Infernalist recoup trigger build (all the triggers with infinite sustain)

I came up with this build this week. Not sure if the exact build has been made before. It's a variation of the recoup Chronomancer Contagion build here:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3867087

I wanted to make a one button trigger build that wouldn't have sustain issues. I hate being limited by mana and using mana flasks every few seconds. Saw that Infernalist has a node (Pyromantic Pact) that solves all mana issues as long as the damage taken can be sustained. Wasn't sure if recoup could sustain the damage but it can and the build is way better than I expected.

Went with a hybrid life build to get more spirit from Beidat's Will node as I wanted to use both Cast on Crit and Cast on Ailment. With the node and the 100 base spirit you end up with about 170 spirit at lvl90 (1750HP). This is enough to use both Cast on Crit and Cast on Ailment with the 20% meta skill reservation efficiency node on the passive tree.



There are a few compulsory items:

- Sacrosanctum body armour so that ES can recoup

- Maligaro gloves to fix crit multi at 350%. This enables us to use the Pinpoint Critical support on all skill gems for 60% more crit chance with no downside.

- Increased recoup speed socketed in the boots and a Darkness Enthroned belt. With about 40% from boots, 40% from belt, 25% from passive tree, the recoup speed is just over 100%. This means you recoup damage taken over about 4 seconds instead of 8 seconds (Chronomancer would be around 2 seconds). I have tried out Headhunter instead of Darkness Enthroned. Headhunter works fine except sometimes it will TP you into melee range of mobs that hit hard (It That Hates breach mob is the main culprit).

Nothing else is mandatory. Other than the above, it's just another ES crit chance and recoup stacking build. Only need to get crit chance and skip all crit multi sources. Crit chance is capped with cold spells and a few passive nodes.



Cast on Crit and Cast on Ailment are enough to clear. However I realized that I still had some spirit left over (chest gives up to 30 spirit). So with a little spirit from an amulet implicit I was able to reach 210 total spirit. This lets us also use Elemental Invocation for more Comet spam. It works as you can either Numlock the keypress to cast as soon as you have the charges or place something heavy on the button while in a map. So it's autocast on your mouse. Same thing with Spellslinger. I used Spell Cascade with Comets in Spellslinger and Elemental Invocation so that I don't have to really aim as 3 Comets will fall per each trigger. When there are a lot of mobs like in a breach, the whole screen is filled with Comets and pretty much every thing gets frozen/oneshot.


So this build has 4 trigger gems constantly casting Comet. All we do is spam Frostbolt while mapping. Frost Darts is better for bosses (it's kind of like the old Barrage CoC from POE1) so that is also included. The build doesn't have the issue where mana runs out and triggers fail. The Infernalist has essentially infinite mana (as long as you can keep tanking the damage) so no trigger ever fails to cast. Recoup is proportional to damage taken so the more faster we cast, the faster we recoup. So instead of running out of mana/sustain, we become more tanky while casting.


One trick I realized is that since we don't need to use mana flasks at all, we can use Ambrosia support gem with a high charge mana flask. It consumes 20% of flask charges to give 3% extra lightning damage per charge. So with a 125 charge mana flask, that's 75% extra lighting damage for 5 casts. I figured the best place to use it is on the Frost Darts since it will then also shock bosses easily.


The build sustains the fire hit with just the recoup. The self-hit from Pyromantic Pact does 25% of ES and Life as fire damage. This is around 3k damage every couple seconds when there are a lot of mobs. However ES recoups at 3600ES per second with the current setup (tooltip - not sure if the 20% more recovery from Soul Bloom passive is in there already). So the build has a permanent 3600ES recovery per second which is enough for the self-damage and to sustain random damage from mobs which don't die instantly. You recoup even faster if hit by a mob. The ignite you also get from the self-hit sometimes is barely noticeable, so I didn't even need to get an ignite charm.

There is no need to get max fire resistance with recoup stacking. All max fire res does is reduce the damage taken, but that makes us recoup less as well. So it's sort of pointless to get more max res. 75% fire resistance is fine.


With the 50% of life reserved the build only has about 800-900HP. Normally bleed would be a problem but with the self damage recoup, the build is constantly recovering life at about 2600HP per second (in addition to the 3600ES per second) . So bleed will never do any damage. I don't let any damage bypass ES so the only damage life ever takes is bleed.

The character is lvl90 and has just over 10k ES. Tested it on a T3 Xesht and he dies in about 3 seconds. Still have some optimizations of the skill tree to do but it's probably 95% there. Main thing I would change with the gear is upgrading the wand (I ran out of currency). More extra damage will be better and +spell skills in the socket.

Here's the PoB: https://poe.ninja/poe2/pob/11393

I'll probably be making more changes.

The live version is here but I see it's still lvl84 (7hrs ago) so it's outdated for now:

https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/abyss/character/SaiyanZ-3112/Saiyan_IZ

Had the first minor hiccup when running instilled juiced breach. I'm triggering too many comets too fast so I actually killed myself by rotating through the 1600 infernal flame 5 times too quickly (in less than 0.5 seconds). It's the equivalent of spending about 16000 mana per second casting comets. Each triggered comet from CoC and CoA costs 662 infernal flame (mana) when triggered. So there was about 24 triggers in a second or 12 triggers in about 0.5 seconds.

Spellslinger and Elemental Invocation are casting 3 comets per cast and I'd say are about half of the triggers. So comets are around 6x3+3+3=24 per 0.5 seconds when opening a breach which is enough to kill me before the recoup fully kicks in.

Going to try out some cost efficiency nodes to reduce the cost of the comets. There are a few nodes on the tree pathing which can reduce the cost of the comets from 662 to 395 which might be enough of a saving. (I'll rotate through infernal flame slower)



Edit: Abandoning the build/league except for maybe some leveling practice. Feels like the "It That Hates" monster in breach hits way too hard. Not sure how people survive. I had 44% chaos res and 11k ES and he killed me instantly 3 times from the edge of the screen before I barely saw him (my only deaths above lvl80). So I don't think getting 75% chaos res would help much. (also had one self-kill from triggering too much stuff)

So I tested out going CI for a bit but the build loses about 3k ES. Only have about 8k ES instead of 11k ES after switching. 8k ES without other defenses feels too squishy in juiced maps after running a few.


The ED+Contagion Chronomancer I made was a much better because it was pretty much immortal and could also stack over 200% rarity without too expensive gear. Only single target was slow but mainly vs pinnacles. Map clear was about as fast though since the Unearth minions are quite fast and aggressive. That build never died once I had finished it between lvl95 and lvl97.5, which was hundreds of distilled juiced maps. I only stopped because leveling past lvl97 takes a long time.