refreshing our fortify will check if the boss is within kill-range for culling (10% remaining life or less).


Vaal Haste and Blood Rage are the only spells in the build that we cast, and both are improved with increased duration. Instruments of Virtue increases our Attack Damage if we've cast a spell recently, so for bosses using Vaal Haste or refreshing our Blood Rage will ensure we're hitting for maximum damage.


The final links in our gear contain a max-level Cast when Damage Taken and a maximum leveled Summon Ice Golem. This resummons our golem frequently enough to have him alive constantly without having to stop to bring him back. The final link here can contain your gem for your 6-link single target (if you are trying to level it to 20) or a leap slam for clearing gaps.

The Combat Focus jewels lock out lightning and cold damage, but only if placed in the correct locations. Make sure to socket the Crimson Jewel in the Templar area, and the Viridian in the Duelist area. I've begun experimenting with Transcendent Flesh in the Marauder jewel socket for the additional phys reduction and critical multiplier. The final jewel socket in the build can be used to obtain more crit multiplier or finish filling resistances.

Ascendancy: Inquisitor
1. Santify
2.Instruments of Virtue
3.Righteous Providence
4.Pious Path

Sanctify is first because during the leveling process, having a constant source of consecrated ground is great.

Instruments of Virtue is second, as the 20% attack speed will greatly improve leveling speed and give a nice 'bump' in damage for act bosses. Gear shouldn't have great critical chance yet, so Righteous Providence is third by a small margin.

Uber-lab ascendancy is Pious Path, which contributes even more attack speed to Sanctify as well as providing elemental ailment immunity nearly constantly. While strong, the other two options are superior in my opinion during the leveling and early mapping period.

Bandits:Help Alira
Crit Multi and resistances serve the build strongly, more-so than any two skill points. The mana regen is negligible, however before Blood Magic is chosen it can be quite helpful.

Pantheon
Major: Soul of Arakaali
Minor: Soul of Ryslatha

Once Arachnoxia has been captured, Arakaali gives a significant regen ability if we choose to run Immortal Call in our level 1 CwDT setup. for HC, I would recommend this. However, for daily mapping and softcore play it is still quite successful at decreasing the negative effects of Blood Rage. Since I prefer to use a Panicked life flask, capturing Gorulis provides an extra 60% on top of the 20% from the Juggernaut node in Marauder, for a total of 3,888 life as long as we are on low-life when we use it. The build reaches low life when it is missing ~4000 life, so this means a nearly full recovery optimally.

As was previously indicated, Inpulsa's socket colors are the build's singular money difficulty. Due to the fact that the base has no strength requirement to equip, that means that rolling red sockets naturally is prohibitively expensive. The superior alternative is to use Vorici's artisan's bench to craft in single socket increments, selecting additional sockets once all prior sockets are red. Once 4 sockets have been reached, the 5th and 6th sockets have a 50/50 chance of being either blue or green, which are the remaining two links of the build.

I would guestimate roughly ~550 jewellers could be required to succeed at this. Possibly more with poor luck. The least possible would be 440-480.

I managed to fail to get the 5th and 6th socket to be blue & green once, in creating 4 such similar chest pieces, so I feel like the odds are fair to expect to land it on your first attempt from 5 to 6.

Any chest piece could be swapped in for Inpulsa's instead of struggling to 6-link your own, however the additional clear speed is greatly felt. I ran a Loreweave at first and it was great.

The weapon that the build uses mostly ignores physical damage contributions, therefore I recommend crafting a high item-level shaper foil in order to have more opportunities to land %Elemental Damage in combination with high attack speed and hopefully critical rolls. As a work-around, I recommend using a Fidelitas' Spike for the majority of the build's leveling and into maps until this crafted sword is complete.


The damage possibility is great due to the tremendously high attack speed, with no real downside.

An additional consideration is the need for 212 dexterity if you choose to craft a maximum-level foil, as the build struggles and only barely manages to reach that total. Finding dexterity on our ring or weapon helps, however you may find yourself starved yet and forced to wear boots with a large dexterity contribution.

Replacing the gloves in the future with an armour base, obtaining near-perfect two-toned armour/evasion boots, a nice pure armour helm, and a stronger armour roll on shield are all options to improve the physical damage reduction in the build, however these sit at late game sidegrade tier.

Adding Enduring Cry to the build is an option to bring Endurance Charges into it, but I would prefer obtaining The Red Dream. This is prohibitively expensive and the socket for it at Scion is ultra late-game, so I omitted it from this guide.

Finally, producing a Curse Enemies with Assassin's Mark on Hit ring with reasonable stats is a final crowning piece to the build, doing so frees up the gloves slot for stronger rares with more damage and life, which are greatly appreciated. I would not suggest this be attempted until all other pieces have been sorted, as this is a side grade whereas the weapon and main 6-link setup are priority.

Q: When I try to attack monsters, I often move around a lot and that gets me killed. In your videos you don't, What gives?
A: Make sure you've enabled 'Always attack in place' for your main skill. It's an easy thing to forget and if you ever unsocket your gem, remember to set this setting again!