Today, we're looking at Primaeva's Blade Blast Saboteur. It uses a new transfigured version of Blade Blast to unleash beautiful, murderous circles. Welcome to Build of the Week.
How Does This Work?
Blade Blast is a spell that works in tandem with other gems. Casting Bladefall or Ethereal Knives leaves blades on the ground, which can be detonated with Blade Blast.
However, this league GGG released Blade Blast of Unloading, a transfigured version of the gem that works with Blade Vortex instead. Blade Vortex builds up stacks of spinning blades around our character. Blade Blast of Unloading can then be used to detonate those blades in sequence.
Primaeva noticed the potential of this gem and decided to go all in. What makes it so effective is that if we time our movement skills right, the blasts follow the character, so we can keep moving while dealing damage in all directions. The only issue is that we need a smooth way to maintain the blades without standing still and casting Blade Vortex every couple of seconds. The answer begins with Arcanist Brand. This brand, once placed, will periodically trigger whatever spell we link to it, in this case, Blade Vortex. So we're automatically generating some blades, which we can detonate at our leisure. But we can go further.
If you're new to Path of Exile, bear with me here because this is what it's all about! Primaeva suggests picking up the Saboteur's Perfect Crime skill. This provides two little Triggerbots. These nifty minions take any triggered spell - like the Blade Vortex that our Arcanist Brand is casting, and they cast it instead. And since there are two of them, the spell is essentially duplicated. With Blade Vortex, this means we're doubling the number of blades we get per brand activation.
However, as Primaeva calls it, the secret sauce is the Brand Recall skill. When used, this recalls and activates all of our brands at once. So if we have five brands active, it will activate five times, doubled by our triggerbots to provide ten stacks of Blade Vortex.
All we have to do now is bind Brand Recall to the left click, occasionally casting Arcanist Brand as their duration depletes.
Offence
So we have beautiful circles, but how do we make them murderous? The trick is more circles! Tiny little ones!
Power charges are a fantastic idea for this build because they are an efficient way to invest in critical strikes. Primaeva is using Ralakesh's Impatience, which essentially takes the bonuses we'd get from having maximum charges, and provides them permanently. Then it's a matter of stacking more maximum charges from sources like this, this, and this.
There are also plenty of ways to get extra damage per power charge. Items like Void Battery and Malachai's Loop are perfect. We can use charms from the current Affliction League to gain more stacked bonuses. Our amulet, Badge of the Brotherhood, is also a must-have. It sets our max Frenzy Charges equal to our max Power Charges, with all the advantages it brings.
In all, we can reach nine maximum power charges and thus get nine charges' worth of all these bonuses. The attack and cast speed is very useful for our Shield Charge and Arcanist Brand, helping the build to feel more responsive.
Defence
Ideally, this character should be strong enough to kill most things before they hit you, but Primaeva admits it is a glass cannon. There are a few ways we can mitigate this. You'll remember we're using Malachai's Loop for the power charge nonsense. This item does have a major downside. Usually, we would shock ourselves every time we reach maximum power charges. Fortunately, there is a belt-shaped solution. If we equip Graven's Secret, every time we gain a power charge, we instead gain something called an absorption charge. This means we never trigger the self-shock from Malachai's Loop. As a bonus, absorption charges recoup a percentage of elemental damage we take as an energy shield.
Since we're using so many uniques, we do have to be careful to optimise the rest of our item slots for defence. A good band-aid fix for our defence is Utula's Hunger. This body armour provides a huge chunk of life so long as the rest of our gear has none.
Fortunately, our other necessary uniques don't have any life mods. Primaeva has demonstrated how powerful transfigured gems can be with a little creativity. Not only that but he's also outlined several versions of the build for different budgets and preferences. One such version focuses on Impale, while another focuses on cold damage so you can freeze your foes with that massive AoE.
Conclusion
Thanks to Primaeva for his contribution. I hope this build can save you more currency and help you a lot. Have fun exiles!