[3.11] 4 Curse Poison BV Occultist | Curse Theorycrafting

You don't have much space for normal jewels. Maybe one on your belt and maybe one on your tree. I'd prioritize Phasing, then Onslaught, then as much life as you can afford. Fragile Bloom is a good jewel for our build. We don't get hit often so we usually have the charges up. We are weak against degens which the jewel helps against. In trade league, you can even get a corrupting blood Fragile Bloom for cheap.

Glorious Vanity with Xibaqua. With max chaos resistance, this gives us a lot of elemental mitigation. It also helps us against elemental ailments. Not required, we have a lot of other sources of mitigation. If you aren't going for Glorious Vanity, you might want to go CI or hybrid for a higher HP pool. Place between MoM and EE.
Thread of Hope, Large. Place near The Agnostic to grab Glancing Blows. Also, not required. I didn't add this and the next jewel until very late but felt the boost immediately.
Unnatural Instinct. This one is very much not required but can save us some passives. Place by Shaper near Scion. Pairs well with Thread of Hope, as Thread currently connects to Skittering Runes.

Early you can path without clusters. Eventually you'll want 1 group and if you're pushing for 100 you'll want a 2nd group. Here are some of the notables you'd like to grab one of:
A tier:
- Born of Chaos (with Glorious Vanity)
- Dark Discourse (S tier if scaling ES)
- Forbidden Words (S tier if you need the mana reduction), can use multiple
- Life clusters like Towering Threat
- Chilling Presence
- Overwhelming Malice (S tier with assassin's mark for consistent uptime)
- 3-passive life small clusters w/o a notable (S tier if well crafted)
B tier:
- Wish for Death (for culling strike)
- Wicked Pall (can use multiple)
- Wasting Affliction
- Brush with Death
C tier:
- Grim Oath (can use multiple)
D tier:
- All the ~30% damage nodes like Unwaveringly Evil and Unholy Grace

- Less curse effect is less damage and less defenses
- Action speed cannot be reduced cuts out a layer of defenses
- Additional projectiles is always dangerous
- Phys reflect can be run deathless, but not a good idea at this point
- Minus max resistances cut out a lot of our elemental tankiness

Toxic sewer and waste pool are good layouts for us. Toxic Sewer was a T16 so I chose that. The boss in the map provided extra loot without too much threat. As long as you run around the spider it can't hit you.
I would chisel and alch the maps. Didn't want to run 8 mod maps so I didn't vaal them. Rerolled them if I got a bad mod. Reflect can be avoided with sextants.
I did apply all 4 awakened sextants and didn't have much need to reroll mods.
Scarabs were cheap in harvest. My choice was Polished Cartography, Rusted Metamorph, Polished Shaper, and Rusted Harbinger.
Almost all league content was fine to run except for Legion. Didn't have any issues running metamorphs every map with all the damage mods. Again, just run around the boss and they can't hit you.
Watchstones are also a good source of XP at a relatively cheap price. They usually paid for themselves in loot:
- Booming Populace for more density
- Stalwart Defenders to make the map t17
- Territories Unknown is fairly safe. There is only one bad suffix (- max resist), and it can be run in a pinch.
- War Among the Stars for density and loot.

## Low life
Low life has potential for more damage and higher HP, but much less elemental mitigation. You can also run more auras. Because poison doesn't scale with spell damage, you'd want a different damage type so you can use Pain Attunement.
Other spells
Impending Doom
Attacks
Minions

I already discussed why we won't use Impending Doom. The other noteworthy changes so far are self-cast curses and mark mechanics. If you have a more passive build, you could add self-cast curses as a productive use of your time. They will be stronger and won't take up mana reservation, but they will use up a curse slot.
Some curses got categorized as Marks. They will only apply to single targets, but they will have full effect against bosses. This is a huge buff to our single-target DPS. We don't really need the damage against mobs, so the downside won't hurt us much.
Assassin's mark becomes a priority for us earlier, rather than a capstone piece. I'd prioritize Maligaro's Virtuosity earlier. We also want another source of +1 curse. You can get that with a rare chest, Doedre's Damning ring, Windshriek shoes, or a +1 curse amulet. On a budget, I would get either the shoes or a decent curse amulet.