Dear exiles, today I want to share Palsteron's Static Strike and Shockwave Slayer build with you.
How Does This Work?
To understand what's happening here, we'll have to talk about the two main skills, Static Strike and Shockwave.
Static Strike is a lightning attack. When you hit an enemy, you begin emitting beams of lightning that strike monsters around you. In this case, Palsteron isn't just using Static Strike for damage but instead as a convenient way to trigger Shockwave. Linked to Static Strike, Shockwave is a support gem attack. It's creating those big, satisfying circles of death you see, in this case, with a fancy MTX applied.
What makes this combo so powerful is that it does not rely on attack speed. Shockwave has a fixed cooldown, meaning we can't make it trigger any faster than this. However, Palsteron has realized that as long as Static Strike isn't shooting out its beams too fast, it can be synchronized with Shockwave, giving us consistent procs of the skill every 0.6 seconds or so for the duration. As it turns out, this combined with the five uses that Shockwave can store up is more than enough. We can hit something once with Static Strike and just wander around blasting Shockwave for as long as Static Strike lasts. And since we don't need to invest into attack speed, we can focus on the good stuff: damage.
Offence
Let's take a look at how we scale these skills - The simple explanation: Strength stacking. This is a popular build archetype, so we'll breeze through it here. Essentially we'll aim to gather as much Strength as possible on our tree and gear, and then we'll use an array of synergistic items to make the most of our swole stack. The foremost of these is Replica Alberon's Warpath. These give us flat chaos damage based on our Strength. This costly item is almost required for the build, but by gosh, is it worth it? The large amount of flat damage is especially useful for skills like Shockwave and Static Strike that don't scale with attack speed. However, you may notice that the boots have a mod that prevents us from dealing anything but chaos damage. This means our Strength stacking, which is giving us a huge physical damage increase by itself, is going to waste.
To get around this, we need two things. One is Iron Will, which applies our Strength's physical damage increase to spell damage, and the other is Battlemage's Cry, which applies our spell damage to attacks. Basically, we've come full circle, and we're getting increased damage out of our Strength again. One huge advantage for Strength stacking with this build comes from a particular mod on our mace. Palsteron is using this mod that scales the Area of Effect from our Strength. It's a global Area of Effect increase, which is how we're creating such massive Shockwaves and such far-reaching Static Strikes.
Lastly, you might notice Palsteron is using the new skill Frozen Legion. This provides a whopping burst of damage for bosses, and since it's cooldown-based like other skills, we don't need to worry about scaling it with attack speed. We can even use the Pulverise support with this and our main skills for a frankly unfair 70% more damage multiplier without worrying about the attack speed downsides.
Deffence
What happens when something manages to hit us back? Palsteron has invested in several layers of defense. Fortunately, by stacking Strength, we've got a nice big life pool, around 6.5K or more, depending on our setup. We've also capped out our Block chance at 75% thanks to our shield and The Iron Fortress, another useful Strength stacking item. Since we're a Slayer, we can take advantage of overleech mechanics. These passives essentially allow us to gain extra life leech and keep it coming even while we're at full life. This is important because we actually have no life regeneration, and there's a good reason for that.
These gloves, Kaom's Spirit, are the culprit. They turn our life regeneration into something better: rage. We've got enough life and regen that this allows us a very long uptime on Berserk, a buff that consumes rage for damage reduction. And, as you might surmise, Berserk is great for our damage.
Otherwise, we've also got 30-40k armor and Molten Shell, and we've taken Unwavering Stance for stun immunity.
Conclusion
All in all, the build is very survivable. And Palsteron notes it has carried him through encounters with juiced metamorphs and essences all the way to level 99. Palsteron has created a high investment, high power build which plays as smooth as butter. It's rare we see an autobomber-style character that doesn't rely on heralds or triggered spell casting, and even rarer when it's a melee character.