[3.22 update] Ethical Crit Impending Doom + Hexblast Occultist: The 6699 Build

Impending Doom is popular this league because of the very high base damage of the skill and the large (370%) effectiveness of added damage. The skill is unique in that you do not cast Impending Doom directly; rather, it is linked to a curse skill which then triggers Doom Blast when the supported curse expires. In the most popular Impending Doom / Doom Blast builds this season, Vixen’s Entrapment is used with three socketed curses and a curse limit of three so that upon cast, the supported skill is immediately overwritten using the triggered curses in Vixen’s Entrapment. (As an aside, it is unclear if this behavior is intended as the skill is being overwritten, not “expiring,” and I suspect this behavior may be corrected or nerfed in future leagues.) There are several downsides to triggering Doom Blast this way:

· You are only able to reliably have two curses on the enemy
· Spell Cascade is required for one of your 6-link gem slots
· Impending Doom is a support skill and therefore does not get + gem levels from traditional sources such as weapons and amulets
· You need specific positioning to get “overlaps” with spell cascade and reach your cooldown limit on Doom Blast.

In this build we solve these problems by using alternate quality Anomalous Impending Doom Support to ethically trigger Doom Blast without overwriting curses. The alternate quality provides “supported curse skills have 2% reduced skill effect duration” per 1% gem quality. This build sockets Impending Doom and a curse of your choosing in a 6-link Cane of Kulemak with the Caterina’s Veiled mod which is scaled by a well-rolled unique modifier (60-90% increased effect of unveiled modifier magnitudes) to grant +3 levels and +14% quality to socketed support gems. Using a 23% quality corrupted gem, we have a total of 37% total quality on Impending Doom providing 74% reduced duration on the supported curse. We then allocate the “Window Of Opportunity” wheel on the skill tree to get another 25% reduced duration for a total of 99% reduced duration. This makes the duration of our curse skill VERY short; I use a level 1 temporal chains which has a total duration of 8 ms. You can use whatever curse you would like, provided that the total curse duration is lower than (a) the cast time of the curse and (b) the cooldown rate of Doom Blast. Note that depending on your gear, you may be able to tolerate 1% less quality from your Cane of Kulemak but if you are really pushing the build, you can get 15% quality for instant expiration. You will likely want to use Temporal Chains in your Impending Doom setup to take advantage of the cooldown reduction on self-cast buff from The Balance of Terror.

Since we are scaling power charges to build our damage and area of effect, we may as well take advantage of Anathema to increase our curse limit to six. This allows us to use several defensive and offensive curses with flexibility both in gearing and in playstyle and gives us a VERY reliable source of power charge generation since we are constantly casting a curse. I suggest using the following curses:

· Despair: reduces enemy chaos resistance which increases the damage of our Doom Blast

· Frostbite: reduces enemy cold resistance which increases the damage of our Hexblast and adds additional chance to freeze on non-critical hits from Hexblast. Cold resistance reduction is the best option to scale since it synergizes with our Void Beacon ascendancy passive.

· Elemental Weakness: reduces enemy elemental resistances (only cold resistance is relevant to us) which increases the damage of our Hexblast.

· Enfeeble: gives the enemy damage reduction to make us tankier.

· Assassin’s Mark: increases base critical strike chance against the enemy which is a much-needed stat on this build and provides another source of power charge generation.

· Temporal Chains: the action speed reduction from this curse is a powerful defensive layer, but this will probably be your Impending Doom curse and so it will likely not always be on the enemy.

These six curses will all be applied in a single cast: you will self-cast the curse linked to Impending Doom, four of the others will be socketed in Vixen’s Entrapment and will trigger when you self-cast any curse, and the final curse will be triggered on-hit from either a corruption implicit on Vixen’s Entrapment or from a ring affix. Choose which curse is triggered where based on availability of on-hit items, and which curse buff you would like to use from The Balance of Terror. Depending on what Balance of Terror you acquire, you can socket an additional unlinked curse skill in your boots and self-cast it (at nothing) every ten seconds to gain an additional buff. I have chosen to self-cast Enfeeble occasionally for an additional chunk of crit multiplier.

Since we are using a staff for our 6-link Impending Doom setup, we have another 6-link available with our chest piece. Here, we look to use a skill which scales well with our ascendancy choices, the availability of several curses, and our power charge scaling. Hexblast is a perfect choice. Hexblast is a spell skill which deals bonus damage when it is able to remove a curse from the targeted enemy. Since we are applying 5 curses at least every 0.2 seconds, there will always be an available curse for removal. Hexblast also is resisted by the enemies lowest elemental resistance rather than their chaos resistance so we can take advantage of our high curse limit to greatly lower the enemies cold resistance in synergy with our Void Beacon ascendancy node. We choose to apply Hexblast using totems with Multiple Totems Support to allow us to maximize its cast rate while still being able to focus on casting our Impending Doom setup main skill.

Hexblast is able to ignite, freeze, and shock – the shocks from hexblast are an excellent source of increased damage for both of our main skills and the freezes provide good quality of life against tanky rares, map bosses, and Sanctum guards. We increase the effect of shocks applied through use of the critical strike mastery “50% increased effect of non-damaging ailments you inflict with critical strikes.” We would also like to use the cold mastery node “enemies you freeze are chilled when they unfreeze” but with limited passive points, this had to be dropped. With a level 100 character, you would use this mastery for quality of life.

We pick up three additional maximum power charges, one from our ascendancy node “Forbidden Power” and two from the skill tree. We are able to very easily maintain our maximum number of 6 power charges during both mapping and bossing due to our “chance to gain a power charge when you cast a curse skill” from Anathema and from the effect of our Assassin’s Mark. Our six power charges grant 240% increased critical strike chance which is a massive boost to our average damage. We also get a decent chunk of % increased damage from “Disciple of the Forbidden” and the “Forbidden Power” ascendancy node. The ascendancy also gives us a huge 36% increased area of effect at maximum charges – this applies to the area of the Doom Blast explosions and the chaos corpse explosions. With all these combined, endgame map packs explode in a single cast, enabling a fast and satisfying map experience.

Additionally, we pick up a massive 18% more spell damage multiplier from our power charges using the “Inner Conviction” keystone node which comes from a Militant Faith Timeless jewel with a “High Templar Dominus” roll. This can be socketed in a couple locations depending on what specific number you’ve rolled – I’ve chosen to socket it to the left of the witch starting position which provides 85 devotion and replaces Mind over Matter.

We use a large number of unique items, do not have access to a shield, and are predominantly in the top left of the tree so acquiring 100% spell suppression would be a significant challenge. Instead, we mitigate elemental damage using Eternal Damnation with capped chaos resistance which provides an additional >30% elemental damage taken reduction. We overcome the downside of Eternal Damnation by forcing our maximum elemental resistances to 78% using Loreweave.

We achieve reasonable physical damage mitigation through armour on our gear and scaling it using Determination, a granite flask, and the increased armour flask mod. This build is socket starved, so I have foregone a cast-when-damage-taken guard skill, but you could drop the second Eternal Damnation self-cast curse to use Molten Shell or Steelskin.

Damage-over-time effects outside of bleed aren’t a major issue; our capped chaos resistance mitigates poison and we are immune to ignites from Purity of Elements. Elemental ground effects are taken care of with the Eternal Damnation damage reduction. A bleed and corrupted blood immunity life flask is used to remove bleeds on demand and for emergency healing when we take large amounts of damage not covered by our recovery.

Recovery is achieved in the form of a reasonable amount of life regen (~10% life per second) from the tree and a high level Vitality. Acquiring a source of chaos damage leeched as life is a challenging but very useful quality of life upgrade. You can get a reliable source from alternate quality void manipulation (which is a small DPS downgrade but worthwhile for the quality of life) or as a Synthesis implicit on your rare ring slot. We hit hard enough with chaos damage and frequently enough to easily cap the base leech rate.

The most specific piece of gear we need is a Cane of Kulemak with very precise rolls. We require as much support gem quality as possible; this is achieved with both a top roll of 8% on the Caterina’s mod and a high roll on the “increased effect of unveiled modifiers” unique mod. It is possible to roll 15% gem quality with perfect rolls in both slots, but the odds are exceptionally low to do so. 14% is sufficient to enable the mechanics of the build.

For the other two rolls, we need a combination of cast speed and damage. Cast speed + chance to gain arcane surge is the only suffix option. This provides a large chunk of cast speed which helps us scale the cast rate of our curse skill high enough to apply impending doom at a rate close to its cooldown. Arcane surge is a nice added bonus during mapping which grants an extra 10% more spell damage. The final prefix modifier has several options. Any of the spell damage options would be appropriate, but the best in my opinion is the chaos damage mod since it also scales the damage of the Occultist’s corpse explosions to more reliably blow up packs.



Devouring Diadem solves several problems in this build. First, it provides mana reservation efficiency for socketed skills along with a +1 to socketed gems. Using an Enlighten and socketing our auras here, we are able to run three 50% auras with leftover mana for Vitality and Precision. Additionally, Devouring Diadem solves our mana issues by providing Eldritch Battery which makes our skills spend energy shield rather than mana. Since we are frequently triggering several high level curses, this is a very mana-hungry build and so we require Eldritch Battery to sustain our cast rate.



Eternal Damnation is a new unique from Sanctum league which provides a large chunk of elemental damage mitigation with the downside that it reduces your maximum elemental resistances. To overcome this downside, we use a Loreweave which overwrites our maximum elemental resistances to 78%.



Anathema is another new unique from Sanctum: this ring provides two very important stats for our build. First, it gives a decent chunk of cast rate to our curse skill which further helps us get our cast rate close to the cooldown rate of Doom Blast. Second, it sets our curse limit to our number of maximum power charges. This is what enables us to run enough curses to make Hexblast effective, scale our crit chance with Assassin’s Mark, and provide the Enfeeble enemy damage reduction.



Vixen’s Entrapment is our source for delivering 4 of our 6 curses. It also provides a good source of flat energy shield which is effectively our mana pool for this build. Note that the increased curse limit does NOT apply to us because of Anathema.



Balance of Terror is another new unique from Sanctum which grants buffs based on which curse skills have been self-cast in the last 10 seconds. Note that the curses that we apply by Vixen’s Entrapment and our on-hit source do NOT earn the buffs. Because of this, I add another unlinked curse skill in my boot slot to self-cast every ten seconds for an additional buff. By far the best option for this build is the cooldown reduction from Temporal Chains which is why we link it to our Impending Doom for 100% uptime of the buff. Good second options are:
· Double damage from Vulnerability
· Cold exposure on hit from Frostbite
· Critical strike multiplier from Enfeeble



We run five auras so there are many good options for Watcher’s Eyes, both offensive and defensive. Use whatever you can afford to plug gaps wherever you see fit in the build. I have chosen to get additional critical strike multiplier from the Precision mod.

Our only rare slots are one ring, our belt, and our boots. On these pieces we need to fill out our resists, add as much flat life as possible, and get a little bit of a damage boost in the form of onslaught, cast speed, and cooldown reduction. Note that it is mandatory to cap out chaos resist because of how Eternal Damnation works, so make sure that you have several large chaos resistance rolls.

On flasks, we get a large chunk of flat armour and armour scaling with a granite flask and a huge movement speed boost with a quicksilver flask with a movespeed suffix. We really struggle to cap out our critical strike chance so a diamond flask and Bottled Faith are significant damage boosts that get our critical strike chance to respectable levels. Bottled Faith has good synergy with our the consecrated ground created by Zealotry. The suffix on the diamond flask is your choice: I’ve opted for curse effect reduction, but you could also go with a craft like life regen or more critical strike chance.

Temporal Chains is our application curse for Impending Doom since it has good synergy with the Balance of Terror cooldown reduction modifier. I leave it at level 1 to minimize the duration of the curse and because it expires quickly anyway so we don't benefit from it's effect on the enemy. A 21/23 corrupted Anomalous Impending Doom support would be the best option but I've been unsuccessful on the alt-quality gem double-corrupts. The 23% quality is mandatory to minimize duration; the extra gem level is an ~10% DPS upgrade. Added Chaos Damage Support scales very well because of the high effectiveness of added damage on Doom Blast. Void Manipulation is a damage multiplier; you could use the alternate quality gem here to gain a source of chaos damage leeched as life. Note that Impending Doom does NOT benefit from the +1 gem level from Awakened Void Manipulation since it is a support gem. Increased critical strikes is used to scale our crit chance; if you opted for a more offensive Hunter base crit chest piece, you could use either Critical Damage Support or Power Charge on Critical Strike Support here instead. Finally, spell echo is used to effectively double our cast speed and get the application rate of the linked curse very close to the cooldown rate of Doom Blast.

In our chest, we socket our Hexblast setup. Since we have so many curses available for removal, we use a Spell Totem - Multiple Totem setup to maximize the trigger rate of Hexblast. Awakened Added Chaos Damage and Awakened Void Manipulation are used to scale the damage and gem level of Hexblast. Increased critical strike support maximizes our critical strike chance and the chance for us to apply elemental ailments with this skill.

Our expensive auras are socketed in The Devouring Diadem for additional reservation efficiency along with an Enlighten Support. Additionally, we use a level 1 precision in the boots for a little extra critical strike chance and to enable the critical strike multiplier mod from the Watcher's Eye. We then add in as high a level Vitality as our mana will allow.

Four of our triggered curses are socketed in Vixen's Entrapment. Curse order (left-to-right, top-to-bottom) will determine which curses are removed first by Hexblast, but this is a minor consideration since we are reapplying curses so frequently and since Hexblast snapshots the resistance reduction before removing the curse.

Our final two sockets are taken up by a movement skill (flamedash works very well because of our cooldown rate increases and our very fast cast speed) and an additional low-level Enfeeble that is self-cast occasionally in order to benefit from the second mod on Balance of Terror.