Cast on crit hexblast oracle
This is my pob: https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/charizord-8664/character/Andacle
I wanted to make a caster oracle that doesn't have to use covenant. Life sustain is usually solved by spell leech, which blood mages get for free, but I wanted to run a similar build on oracle which could run atziri's splendour or temporalis.
I took inspiration from the zero duration titan. We can use time of need to sustain our life costs. With all reduced duration nodes and a palm of the dreamer with -13% duration, we get 85% reduced duration. Time of need also has a bug where you can socket in Hayoxi's Fulmination and Overabundance 1 for 50% less skill duration (I also tried swift affliction 3, but that didn't seem to work). Along with compressed duration 2, this lets time of need proc every 0.46 seconds. It isn't as good as a titan, but in practice it is fine since we one shot everything.
Since we have low duration, this rules out spark as a trigger, since sparks don't last long enough. I opted for a curse setup with doedre's undoing. At this point, I thought I could also make hexblast work instead of comet. Hexblast has higher base damage but isn't as spammable. The way hexblast works is it explodes curses only if at least half the duration has expired. Since we have low duration, I wanted to try putting hexblast into cast on crit and make it proc off my self cast curse (I chose despair for my curse since we can take dark entries to level this and hexblast up).
Unfortunately, there isn't really a good way to find out how long it takes cast on crit to trigger a spell to see if hexblast even triggered. In the tooltip for "trigger", it says it happens immediately, but there still seems to be a small delay. My guess is around 0.08s, but it's hard to confirm exactly. If we can get our curse duration down, then hexblast can proc reliably. The way I tested this was putting withering touch with hexblast and checking if things get withered.
You want curse duration around 0.08-0.16s to reliably proc hexblast. To get curse duration down, we can use the node "master of hexes" around whispers of doom for -25% duration. This unfortunately brings the curse duration down below zero, and this prevents hexblast from proccing. There are a few alternatives.
- Don't use palm of the dreamer, which makes your curse duration 3%, you may still need compressed duration (you could also use a palm with exactly 1 or 2% reduced skill effect). This almost doubles the time of need duration though, so I didn't like it as much. You can also wear rathpit in this setup for more damage, but you lose some spirit.
- Use a time lost jewel with small passive skills grant 2% increased curse duration and take 6 small passives (normal jewels aren't good, they give back too much duration). This lets you keep the small duration of time of need, while still lowering the curse duration to just 2%. You can get a corrupted one that still has double crit damage so it's not a wasted spot.
There are a few other uniques that were good:
- Windscream boots. Makes curse activation instant. This lets you also run whispers of doom without the downside and blasphemy + temp chains if you have the extra spirit for safety (be careful with temp chains, it makes curses expire slower, so you still may need compressed duration to offset it). You can solve curse activation with some passive points + jewels, but I didn't find it worth it to lose a jewel slot since I'm running a lot of time-lost jewels.
- Plaguefinger gloves. Get one with +1 all chaos skills. Poison chance and all damage contributes to poison is good, but not that important. A rare glove is comparable, but my tooltip dps was higher with plaguefinger.
- Choir of the storm amulet. I found a rare amulet is better for just purely optimizing hexblast with extra spirit + spell skills. However, choir is a good alternative to make your crits do more damage
The final setup fully takes advantage of the oracle ascendency with 10 keystones and inevitable crits. It also takes advantage of low duration in two ways, one to make time of need proc enough to sustain life costs, and two to make curse duration low enough to proc hexblast automatically. I would say bloodmage is still better and is meta for a reason, but I did learn a lot optimizing this build. There are probably more improvements that are still possible, but I got to level 100 with this build, so I probably won't dive into it much further.
