INTRO/BACKGROUND
So I tried out CoC Frostblink of Wintry Blast and it was not to my liking at the budget I had available. Even with good AOE, I'd run into this problem where, on normal hitbox sized mobs, I'd blink a little too far away and have to run back to the mob for a split second before I could trigger again. And even though I've played Flicker Strike many times, I found Frostblink to be a bit too jittery.
I decided to see if I could make a good CoC build using the new Bodyswap of Sacrifice gem. I started with a Raider, stacking 8 Frenzy and Endurance charges with Replica Badge of the Brotherhood and using a Restless Ward, with Iron Reflexes + Grace + Determination, 100% flask uptime, and capped spell suppression. It worked well, but my DPS capped out at about 15m.
So I switched to Elementalist using Dialla's Malefaction, Ashes of the Stars, and max block/spell block with glancing blows and an Aegis Aurora. I saved and bought a Mageblood, and got 86% allres. I later dropped the Aegis Aurora for a bone spirit shield. I went for max fire resistance instead of cold, and got to 89% allres. The Elementalist is physically squishier than the Raider (significantly lower armour), but damage is of course much higher, although AOE is a bit lower.
BUILD EXPLANATION AND OVERVIEW
We link Awakened Cast on Crit to two spells -- Bodyswap of Sacrifice, and Raise Zombie. Using the Aukuna's Will gloves, we don't need a corpse to raise a zombie. Every other hit, we raise a zombie with about 220k life, and then on the next hit we sacrifice that zombie using Bodyswap of Sacrifice, dealing great damage in a massive (3.9m radius) AOE. Dialla's Malefaction and Ashes of the Stars pump Bodyswap up to 80% quality. The double corrupt on Dialla's, +lvls from Ashes and our dagger, and +minion skill levels from our helmet and shield, give us a lvl 29 Bodyswap. At 29/80, we get a Bodyswap of Sacrifice that does 45% of the minion's maximum life as base fire damage, and gives us +0.4 metres to base radius.
Spiritual Command helps us reach 15aps, so we're blowing up 7.5 zombies per second. AOE is scaled through 5 endurance charges and a couple +AOE per endurance charge charms. Would like to add this to my TWWT as well for even more AOE. We get Frenzy charge generation, round out our block chance, +6% max fire res, cover enemies in ash, and some crit chance/multi from our charms and TTWT as well. Endurance charge generation is handled by a couple Enduring Focus cluster notables, and power charge generation comes from Powerful Ward on a Megalomaniac, and Assassin's Mark linked to Enhance (and further boosted by the Ashes).
The build does not jump around as far as and as much as Frostblink (which seems to have a minimum travel distance), nor Flicker Strike.
Thanks to the +60% quality we get to Cyclone, the quality bonus means we actually get more movement speed when channeling cyclone. If I didn't want to move quite as fast, I could also drop the chaos res on the tree in favor of more DPS, and use a base jewel with corrupted blood immunity.
SUSTAIN
Unlike most elemental CoC builds, we're not running Inspiration, opting instead for Minion Life. That means reduced mana cost of skills is a must on both of the base jewels we run, and we need -8 to cost of non-channeled skills on both rings, so that our paltry mana regen can keep up with the zombie cast cost.
DPS
Damage scaling is done through minion life, elemental/fire damage and crit multi, global crit chance, reaching the 15.1 APS cap, and minion damage (thanks to the Spiritual Aid notable). Modifiers to spell damage, spell crit chance, and spell crit multi do not affect the damage of the minion explosion, although they do boost the damage of the two self-explosions we get per cast. Those self-explosions only account for ~2% of our dps though.
POB does not calculate damage for the minion explosion correctly -- it does not scale off of our zombie life at all, so you have to calculate a multiplier manually. So for example, POB says my base minion explosion damage is 7319.2. But actually, my base minion explosion damage is 45% of 220k, or 99,000. This is 13.5 times higher than what POB is giving me credit for, so we multiply our hit DPS by 13.5 and then we can add 2x the self explosion hit damage, to get the correct figure.
Because POB fails to take into account minion life, this can sometimes make evaluating gear mods and passive skills more difficult as well. For example, POB tells me that picking up a 20% minion damage passive is worth an extra 3.2% DPS, while picking up a 10% minion damage/10% minion life node is only worth half -- 1.6% extra dps -- because the minion life increase is ignored. In reality the 10% minion life itself is worth an extra 2.2% dps, for a total of 3.8% increased dps from the damage+life passive.
For the reason just explained, I'd be better off with a dagger prefix unveil of +minion life +minion damage, as opposed to the +fire damage I have right now. That's going to be my next upgrade.
In my current setup, with 40% shock and flammability applied, my calculated Guardian/Pinnacle dps is about 57m. This number matches the "feel" of the build well, and I think it's probably accurate.
LOCKSTEP/PREDICTIVE
Finally, a note about settings. I am on PC. This build feels awful to play in Lockstep mode. There seems to be a bug with Bodyswap of Sacrifice and Cyclone whereby you'll be holding down your Cyclone skill button, and going along smoothly, and then suddenly the client will forget you're channeling. You're still channeling server-side, and at least on the server, your character will go in the direction you place your mouse cursor, trigger spell casts, and then on both client and server you will bodyswap/teleport as usual. But on the client side, you character appears to just be standing still between casts of bodyswap. Momentarily releasing Cyclone and starting it back up fixed the desync, but it's annoying as hell. I switched to Predictive mode and don't ever experience this problem.
