John Wick Invoker: Tanky explosive shot xbow mapper

My mobalytics build profile

Here's a build that was inspired by Palsteron's explosive shot deadeye. I thought I could take the concepts and build it on an invoker ascendancy, and I'm happy with the results. I built this primarily for farming high density mechanics, and it really shines in stuff like breach/delirium.

This build feels incredibly to play in maps - walking around and popping mobs with explosive shot, then using shockburst rounds to kill rares.

Pros of the build:

• Tanky while mapping - The monk ascendancy sacrifices 40% evasion to gain a ton of physical damage reduction. Also, with medium to high investment, you can go Chaos Inoculation
• Exceptional clear - Since we are applying a ton of ailments, you are activating all 3 heralds at the same time, providing for massive screen-wide pops
• Relatively fast - Not as fast as the deadeye, but crossbow explosive shot provides a very fun run-and-gun playstyle
• Tons of utility due to "free" spirit - With the invoker ascendancy, we get spirit based on our body armour stats. You can easily get 200+ spirit, which opens up a lot of flexibility with auras
• Doesn't require "premium" affixes - One of the advantages of going invoker and CI are that you basically don't need some of the more premium stats on equipment like spirit/life/chaos res/etc.

Cons:

• Mediocre bossing - Shockburst rounds almost entirely relies on your ability to consistently apply shock. This can be very hit or miss depending on your lightning damage/shock chance/etc
• Weak to damage over time - True of all CI builds, although we somewhat mitigate it by going eternal youth
• Lack of skill slots - Because we're running 5-6 auras, there's not that much room for skills (can be mitigated with unset rings)

Core mechanics

Unlike Palsteron's deadeye build, this build is using Painter's Servant to convert ALL damage to be split between fire/lightning/cold. In addition, we grab the I Am The Thunder ascendancy node for 10% gained as lightning, and Essence of the Storm passive node for 5% gained as lightning. The net result is that ALL of our attacks are now doing roughly 29%fire / 29% cold / 42% lightning baseline. This includes not just our attacks, but herald procs as well, which we can take advantage of.

Damage

Implications of splitting damage:

• The main downside is that modifiers that individually apply to lightning/fire/cold are not as effective as before, but this isn't really that bad because we can scale stuff using attack damage / elemental damage / etc.
• Assuming you have a heavy hitting skill, everything has a good chance to shock/freeze/ignite

How we take advantage of this:

• We use explosive shot since it is has a relatively high attack multiplier (~400%)
• We stack ailment chance to increase shock/freeze/ignite procs. In particular, we want to make sure shock chance is high to activate shockburst rounds
• We also use all three heralds at once, since they will constantly be proccing with all the ailments we apply
• We set up our heralds to apply ailments for some additional procs
• Herald of ice cannot apply freeze, but it CAN apply ignite/shock
• Similarly, Herald of thunder cannot shock, but can apply freeze/ignite

Defence

We can get incredibly tanky with a hybrid Evasion/ES defense:

• Your evasion will be relatively high (~70-80%), which is pretty good considering it also affect spell hits
• With medium investment, you can get a 3k+ ES pool. High investment can go for 5k+
• With CI, you ignore bleeds/poisons/chaos damage (I wouldn't do this until you get at least 2.5k ES)
• ES recovery galore that doesn't rely on recharge:
• Grim feast (note: I'm 100% positive this will be nerfed in the near future, so enjoy it while it lasts)
• Ghost dance - works great with evasion-based defence
• Eternal youth
• Assuming you have decent evasion, the invoker ascendancy can provide ~70% PDR, which is absolutely insane

Playstyle

Imagine yourself as John Wick with a shotgun and an MP5. That's basically how this plays. You run up to mobs point blank and shoot them in the face with explosive shot. For tankier mobs, make sure they are shocked before switching to shockburst. Because of simple damage rotation and the mobility afforded by explosive shot, you can focus on dodging slams/etc

Future Plans

• I've invested pretty heavily in defences, but my xbows are actually not that great. Will be looking to upgrade those next.

• I'm working on getting my 4th ascendancy (wiped on floor4 boss at 33% due to hungry fangs 😂). Once I get that, will be looking to see how best to incorporate unbound avatar (probably will replace emergency reload).

• Once I farm enough currency, I also plan to upgrade to Hands of Wisdom and Action - will likely hurt my map clear, but also improve my single target.

looks really interesting, how much investment do you think is needed to get started on this build? kinda broke with like 50ex lol