[3.22] Forbidden Rite Traps Occultist

Introduction

When Forbidden Rite was first released, it was played as a league starter with Spell Totem Support. The totem would incur the self-damage instead of you, but would also count its own life for the purpose of adding to Forbidden Rite’s damage. Unfortunately, totem life and damage taken were changed the patch immediately after, thanks to Forbidden Rite, and it became much harder to league start Forbidden Rite as a result. It was possible to get around the self-damage with things like Life Leech Support or a lot of flask usage, but it usually wasn’t worth the trouble.

This build takes a different route to get around the self-damage issue by supporting Forbidden Rite with Trap Support instead. While traps have no life or energy shield that can boost Forbidden Rite’s damage, the added scaling and flexibility from traps more than makes up for it. In addition, Forbidden Rite’s self-damage is no longer an issue, so you don’t have to worry about keeping your totems up or manage.

The end result is that Forbidden Rite basically becomes a chaos version of something like Pyroclast Mines or Blazing Salvo, and you get a build that exceeds my benchmark damage numbers on very basic gear. This build can either be geared in its own right, or used to level Forbidden Rite from the beginning with an eventual transition to self-cast or CoC Forbidden Rite.

Pros and Cons

Pros:
– Cool skill, made even better with the Celestial Cat MTX
– Chaos main skill – can ignore a lot of detrimental map/Expedition mods
– Fast for a caster build, and can be made faster at the cost of some damage
– Good and relatively safe single target with three slows
– Easy and early upgrade path

Cons:
– Not very tanky and relatively poor regen
– Levelling as Forbidden Rite from A2 is quite slow
– Upgrade path involves a fair amount of Delving
– Crit scaling already semi-inbuilt into the build, so further scaling may encounter diminishing marginal returns

Mapping showcase

Because this build is relatively new, I’ve only had time to playtest this through to T16s. I don’t want to push it further before 3.22 starts as I don’t want to burn myself out, so you’ll have to make do with a video showing mapping in T16 maps. Nonetheless, this should give you a pretty good idea of how it’s like to play the build.

(Ignore the fail blight halfway through.)

POB

https://pobb.in/kEmuuXa5ZGV_

This is the PoB for the character as shown mapping above.

Note that there is a custom config stating that Forbidden Rite deals 50% less damage. This is because PoB still counts your life and ES for the purposes of adding damage to Forbidden Rite, despite traps not utilising that particular mechanic. This threw me for a loop to begin with as I thought the damage was much better than it was, but even after correcting for that error, the damage is still decent, just not completely bonkers.

If you wanted to be really precise, you could calculate the proportion of base damage that your life and ES contribute, and then use that number instead. But in the absence of large amounts of flat added chaos damage, or major deviations from 4k-5k life, I find a ballpark of 45%-50% damage is approximately correct.

Ascendancy

The ascendancy of choice is Occultist. Not only does Occultist have massive damage boosts for chaos builds, having automatic Wither is very good quality of life both in terms of Wither uptime and saving 4 skill sockets. Furthermore, the increased area of effect that Forbidden Power gives is important for the build in so many ways: it increases the ability of Forbidden Rite to shotgun on single targets, it improves the coverage of Forbidden Rite on mobs, it allows you to hit targets with Vaal Blight from much further away, and it massively reduces the cooldown of Frostblink.

The only knock against Occultist is that to be able to play Forbidden Rite the moment you get it at level 16, it’s strongly recommended that you mule Sniper’s Mark and Bear Trap from Shadow. Otherwise, damage can feel quite lacking at that stage. If you intend to level as Cold DoT, though, this isn’t an issue.

It’s possible to also play this build as either Shadow (Trickster/Assassin) or Ranger (Deadeye/Pathfinder). Shadow gets access to all the necessary gems as well, so levelling will be smooth. Trickster has a little lower damage in exchange for better mapping recovery, while Assassin is probably a little faster – that said, it’s already possible to make the Occultist pretty fast, so I don’t recommend the Assassin. Ranger is a distant third, needing to mule Forbidden Rite, and not having much support damage-wise from either Deadeye or Pathfinder. However, Ranger may be necessary if the end goal is to make a self-cast Forbidden Rite Pathfinder.

Gem setups

Main damage 6L: Forbidden Rite – Trap – Greater Volley – Charged Traps – Cluster Traps – Void Manipulation

This is a pretty standard setup. Forbidden Rite shotguns so we need a source of extra projectiles, and Greater Volley is used over Greater Multiple Projectiles as it has a less severe damage penalty. Charged Traps allows charge generation and provides much-needed trap throwing speed and critical damage multiplier, while Void Manipulation is just a more damage support that doesn’t inflict a throw speed penalty unlike Trap and Mine Damage.

Cluster Traps needs a bit of explaining, however. Swift Assembly is usually the preferred multi-trap support, since it is basically 60% more damage with no damage penalty. However, during ordinary mapping and most regular map bosses, Cluster Traps is more consistent in coverage. This build already has some issues with leaving the occasional straggler behind, and Swift Assembly will really exacerbate that problem. In addition, if you’re using the mastery which recovers 30 life when a trap is triggered, Cluster Traps is more consistent recovery.

Feel free to carry Swift Assembly in a weapon swap and switch it in for major bosses, though.

Reservations: Grace, Arctic Armour, Flesh & Stone, Summon Skitterbots, (Temporal Rift)

Nothing much to explain here, other than Temporal Rift. With the relatively poor recovery of the build, Temporal Rift is usually a better means of recovering life after you’ve taken a massive hit, rather than trying to get it back via Enduring Cry. It’s also a great way of preemptively getting out of trouble if you see a big attack headed your way. Temporal Rift has good synergy with trap builds because you can simply dump your traps and then recall yourself, and your traps will still do damage.

However, you will need some additional source of mana reservation efficiency (e.g. jewels, Eater of Worlds helmet eldritch implicit) to be able to run Temporal Rift alongside everything else.

Divine Blessing: Zealotry – Divine Blessing – Inspiration

Chaos hit builds don’t benefit from a lot of offensive auras, and Zealotry is the only option for a trap build.

Do be careful with levelling Divine Blessing, as it adds to the mana cost of the aura. Make sure that you have enough ES left over to cast your other spells after you’ve cast Divine Blessing.

Debuffs: Sniper’s/Assassin’s Mark, Vaal Blight, Bear Trap, Despair

It’s fully worth running all these active debuffs. Vaal Blight and Bear Trap are very strong hinders, and on top of the damage multiplier to chaos damage and trap damage respectively, make it much easier for your Forbidden Rite projectiles to catch your enemies. These two combined can make even hard-charging enemies like Rhoas and the unique boss based on A8 Titucius look like a car crash in slow motion.

The choice between Sniper’s Mark and Assassin’s Mark is essentially one of damage. Sniper’s Mark is strong early but is outclassed by Assassin’s Mark once you start power charge investment for at least two reasons. First, Sniper’s Mark offers no qualitative advantage to ground-target projectiles like that of Forbidden Rite. Second, the Wither debuff central to chaos builds is a major source of increased damage taken which stacks additively with other increased damage taken stats like that of Sniper’s Mark. It’s made even worse by the Shock from Summon Skitterbots, which is als increased damage taken. It’s arguable that Sniper’s Mark regains some of its value if you are crit overcapped with a relatively high crit multi, although that is a very high level of investment.

Lastly, Despair can naturally be automated away on curse on hit rings. That frees up sockets for things like Temporal Rift. In fact, it’s strongly recommended that you should start with Wandering Path + Delve as an Atlas strategy because of how easy Delve’s upgrades to this build are, but more on that later.

Defences: CWDT – Frost Shield – Enduring Cry – Immortal Call/Steelskin

While Eldritch Battery is a very worthwhile investment in the current meta, the major drawback is that it removes ES as a buffer to your EHP. That’s especially sore when you have a build that needs relatively high ES recovery and a large amount of ES to use Divine Blessing auras without instantly running yourself out of mana, and this build is both of them.

Frost Shield partially solves this problem by giving you back some of that buffer. It drains up to about 1k ES over 1.2s to create a frost dome that takes some damage before it goes through to your life. Most importantly, this effect stacks with similar effect that Guard skills like Steelskin have, and the layering of two such effects makes you surprisingly tanky.

The main issue is that Frost Shield is stationary, which isn’t great, and if linked to CWDT, doesn’t stop one-shots from killing you first. It’s however really good for the two- or three shots that do, when you have no time to react to getting mobbed.

There’s some room to play with links and preferences here. Enduring Cry doesn’t need to be linked, though I cover it here simply because it’s thematic. Some people prefer having guard skills on LMB instead of in CWDT setups, which is fine too.

Movement: Frostblink – Increased Area of Effect – Elemental Proliferation (Phase Run)

It’s not that common that builds can afford to give over three or four sockets to mobility, but that’s where the QoL of Occultist comes in where free Wither saves the usual Wither – Spell Totem setup.

This setup exploits one quirk of Frostblink that I haven’t really seen discussed anywhere else, which is that Frostblink’s cooldown decreases per enemy caught in the AoE of both your starting and ending damage areas. That means that increasing the AoE of Frostblink increases the number of enemies that can be caught in Frostblink, which in turn drastically cuts the cooldown of Frostblink the more enemies are around you.

You can see how it looks like at about the 3:00 minute mark in the video above – you reach near-Lightning Warp levels of mobility with just a 2L and enough enemies. The AoE you get from Forbidden Power helps, too.

You also have decent chance to freeze trash with Frostblink alone, between the build’s crit scaling and Elemental Proliferation. Elemental Proliferation also makes it such that a mob you blink into is nearly entirely either chilled or frozen, taking some of the risk off recklessly blinking into mobs.

Lastly, Phase Run is optional here (and in any case you only have space for it after you get Despair on hit), but puts the Frenzy charges you can generate with Charged Traps to good use running between packs. Just don’t put it on LMB, so you have more control over when you consume your Frenzy charges – it’s a sore loss to not have them up when trying to DPS.

Items

This section won’t be a detailed breakdown of every possibility, just some good options to take note of.

Weapons

As a chaos build, you have a very easy upgrade path to a +2 wand, using CaptainLance9’s recipe. It calls for a Shuddering, Metallic, and Corroded Fossil used on a wand of ilvl 82 and below. That eliminates every possible prefix other than spell damage, +1 spell gems, and +1 chaos spell gems, and the only RNG involved is what tier of spell damage you get.

The best base to use is a Prophecy Wand with ilvl 64-82, as the implicit is the best for a chaos spell trapper build, and using an ilvl 64 base and above gets you a chance to hit T2 spell damage. T1 spell damage is only available at ilvl 84, and you need to keep it below ilvl 82 to avoid hitting flat added chaos damage to attacks, which is useless for the build.

The same fossil combination can be used to hit spell damage and +gems on a shield, although you also have a chance to hit life or ES prefixes. However, you will be unable to roll useful defensive suffixes like resistances or ailment avoidance, at least not until you start getting fancy with your crafting.

Very early on, you can just get started with a +2 wand easily, as fossils are not dependent on Delve depth and you can just run low-level Delves for levels and fossil farming (target the Mine, Frozen Hollow and Fungal Cavern biomes, and pick long runs or nodes with Fossil rewards). With Phase Run, Temporal Rift and a juiced Frostblink, this build is a very competent and relatively fast Delver for a Witch.

You can push the +2 wands further by engaging in metamodding shenanigans. As long as you have an open suffix, you can lock prefixes at the cost of 2 divines, and then try and get good crit rolls on them with things like Harvest crit reroll. Well-rolled crit versions of the +2 wands will outperform even Void Batteries, even if you’re already using Badge of the Brotherhood and Architect’s Hand (more on that later).

Armour

There are a couple of honourable mentions here. First, Lightning Coil helps cover the build’s weakness to physical damage very well, so much so that EHP takes a substantial boost when Lightning Coil is used. Second, you want Warlord helms for +1 to maximum power charges, and helms would be a good place to stick more phys taken as elemental mods.

If you are not going with Lightning Coil, consider also crafting the rare suffix on body armour that regenerates ES when near a rare or unique enemy. That massive amount of ES recovery, especially if your ES totals are not that high, can solve all your ES sustain problems in one (or two – that mod is also available on belts) mod.

I feel like I should mention a few baits here, which is Architect’s Hand and Ralakesh’s Impatience. Architect’s Hand isn’t great when your throw speed comes mainly from Charged Traps and not an excess of cast speed, while Ralakesh’s Impatience isn’t really good for a build that has no trouble keeping up the important charges. It’s only really good if you are using Badge of the Brotherhood and want to use Inner Conviction, as you’re then blocked from using Frenzy charges, but I think this combination isn’t really worth all the slots for things that you’re giving up.

Jewellery

Early on, one other side benefit of delving early is early access to curse on hit jewellery. I lucked out and hit a decently usable Despair on hit ring on my very first chaos node, but luck is sometimes just a matter of generating enough opportunities, and the recommended SSF Atlas setup will give you more than enough opportunities.

A good Heavy Belt with a Strength mod is pretty important early on, as this build really struggles with strength. You’ll also want an ES regeneration suffix on the belt, especially if you’re using Lightning Coil.

The big name here for any power charge stacking build is Badge of the Brotherhood. At base, this build hits 6 power charges and can go to 8 with an anoint and a helm mod; that’s 8 Frenzy charges that add up to a 32% more multiplier, and 80% increased throw speed from Charged Traps alone. This can go even further with Precursor’s Emblem, but you’d have to really like Delve to stand a decent chance at getting usable Emblems.

Jewels

Considering that at lv 87 I was casting around for reasonable notables to take on the tree, this build has plenty of passive point space for cluster and jewel slots. That said, none of the cluster notables really impressed me; some are nice but by no means unique or best in slot. There’s conceivably room for stacking double damage, but I’m no cluster expert and you’re best advised elsewhere.

Abyss jewels can provide a nice place for stacking some flat chaos damage, but do note that you’ll have to manually adjust Forbidden Rite’s damage in PoB if you screw around too much with flat damage.

Levelling

Obligatory warning: If you’re not hard up for playing Forbidden Rite from the off, you are very strongly advised to level as Cold DoT at least until roughly A4-A5, or when you can get a 4L and access to Siosa. For the same amount of manic button pressing, Cold DoT is just simply much better damage – you can see that my damage output takes a pretty big hit when I swap over in A5-A6. I would actually advise deferring it till A8 altogether when you have Cruel Lab and free Wither.

If you must play Forbidden Rite the moment it’s available from Yeena in A2, then mule Sniper’s Mark and Bear Trap from Shadow before making the switch. Both are purchaseable from Nessa in A1 after completing Breaking Some Eggs (i.e. making it past the Mud Flats), so it’s at worst a 5 minute distraction, especially if you have a spare Quicksilver or good boots, and make a mad dash through.

A sample levelling progression would look something like this, with a swap at A5-A6. Note that I haven’t bothered configuring the damage output properly, since it’s not really material at that stage how much or how little DPS you do as long as you can actually kill things.

A2: https://pobb.in/uLVGMf6Kqi_u
A4: https://pobb.in/xjW6oGtvxiTV
A6: https://pobb.in/4wzjl_bNq87P
A8: https://pobb.in/_1xA7oalTO-z
A10: https://pobb.in/RPVUrvDS03Bt

To test the viability of the build in a fresh leaguestart, I did a levelling playthrough snapshotting the character into the above PoBs. The levelling playthrough is below.

For your viewing displeasure

Atlas Progression

With how much Delve rewards enable this build, and how bad Delve notables generally are, that makes for a great combination with CaptainLance9’s Wandering Path T16 rush strategy. That was what I used to level and gear the above character. The character is probably about 1 day in age, which is pretty good for a non-competitive “aimless SSF” player like me; someone who knows what they’re doing could probably push this even harder.

The new All Hands keystone coming next league is, to my mind, only going to improve that further, possibly making it viable for you to just passively farm Sulphite while mapping.

Since Harvest is on the same side as Delve, and is reasonably ok for a Wandering Path strategy as well, you can start banking the lifeforce to try and make some super good wands early. In theory, since the Eater of World’s altars are the ones that drop divines and are on the same side as Delve and Harvest, you could also invest in Eater altars, but Exarch altars are probably going to feel much better generally even if you have to gate over.

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