Conc's Toxic Rain Occultist 3.6 League Start

[Concillian]

Damn that death man, Nice to see how the build plays though.

Do you think that it would have to be CI? I'm terrified of trying to play CI after my first (admittedly long time ago) time playing.

CI is definitely core for using Incandescent Heart. That item is simply bad without being CI. Replace that and the build works without CI, but you may want an item that doesn't let Chaos damage bypass ES, because life is very low, obviously, and any map with Chaos Annihilators will make you very dead very fast with current build's life total and no item that lets ES work against chaos damage. Replace the damage on full life support with something else, too.

This build makes it so easy to get "enough" ES that I don't think you really need to be scared of CI. I don't know how it was in the past, but it takes like 5ex to buy a chest on par with Incandescent Heart for elemental damage (800-850ish ES), though the build should be pretty workable with a lower ES Vaal Regalia.

The Incandescent Heart and Memory Vault were kinda core to the concept of being able to get a solid amount of ES without having to compete with 70+% of the league players being ES and wanting the same gear. I didn't have to try to craft a Vaal Regalia to get a 750+ or 900 ES vaal regalia, and I could focus all that crafting attention on the bow. These items are kinda flying under the radar.

With all of that in mind, it can be made to work without CI, but I think it would be quite significantly more difficult / expensive to pull off having enough tankiness without CI.

It was an experiment for me being my first ES build and it was wildly successful in that aspect. Life based Toxic Rain has to dedicate so much to +life to get resilient to one shotting, and I'm sure I could do it better now that I have more experience, but I had issues with health sustain in boss fights as well. The ES/CI build this league eliminated ALL of those issues. I kinda lucked out that it also happened to be a league with +1 implicit bows being a thing, as that process was interesting and added a ton to the damage (literally 25% more damage from having that one implicit)