Level 95 Lightning Conduit Elementalist^3.19

Notes

> PLAYSTYLE <
For clear you put down your shocking skill(probably either Wave of Conviction or Orb of Storms) then use Conduit to kill as much of the screen as possible.
This means it's a 2-button skill like Desecrate + DD and ED + Contagion, if you don't like that beware.

For bossing you press your Wrath Divine Blessing and Curse on the boss, then you either use Orb of Storms or Storm Brand to keep shocking the boss while
you spam Conduit.
On the full endgame setup you can press focus as well for a nice dps boost.

> LEVELING <
Since Witch doesn't get Onslaught or Pierce, there's 2 ways to get this:
- Make a lvl 1 Scion and Ranger, they get Onslaught and Pierce on the Twilight Strand
- Make a Ranger and kill Hailrake, now you have Onslaught and Pierce and an extra Quicksilver

We start out leveling by using Spark until we can use Lightning Conduit when we're at least level 28 and have Normal Lab.

You can sell a Magic Wand with a Topaz Ring and an Alteration Orb to get a wand or sceptre with flat lightning damage to spells. This is very nice for damage early on.
The tier of flat damage depends on the rarity of the ring you use:
- Normal Rarity = lvl 8 requirement
- Magic Rarity = lvl 14 requirement
- Rare Rarity = lvl 20 requirement (you can keep using this all the way to act 10)

At level 28 we switch to Lightning Conduit, since it's a new skill we're not quite sure how good it is early on, so if it sucks feel free to stay with Spark for a bit longer.
It's a good opportunity to see if you'll like the playstyle though.
For Lightning Conduit while clearing you can use Orb of Storms, Storm Brand and/or Wave of Conviction to shock enemies and then cast Conduit to deal real damage.
On bosses you want to put Storm Brand on the boss, its tickrate should be equal to Lightning Conduit's cast rate, so you can just keep casting Conduit.

Alternative/advanced movement option while leveling
You can also craft 2 sceptres and use Leap Slam with Frostblink to move around. This is much faster than just Flame Dashing, but requires you to be more active
and means you can't use wands.

> POTENTIAL ISSUES & CHANGES YOU CAN MAKE <
Lightning Conduit is a new skill, we don't know exactly how it'll work or how it'll feel to play. This section explains some potential issues and how to solve them:

Orb of Storms doesn't feel good because it doesn't properly proc shock
If Orb of Storms is an issue you can 1-to-1 swap the Orb of Storms gem with Storm Brand, you might want to fit brand recall somewhere, but your links will be the same
Another option would be Arc, but this will definitely feel a bit more "meh" than Orb of Storms and Storm Brand

Mana cost feels really bad
If mana feels bad the first thing you should look at is maybe equipping another piece of gear with energy shield on it.
Also make sure you have the elemental mastery "1% of elemental damage leeched as energy shield".
If it still doesn't feel good you can craft "Regenerate 150 Energy Shield per second while a Rare or Unique Enemy is Nearby" on your chest and/or belt
If even that's not enough you can replace Cruelty with Lifetap, this will feel pretty bad with the amount of recovery we have on this build though

My recovery is kind of low
This build doesn't get a lot of life recovery and will mainly rely on flasks. If you're not a big fan of that playstyle(completely understandable) here's some solutions:
- You can equip a Berek's Grip, this gives you life leech(as any enemy you hit will be shocked)
- You can replace Tempest Shield with a high level Vitality, get shock reduction on your flask & pantheon if you do
- Get flat regen on gear, you can even consider an item like Kikazaru if you find it early on

On death effects really hurt
Getting a Divergent Lightning Conduit with 20% quality will remove all corpses on kill. Since your damage for clearing will be more than sufficient, you might consider having a 20/20 Divergent LC for clearing and swapping to a 21/20 for bosses.

I'm not getting Inspiration charges or Arcane Surge!
Inspiration and Arcane Surge don't work with Eldritch Battery since they require you to use MANA(not Energy Shield), swap out those gems!

The links on Conduit are weird, I don't understand them? Why Cruelty?
Because we're Eldritch Battery we're limited to what support gems we can use(see the question above).
Energy Leech Support is a good option once you have Eldritch Battery to help with sustain, and so long as you're casting regularly you'll always be leeching and dealing the same damage as Cruelty.
Controlled Destruction is bad for our Elemental Overload uptime, so we don't want to use that.
Concentrated Effect and Intensify DO NOT WORK to scale the damage. Only the targeting range for selecting shocked enemies is affected by AoE scaling.
This means there's not a lot of gems left, our best 6th link is Empower, which is rare, so before we have Empower we use Cruelty or Energy Leech as this still gives some % hit damage. This also makes coloring the chest easier/more flexible.

I can't get the off-colors on the chest :(
Use Harvest and Vorici in Research to get the chest colors. Before that you can also use a Sadist Garb which should be easier to color.

Conduit just sucks, any fallback build?
The most obvious choice is Spark: you can take almost any Inquisitor Spark tree, make it Elementalist(with the same ascendancies we have in this PoB), replace Inspiration with Lightning Penetration
and make sure you have an exposure setup(gloves implicit or wave of conviction). Also try to grab Eldritch Battery so you don't have mana issues and can potentially use Divine Blessing.
Some other options that require more respeccing include:
- Hexblast Elementalist(Paak should have a guide for this)
- SRS or Animate Weapon(requires respec to Necro!)
- Explosive Arrow Elementalist (no ascendancy respec, but big tree respec)

What about Galvanic Field?
It's really hard to judge how good Galvanic Field will be, so I didn't include it in this PoB. If you want to try it out you can replace "Cruelty" in our 6L with Galvanic Field and have 2x5L that way.
It might just be OP!

> SHOCK/AILMENT EFFECT <
As an experienced player might notice: this build goes a bit overboard when it comes to shock effect
PoB doesn't properly take unbound ailments into account on Shaper of Storms(you could potentially shock for like 80% with just 1 lightning damage if it wasn't capped at 65%)
This has 2 reasons:
- It shows you everywhere you can get ailment effect
- All the specific shock effect on the tree enables masteries that we really want anyway, and we still want to scale Scorch boots and Chill from Shaper of Winter

You can try shocking bosses and seeing if you get 65%, if you do you might be able to drop ailment effect from your boots and/or amulet.
You could even consider replacing Unbound Ailments in your shocking setup with links like onslaught, inc aoe, faster casting or innervate!