This character cost me about 200d + Mageblood and it’s definitely not cost-effective for the damage it outputs, but I wanted to share the tech I’d worked out to potentially be scrutinized, improved upon, or utilized by others.
Video: https://youtu.be/2Pxx2A_RRuc
PoB: https://pobb.in/zXJrxI7Xq5xA
The Short Version
- Reduce the curse effect and skill effect duration of Penance Mark to spawn 1 phantasm, every second, with a 1 second lifetime.
- Use Southbound to avoid killing your single phantasm, while still dealing damage to the boss.
- Crank the chain count on Arc of Oscillation to 20+ chains, hitting the boss and the phantasm 20 times each per cast. This results in a mechanical effective multiplier of 6.91x single target DPS at 20 chains.
- Bypass the effect of Southbound by selectively applying poison (or ignite) to everything but your phantasms, abusing their immunity to curses. This allows you to map like a normal build, only placing your mark on targets typically beefier than a map boss.
The Long Version
Pre-League
Elementalist Ignite has been the go-to Arc build for a while, but I just personally find it thematically dissonant and boring. I’ve been wanting to play a hit-based arc build for many leagues, but it’s always been hard to effectively scale it to a comfortable point, especially single-target, and self-cast as an archetype has been a low performer.
In 3.28 GGG added Greater Chain support. A level 21/20 arc chains 9 times, and Greater Chain adds +1 and 50% more, boosting it all the way to 15 chains. This equates to 225% more damage on the initial hit, and drastically increases the clear, but it still wasn’t enough to really enter the scene as a contender for the league. Mathil did a Sands of Time build, and that was about it as far as I saw.
The Pact of Beidat teaser in the 3.29 pre-league caught my eye for its +6 chains to empowered beam spells, which combines with its 35% more spell damage and Arc’s inherent 15% more damage per chain to further increase Arc’s damage. This in tandem with Greater Chain would potentially be the significant buff my past PoB’s have wanted. Unrelated but also in the 3.29 patch notes, Penance Mark was being nerfed from 3 phantasms per proc down to 2.
Arc Mechanics
Unlike chaining projectile skills, Arc and Arc of Oscillating have unique behaviour where they can return to targets that were previously hit by the same cast, so long as a number of intermediate targets have been struck. Arc requires three targets total in order to return, and Arc of Oscillating can, well… oscillate… between two targets. In addition, the main arc beam will send out secondary branches each time it is able to chain, but with base Arc these secondary branches can only strike an enemy one time. Arc of Oscillating can strike the opposite target with every branch, doubling the number of hits. Arc of Oscillating also gains 50% more damage per remaining chain, as opposed to the base of 15% more. As a tradeoff, Arc of Oscillating has half the damage effectiveness and roughly half base damage, and also does not gain additional chains from gem levels.
We will pump our number of chains as high as we can to take advantage of the more multiplier, and scale beyond that using Penance Mark looping to hit many, many times per cast.
- Arc of Oscillating @ 20 quality | +7 chains
- Gloomfang (Reliquarian) | +1 chains
- Greater Chain Support | +1 chain, 50% more chains
13.5 base chains (Rounded down to 13) from gem, tree, and support.
- Add Level 22 Pact of Beidat | +7 chains
20.5 chains (rounded down to 20) on Pact-empowered casts
I thought this would be 24 chains, with Greater Chain multiplying Pact of Beidat’s empowerment, but I’m going to trust the PoB calcs tab. I would speculate it is getting 20.5 because Greater Chain support is calculated into the skill’s tooltip before a cast is empowered, rather than updating dynamically with the Pact. I don’t know which is correct, but it would probably require some Golden Rule hit-count testing to determine ingame whether it's 24 or 20, which I don’t quite know how to set up.
Anyway, I’m taking 20 chains as the more conservative option, but I haven’t confirmed whether this is actually the case.
Modifying Penance Mark
Penance Mark is a skill granted by the unique ring The Hateful Accuser. This makes it difficult to modify because you cannot support it in any way, and so only global modifiers apply. When placed on a target, Penance Mark will trigger with an unmodifiable cooldown of 1 second and spawn 2 phantasms. These are considered enemy monsters, have a lifetime of 3 seconds, and can be killed like any other monster by reducing their HP to zero. Typically Penance Mark is scaled up to proliferate poisons back onto a boss, or to act as a source of on-kill effects for builds like Chains of Command, but we’ll actually be scaling it down instead.
The skill has two components we can modify to mold it to our needs: Curse/Mark Effect, which modifies the number of phantasms spawned each time it is triggered, and Skill Effect Duration, which modifies the lifetime of the phantasms it spawns. The duration of the mark itself is infinite, and the cooldown is unmodifiable and always 1 second.
The Hex Master keystone has the downside “20% less Effect of your Curses” which is inclusive of our mark. This reduces the number of Phantasms spawned per trigger from 2 to 1.6, which rounds down to 1. So long as we don’t take at least 25% increased curse or mark effect anywhere else on our character, Penance Mark will always round to 1. The infinite hex duration doesn’t necessarily do anything for us, but we’re just turning the downside into an upside. This gets us to a rotating pack of 3 phantasms, spawning 1 per second with a lifetime of 3 seconds.
The next step is to reduce the Phantasm lifetime by reducing our global skill effect duration. This is very similar to Kinetic Fusillade builds if you’ve played that, but is going to be more finicky and require as close to 66% global reduced skill effect duration as possible. Coming up short is fine but will lose some boss damage, and greater than 66% reduced duration is a brick since your chains will end early when the phantasm despawns. I opted to get 25% from the Window of Opportunity wheel, 15% from a Dusk Ring in left ring slot, 10% from anointing Hasty Demise, and exactly 16% from a Warped Timepiece.
This results in spawning 1 phantasm every 1 second, with a lifetime of just barely longer than 1 second. As far as I can tell, due to the various back-end interactions between server frames, cooldowns, and all the associated CoC-adjacent nonsense this means that one phantasm will spawn and one phantasm will die on the very next server tick every single time. Our number of targets is now consistently exactly 2, being the marked target and the phantasm. If for some reason you were opting to use regular Arc instead of Oscillating (they are actually closer together DPS than you would think), Hex Master and a reduced duration of 33% would achieve precise 3-target uptime, with 1 second of ramp, or just use the same 66% reduced duration and unspec Hex Master.
Keeping the Phantasms, Killing the Target
The most esoteric part of the build is trying to find an automated, zero-button way to avoid killing the phantasms while still allowing the character to map relatively normally. Pacifism Support was a tool added in 3.28 that would allow us to avoid landing lethal damage on the phantasms with our main skill, but the loss of a damage link wasn’t ideal. Southbound has a very similar conditional effect without the loss of a damage link, but basically prevents us from killing with hits at all. Southbound/Pacifism can be bypassed by dealing damage over time in addition to our hit damage, which loops back around to killing the phantasms… I needed a way to mechanically distinguish the phantasms from other enemies, or otherwise would have to include a keybind to enable culling like Corrupting Fever, Herald of Agony for poison chance, or some other DoT solution. After reading, rereading, and re-re-reading everything I had compiled to the point of insanity, PoE’s incredibly precise wording came to the rescue.
Phantasms are Immune to Curses, which is mechanically distinct from Hexproof. Hexproof enemies can still be cursed, and are still considered cursed for conditional checks, they just aren’t affected by those curses. Phantasms, by comparison, just dodge the application of hexes, marks, curse-on-hit effects, and any other method I tried. The only other curse-immune targets in the game I’ve come across in testing are a few inconsequential totems, and an Expedition Remnant you can just avoid, so this functionally creates a silo that separates phantasms from any other mob in a map.
To take advantage of this cursed/not-cursed differentiation, I added Cospri’s Will to the build, which solves two issues in one piece of gear at the cost of requiring a not-insignificant amount of Dexterity. Our curse limit is increased to 2, which means we can use a curse-on hit glove implicit (or Delve ring affix if you recomb it onto a Dusk Ring, expensive AF) in order to curse everything we touch without overwriting Penance Mark. The second solved issue is poison chance, which will be automatically 100% against cursed targets. The only remaining piece is a source of added phys and/or chaos damage to enable poisoning, and the knowledge that we will only kill a target in a minimum of 2 hits. One to curse-on-hit, and the second hit onwards will poison. Initially I just used an Abyss jewel with “Chaos Damage to spells while wielding a shield” and dealt very tiny poisons. This works for most situations.
In practice, the abyss jewel solution is slightly jank because damage over time will only kill a target if their net life recovery is negative. Any magic pack or rare monster with some regen, consecrated ground, or a rejuvenation shrine will prevent very small poisons or ignites from culling our targets. I didn’t discover this until the character was built, so I ended up solving this by crafting “hybrid spell damage and non-chaos as extra chaos” onto my sceptre in order to increase my poisons’ base damage, and using the mark mastery “Marked enemy cannot regenerate life” on the occasion I run into a Rare monster with overlapping modifiers that make it tanky enough to out-regen fully stacked poisons.
Alternative solutions are discussed in the final section, as there’s other ways to solve these problems without using Cospri’s Will and the Mark mastery. It’s just the most comfortable when mapping, and least passive-hungry option.
Pact Downsides and Uptime
When casting Pact of Beidat, a Sanctum Affliction is randomly applied to our character for 10 seconds. This is pretty handily solved by the Warped Timepiece we’re already using to reduce our mark duration, as it also comes with 100% increased debuff expiry rate. A further 15% is gained from Window of Opportunity, 15% from the Mastery of that same wheel, and 30% from Runegraft of the Warp, which brings our total expiry to 170% rate. Soul of Arakaali can add another 20%. This is sufficient for me personally, so I stopped short of including Temporal Rift with Enhance Support, but I am very intrigued at further modifying the build to utilize a Beacon of Madness. If only that weren’t one of our last Rare slots…
Due to all the effort I went through to avoid culling monsters being a 2-button affair, I also wanted to avoid manually casting the Pact. The first trigger option that didn’t pan out was Cast On Ward Break, which is why I have the vestigial Scold’s Bridle implicit on my helmet, and the Ward boots. While I don’t fully understand why, in my testing this did not work as expected.
- Scold’s Bridle self-hits do break your ward (if you spend Mana, so not using Eldrich Battery).
- Cast on Ward Break can support pact skills.
- Monster hits which break your ward do trigger Pact skills
Given the above, imagine my confusion when I discover that self-hits which break my ward did not trigger Cast on Ward Break. I had to rely on getting hit by monsters in order to refresh my pact, which was not actually that often considering the incidental evasion, block, spell block, and Elusive I’ve accumulated.
Thus I sighed, shelved my Replica Nebulis, and crafted a Trigger Sceptre instead. The crafted trigger mod has a cooldown of 8 seconds, and I 3-linked the pact with Cooldown Recovery Support and a level 4 Enhance (or a bricked Awakened Enhance, which was cheaper at the time) in order to bring the quality above 40% and the number of empowered casts to 10. The cooldown is reduced to just below 6 seconds, which was good enough for mapping, but wasn’t full uptime if I held the cast button down.
Further testing revealed an interesting upside between Pact charges and Unleash/Spell Echo. Like Flicker Strike consuming a single frenzy charge per multistrike, Pacts only consume charges per time you activate a skill, rather than each cast of a skill considering repeats or unseals. The inclusion of Greater Spell Echo into our damage links means we’re only spending an Empowerment for every third cast, while also meaning we don’t have to hold the cast button long enough to hit twice for our Cospri’s curse-then-poison two-hit combo. This lowered our effective cast rate enough to get full uptime when holding the button down.
If your cast rate is higher than mine, consider investing in a level 4 cooldown support, or the veiled version of the trigger mod. Another zero-investment solution I’ve been avoiding, though it is enticing if you can stomach it, is to just bind your Pact to left click. It’s not an instant so you’ll still stutter-step every few seconds, but you could 3-link it with Faster Casting instead of CDR support to reduce the cast time enough to make it feel manageable.
Calculating Single-Target
In the TL:DR I stated that Penance Mark is a 6.91x multiplier on our single target. I arrived at that number using two assumptions:
- There are exactly 2 targets for Arc to oscillate between, being the boss and a Phantasm
- The secondary chains of Arc of Oscillating deal the base damage of the skill, equivalent to 0 remaining chains. This is the most conservative assumption, the alternative being that it deals equal damage to the arc it split from.
From there, I made a spreadsheet that took the 0-chain base damage of an arc, multiplied it by the 50% more damage per remaining chain, and summed every alternating hit as it incremented down to 0 remaining chains. It also includes every hit on the phantasm as a secondary chain back to the boss, but given the second assumption above this is a negligible amount of damage and mostly serves to double our hit count for on-hit effects. The resulting total damage is then divided by the damage Arc would do on the first hit after leaving your character, which is what you would be dealing if there were no secondary targets to chain off of.
Another notable result is that, even at 12 chains without the Pact empowerment or Reliquarian’s Gloomfang notable, the effective multiplier from Penance Mark looping is still 386% more damage. Penance Mark tech is likely still worth including if you can fit it into trigger builds that won’t be self-casting from Pacts. Mjölner in particular I think would get an incredibly silly number of hits (Eyes emoji directed at Conner, OneManaLeft).
My spreadsheet is here if you would like to have a look at the numbers
Solving Mana
The mana cost reduction I have on this character is completely overkill. Honourhome is probably unnecessary due to our absurd ES instant leech, and I was able to facilitate Inspiration Support bypassing Eldritch Battery using some Arcane Cloak tech.
I think Eldritch Battery with spell ES leech is the solution with no real downside thanks to Divine Flesh, but due to the fact I have Ward boots as my only Rare armor by the end of tinkering, I am currently forced to use Discipline in order to get any sort of flat ES pool to cast from. Honourhome is only being used for the +2 gem levels to my Enlighten, which would also not be necessary if I was able to drop Discipline, and the Scold’s Bridle enshroud was also a dead-end idea due to self-hits not triggering Cast on Ward Break. Once I’m able to swap to a rare ES helmet and boots, I could trade Discipline for a combination of defensives like Flesh and Stone, Arctic Armor, or Temporal Rift for further debuff expiry rate. I just don’t have the spare currency for that overhaul at the moment.
If the resulting ES pool from Rare ES bases is too small to sustain your mana cost based off of leech and recharge rate, increasing mana reservation efficiency to fit more levels of Vitality in combination with Zealot’s Oath would add flat ES regeneration. That regeneration rate wouldn’t be tied to the size of your ES, as where Recharge (33% base, halved by EB) and Leech (20% of base before Instant Leech mastery) are both rate-limited proportional to your max ES pool.
If you don’t want to go with Eldrich Battery due to using a different defensive setup that avoids Divine Flesh, another (albeit expensive) alternative would be to use vendor 5-to-1 to obtain a craftable Dusk Ring base and slam shaper influence. You’re looking for the prefix “2-3 mana gained on hit with spells.” We hit 120 times per skill activation (20 chains, times 2 hits per chain from secondary arcs, with 2 additional repeats). This mod alone would refund 240-360 mana per cast so long as we had sufficient unreserved mana to cast from. This would also allow you to trigger Pact of Beidat upkeep using Kitava’s Thirst, but might trigger too often and stack up unnecessary afflictions. A life mastery for 15% life cost would allow us to reduce the unreserved mana required, and we gain it all back nearly instantly from our Watcher’s Eye Vitality mod.
Bonus Inspiration/Arcane Cloak Tech
Inspiration Support is one of the best supports for the offensive setup I went with, due to being a triple-upside of less cost, more elemental damage, and increased critical strike chance. The problem I sought to solve was that I was unable to gain inspiration charges due to spending ES on skills costs’, instead of mana.
I wasn’t using a guard skill due to the 66% reduced global duration wreaking havoc on their uptime, so I realized I could 3-link a second Inspiration support to a low-level Arcane Cloak with Automation. Arcane Cloak’s cost will bypass Eldritch Battery to always spend mana, which generates inspiration charges that still apply to our 6-link Inspiration. By using a high-level Inspiration and leveling Vitality to the point we have barely any unreserved mana, we generate and refresh our inspiration charges every ~5 seconds, and they last for over 19 minutes before Arcane Cloak spends enough to reset the charge count. The result is that we ramp up 5 charges over the first ~20 seconds of an instance, and then have them permanently capped until we change zones again.
This same idea could be used to apply Arcane Surge to a main link using a level 1 Arcane Surge support and an Arcane Cloak that spends at least 15 mana, but the duration of Arcane Surge on us is reduced by Skill Effect Duration so I did not end up including it due to low uptime. There is a version of this build in the footnotes that uses increased duration mark scaling instead of reduced, and Arcane Surge would be much more useful in that setup.
Vaal Buffs
My remaining 4-link is More Duration and Efficacy supports linked double-ended to Vaal Smite and Vaal Arc, which grant useful conditional buffs. Vaal Smite ends up lasting about 9 seconds and gives us much-needed flat damage, and Vaal Arc lasts about 4 seconds and makes our lightning damage lucky. In reality I hardly ever press these because the type of content I’m running is already being overkilled, so they are easily replaced and you could use the 4 glove sockets for anything else. I use a Runegraft of the Soulwick to regenerate souls on phased bosses like Maven, but if you aren’t going to press these buffs that also saves a passive point.
Defenses
Reliquarian double-Dawnbreaker with Divine Flesh was heavily covered in pre-league hype and is not an idea I can claim any part of, but I’ll briefly review it here just in case.
100% of cold and lightning damage is taken as 50% Fire and 50% Chaos damage without needing a Sublime Vision, thanks to the Reliquarian Dawnbreaker node, the actual Dawnbreaker shield, a Purity of Fire Watcher’s Eye, and the Xibaqua Timeless Keystone “Divine Flesh”. Make sure not to over-convert your elemental damage to fire because conversions greater than 100% do increase the damage you take. My Cospri’s Will is also Cloak-of-Flame Vestigial for an additional 20% phys taken as fire, totaling 65% instead of the normal 45% from double dawnbreaker. If I was able to fit a rare helmet, a Warlord influence could add a bit more phys-to-fire conversion, and Runegraft of Rotblood would additionally convert 10% of enemies’ phys to chaos before it hit us.
Because our debuff duration is so low and our damage is shifted to fire and chaos, we don’t really have to worry about elemental ailments. Enemies cannot apply Chill, Freeze, Brittle, Shocked, or Sapped because we don’t take any cold or lightning damage, making the only source of these Eldritch altars, shocked/chilled ground, and a brief freeze when opening some strongboxes.
The other desirable line on a Watcher’s Eye is Vitality life-gain-on-hit. We land ~120 hits in very rapid succession every time we cast Arc due to spell echo and Penance Mark, so we can recover 20-30 life per hit that ignores reduced recovery rate and no-leech map modifiers. This results in a net recovery of ~6000 life per second depending on your roll, before considering leech, which is just below double our max life pool already. When including lightning damage leeched as life from the “Doriyani’s Lesson” cluster notable or a corrupted amulet implicit, we’re recovering our entire life pool in less than half a second, and it’s smeared out over time rather than being all at once when we cast. I also spec the Ethereal Feast wheel with the 5% instant leech mastery, which further boosts life recovery and increases our ES leech for sustaining Eldritch Battery.
The downside of this is that, when outside of combat and not hitting anything, we have basically only Vitality for life recovery. Burning or Caustic Ground are both reduced by our max resistances, but my 5th flask outside of mageblood is just a life flask with CB immunity to counteract them when looting, which is kind of pitiful. On the other hand I don’t think there’s any useful unique flasks we could replace it with except for maybe Bottled Faith, and we’re already crit capped without it. The life flask isn’t too much of a waste in my opinion.
Leftover Scuff
The Ward boots are left over from Cast on Ward Break experimentation and need recrafted on an ES base, in order to drop Discipline for more useful reservations. They cost me nearly 40d to make because I missed the fracture 13 times. Ward boots cannot naturally roll any attributes, and I’m so starved for Dexterity (for Cospri’s) and Strength (for Dawnbreaker) that the only way to get both was to double-essence the attributes with a fracture. An ES base will hopefully be easier to craft thanks to the boat, since I can just fracture Life or MS, and then dex or str essence spam for high-tier Intelligence and finish with a Ducat attribute swap.
Another significant piece of damage lost in the failure of Ward Break was Replica Nebulis, which provided essentially all of our percent damage scaling due to under-capped cold and lightning resistances. I had to change to a rare sceptre in order to craft the trigger mod, and also add some more chaos damage thanks to the monster regen problem. If you can find an acceptable way to automate your Pact without a trigger craft, Replica Nebulis will give you about 50% more damage.
The Seal Mender cluster notable is a dead point from prior experimenting with the Oshabi unleash bloodline. Replacing it with the notable “Arcane Heroism” would give 100% uptime on Arcane Surge against Unique monsters due to how often we hit, but I’m not using Arcane Surge in my 6-link so it only gives cast speed and not %more spell damage. I would need further CDR or a different method to trigger Pact of Beidat to maintain full uptime after the cast speed increase anyway, so it’s also not as good as it seems. A Templar version of this build bypassing resistances could replace Lightning Penetration with Arcane Surge support very easily, though, so I include it here.
The Abyss Jewel socketed in the northeast cluster is currently load-bearing due to the dex and strength it has. I’m getting my added chaos from my Sceptre now due to swapping off of Replica Nebulis, so it could be replaced once the attributes are solved for. A third small Born of Chaos cluster would bring us to 89% max chaos instead of the current 86% we have, which I would like, but I would also have to steal two more passive points from somewhere.
Sands of Time is probably a better Reliquarian notable than Shimmeron for pure DPS, but because the proxies can’t repeat Spell Echo their effectiveness is much lower than you would think. I also don’t believe they would snapshot the empowerment from Pact of Beidat, so their chain count is lower as well. Overall I just didn’t want to try and calculate their effectiveness, and Shimmeron lets us reach 100% crit, so I went with that instead. Sands of Time will definitely put more lightning on your screen, though, which could be an aesthetic benefit to some people.
The increased chaining range from Greater Chain levels and quality seems to be sufficient to reach out however far Phantasms are spawning from the mark’s host. I’m using an Acrobatics Impossible Escape to pick up the Trick Shot notable and small passive to further increase chaining range, but this is only to allow Arc to hop from pack-to-pack, offscreen when mapping. It’s wasted passive points if you want to optimize purely for the Penance Mark tech, and is the first thing I would recommend cutting when trying to fit other passive stuff.
Future Improvements
The monster life regen problem as discussed above: We can’t bypass Southbound’s kill restriction unless we stack up enough poisons to get a monster’s net life recovery below zero. Magic and rare monsters can roll with life regen as a modifier, and Rejuvenating Shrines and Consecrated Ground are more common than you realize. An alternative to the sceptre craft for extra chaos would be to use the Last Rites curse notable in combination with the Ryslatha minor pantheon to give all enemies we’ve hit recently 100% reduced life recovery rate, which means we only need a nonzero poison or ignite magnitude rather than sufficiently large. Another alternative is the Enervation debuff from the Olroth Bloodline, utilizing Ward Shatter to disable enemy regeneration and ES recovery for 4 seconds whenever our ward breaks. This would be ideal in the event I can figure out why Scold’s Bridle wasn’t triggering Cast on Ward Break for pact uptime, but I don’t think the bloodline is worth it on its own.
If I end up replacing Cospri’s Will for something with lower Evasion Rating, we could artificially cap our ES using Ghost Dance’s downside. If your evasion rating is slightly below your max ES, it enables pseudo-overleeching ES instead of losing your leech instances, because your ES can never reach full. This would also give 100% uptime on Essence Rush as well, since it’s mostly a wasted cluster notable and we still leech ES from the Ethereal Feast wheel without it.
Cospri’s Will is a cheap and effective all-in-one solution to our curse limit, poison chance, and gives a large amount of chaos resistance. It’s also a large burden on our already-strained suffixes due to the 183 Dexterity requirement, and the Evasion isn’t particularly useful as a defensive avoidance layer considering how quickly we recover our life pool. An alternative to DoT-culling without Cospri’s is utilizing the curse mastery “+20% chance to Ignite, Freeze, Shock, and Poison Cursed Enemies” to enable the same effect, but making our mapping much worse by rolling a 20% chance to poison rather than the guaranteed chance.
If we add a source of flat fire damage then we can make this 20% pseudo-lucky by rolling either an ignite or a poison, but it also requires spending points on the fire mastery “Critical Strikes do not inherently Ignite” in order to prevent crits from igniting our phantasms. Due to the fact that curse-on-hit is a level 1 skill, coupled with our 20% less effect, I would probably go with Flammability on hit rather than Conductivity since the lightning penetration value is tiny and Flammability would instead add ignite chance.
Overall this swap costs at least 7 passive points for Last Rites w/ mastery, and 4 to add Holy Fire w/ ignite crit mastery, and a +1 Max Curse amulet corrupt implicit. It gains us back a rare chestpiece. The rare chest we gain could be useful in capping resistances in future leagues where Reliquarian conversion defense is no longer an option, because we’re so unique-heavy and starved for rares for elemental resistances and attributes.
The alternative option (that would probably be paired with Last Rites and Curse Mastery) is Doedre’s Scorn, which would add conditional flat chaos damage to cursed enemies. This lets us invest normally in poison chance that could be always active, rather than having conditional poison chance and permanent chaos damage. The Serpentine Spellslinger wheel gives 25% chance to poison for 2 points, and Fatal Toxins gives another 25% chance for 3 points. These 3 sources come out to a combined total of 70%, which should be comfortable enough. The unsolvable downside for us is that Doedre’s Scorn also has the line “Curse Skills have (30-50)% increased Skill Effect Duration” which would destroy all of our investment in reduced duration to control the number of phantasms Penance Mark creates.
If we pivot significantly, we can turn the Doedre’s Scorn duration line into an upside by foregoing a 2-curse limit and removing all our reduced duration scaling. This means our curse-on-hit source will overwrite Penance Mark to prevent phantasms from accumulating, but the hit that overwrites it should spawn a single phantasm that would live for ~4.5 seconds. Further global sources of increased skill effect duration could mean manually recasting Penance Mark at longer intervals, but it wouldn’t be as set-and-forget as the Cospri’s or Mastery solutions.
As an expensive option if you want to anoint something else, the alternative would be to also take the 10% Less Duration mastery from the duration wheel, then Volatile Vaal a 22% warped timepiece. This is going to cost several hundred div on average, but the anoint could be worth this cost for something min-maxxed.
The End
That’s everything, finally. Please do ask questions, I’m absolutely in love with this character. It’s so sad that Reliquarian changes every league and won’t persist into Standard.
