Ignite Archmage Infernalist Endgame Build

Introduction

In a League where 80% of casters are using Trigger builds, where seemingly every self-cast spell serves the lowly purpose of fueling a meta gem, wouldn’t you rather your own spells packed a punch? Why wait for comet spam if everything’s already dead?

This is a build that aims to kill everything in one single hit; trash, Abyss rares, Rogue Exiles, even the most juiced pinnacle bosses in the game can be killed in just 1 second of being active. This makes the build fast for mapping and maybe the fastest in the game at present for bossing.

We achieve this by stacking some extremely powerful effects on Infernalist.

• Mana stacking with Archmage and a Mind Over Matter setup lets us acquire a huge amount of added lightning damage on our spells, tripling our damage, while adding a strong defensive layer.
• Bringer of Flame lets all our damage contribute to ignite, including the huge extra damage from Archmage. This allows us to roll enormous ignites with Comet that decimate even the toughest and most juiced bosses.
• Grinning Immolation gives 50% more critical damage bonus. We reserve 25% of our life and use Coward’s Legacy in the belt slot so we’re always considered at low life, allowing us to benefit from a further 30% more crit dmg bonus from Pain Attunement, giving us a huge 95% more crit dmg bonus overall and unlocking a further 12x damage multiplier.
• On very high mana setups we can optionally use a very cheap unique, The Black Doubt, to provide a large amount of passive life recovery and enabling the use of uncapped Demon Form for a significant more damage modifier, along with the excellent mobility provided by Demon Form’s enhanced dodge.

With this scaling, lightning-infused Arc becomes a potent clearing tool in its own right, and cold-infused Ice Nova can clear entire Abysses in one short cast. For bossing, fire-Infused Comet makes for one of the quickest time-to-kill bossing setups in the game, capable of rolling an ignite dps in the 10s of millions.

This is an endgame build variant, requiring a moderate investment to become functional and to play smoothly. Leveling as a mana stacker is very much not encouraged, and instead newer players should level a character using an established leveling build like the Chaos Witch, swapping to this build when the required gear has been assembled around level 80-85.

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Strengths and Weaknesses

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Build Mechanics

Archmage and Mind Over Matter

Archmage is a potent persistent buff that gives your non-channeling spells 4% of Damage as Extra Lightning Damage per 100 maximum mana. By the time you hit 5k mana this buff single-handedly triples your damage output in exchange for making each spell cost a % of your maximum mana. This additional cost makes it ill-suited for trigger spam builds but excellent for builds that fire off big, impactful spells that decimate the screen.

We pair this with the Arcane Intensity tree notable Arcane Intensity providing “3% increased Spell Damage per 100 Maximum Mana”, and the staff desecration prefix for a further 5% of this stat, resulting in our damage rising sharply as we stack more max mana.

By stacking a significant amount of the stat “% of Damage is Taken from Mana Before Life” we can use this high mana pool as a health resource. Mana regeneration is an easy quantity to scale with gear and the passive tree, enabling us to passively recover thousands of mana per second. This allows us to soak up larger hits and deal with damage-over-time effects with ease.

To attain a high amount of mana in the first place we stack flat and percent mana on our gear. We also wear energy shield armour pieces and take the Eldritch Battery keystone to convert all that base energy shield to mana, giving us more tankiness and damage.

Elemental Infusions

All of our spells have powerful elemental infusion effects we want to benefit from:

• Arc chains 6 additional times and deals triple damage when lightning-infused.
• Ice Nova is 2.25x larger and deals 3.4x its base damage when cold-infused.
• Comet is 50% larger and deals 2.5x its base damage when fire-infused.

While mapping we attain a steady supply of infusions via the Siphon Elements persistent buff, along with the Elemental Equilibrium keystone. This keystone creates lightning infusions instead of fire, and cold infusions instead of lightning. Our primary clearing skill, Arc, deals almost entirely lightning damage that naturally shocks foes, but also contributes to ignite via Bringer of Flame. Siphon Elements therefore generates a plethora of fire and lightning infusions that get switched to lightning and cold by Elemental Equilibrium. These fuel our mapping skills, Arc and Ice Nova, ensuring our clear is smooth.

For bossing, Elemental Equilibrium offers a fantastic way to get fire infusions on-demand via Frost Bomb. This detonates almost immediately when supported by Short Fuse II, providing a way to easily generate a fire-infusion to fully unleash Comet’s power.

Crit Scaling

Infernalist is a powerful choice for scaling crit damage, with 95% more crit damage bonus being attainable via a low-life Pain Attunement setup and Grinning Immolation working together. Infernalist can even use one of the Beidat’s ascendancy choices to reserve 25% of maximum life and use the Coward’s Legacy belt to always be considered at low life. By stacking crit dmg on the tree and on our gear we can attain and even exceed a 1200% crit damage bonus, giving our abilities a further 12x damage multiplier.

Infernalist gets no latent ability to scale crit chance, so we have to pull some tricks to ensure we bolster our crit chance. The persistent buff Charge Regulation gives us 25% more crit chance whenever we have power charges in exchange for regularly consuming a power charge. Our build constantly generates and spends elemental infusions, giving us power charges via the newly added Infusion of Power tree passive that provides a power charge whenever we consume an elemental infusion.

Comet and Ice Nova benefit from the higher base crit chance on cold spells and so need less support to guarantee a critical hit. Comet’s crit chance naturally scales above 50% which Ambush takes to 100%, ensuring every boss is deleted the second we touch it. Ice Nova has the job of finishing off tougher foes so we can’t rely on the target being at full life; so instead we use Pinpoint Critical and Inexorable Critical I for an on-demand critical Ice Nova that clears the whole screen without the lengthy cast time of Comet. Giving up two support gems is a big investment but worth it to reliably unlock the critical damage bonus, which even with Pinpoint Critical sits at a multiplier of around 8x.

Arc as a lightning spell has a lower base crit chance and so needs some more support. We use Pinpoint Critical and Ambush together to guarantee that every new enemy Arc jumps to will be crit. Together with Archmage, this turns Arc into a one-shotting machine that chains through entire screens of foes without needing a trigger setup to deal damage!

Supplementing clear with Lucky Hit and Fiery Death

Even with so many damage modifiers stacked on our Arc, it remains a pure lightning spell meaning its damage range runs down almost to zero. By stacking Lucky Hit for lightning spells via a Heart of the Well jewel for up to 25%, and anointing Lightning Rod for a further 30%, we smooth out our clear considerably (another 20% is possible via a Megalomaniac jewel providing The Spring Hare, but 50% lucky hit chance seems enough to smooth out clear).

For any targets that Arc fails to clear out in one go, we have another trick up our sleeve: Fiery Death has a powerful corpse explosion effect that is poorly suited for most mapping setups because of the long cast time of the explosion spell effect. However, when Arc is off-screening enemies this aggressively, giving the explosions plenty of time to go off, this underlooked support gem acquires considerable utility for clearing out any stragglers. This delayed explosion effect also makes the build fantastic for clearing static encounters like Ritual, dealing with new monsters as they spawn in on the priming corpses.

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Skill Rotation

Map Clearing

For mapping the setup is very simple, cast Arc at anything alive. The first few packs might require a couple of casts to clear as we generate our initial lightning infusions and corresponding power charges to get our crit rate to 100%, but as soon as we build momentum we maintain it, clearing very comfortably even when we have droughts in lightning infusions.

For any tough rares that live the initial onslaught of lightning and secondary Fiery death explosions, Ice Nova when cold-infused deals a tremendous amount of reliable crit damage in a wide area, and is great for clearing tougher mobs like Abyss hordes and Rogue Exiles (although Arc still should deal with the majority!). Ice Nova is particularly great for instant-killing essence mobs as they break out their crystals, making this build a great essence farmer.

Bossing

To one-shot bosses that have a spawn in animation you’ll follow this rotation:

• First put down your Sigil of Power to start stacking its more spell damage buff as you spend mana within it.
• Cast a Frost Bomb at your feet and pick up the fire infusion.
• Start to routinely cast Elemental Weakness under the boss to ensure when they’re active, they’ll be on cursed ground. This also stacks stages on your Sigil of Power.
• Just before the boss is active, cast Comet on their head and watch as they die within a second of being alive.

For bosses that start active, you can get away with generating your fire infusion with Frost Bomb before entering the boss arena, putting down Sigil of Power under yourself, dropping Elemental Weakness under the boss, and casting Comet at your first opening, usually after dodging the boss’s initial attack.

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Gameplay Tips

• This build is very much an assassin build. That comes with the usual caveats for playing an assassin archetype. Your initial burst is extremely high (and usually enough to clear everything) but if your initial burst isn’t sufficient at your gear level, your sustained dps ability outside of Ice Nova is lower than other builds because many of our bonuses rely on targets being one-shot from Full Life. If your gear is insufficient to do this for the content you’re farming, you’ll have a bad time.
• In a similar vein, while you have a respectable health pool, with your life and mana totaling about 7.5-8k in good gear, you have no active avoidance or mitigation outside of Temporal Chains and Enfeeble on your mapping setup. This makes you something of a glass cannon, unable to take sustained fire from enemies. The build’s high range with Arc facilitates clearing safely; but if you run into a dense pack at melee range, expect to die.
• The current inability of mana-stacking builds to meaningfully scale their stun threshold can make ranged attacks dangerous to deal with; if you get stunned out of a cast animation, particularly while subject to some kind of slow effect, this can give enemies time to get in your face and cause problems. Cast speed becomes a great defensive affix for avoiding this situation while also improving your clear’s fluidity. Staying mobile and keeping your momentum while mapping also helps.

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Video Guide

The video guide for this build is under construction and will be published very soon!

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Demon Form Variant

At very high mana levels for the build, we can optionally drop the Beidat’s Ascendancies altogether to take uncapped Demon Form with those 4 points instead.

Demon Form stacks Demonflame on you as you stay in form, stacking an ever-increasing more spell damage modifier, but also an ever-increasing life loss. This makes it very difficult for most builds to stay in Uncapped Demon Form for a long time, normally requiring some self-damage life/ES recoup loop with Sacrosanctum that necessitates spamming spell casts to trigger self-damage and life recoup recovery. This can often negate the primary advantage of Demon Form, which is that its dodge has exceptional range and speed, functioning more as a mini-blink than a dodge roll. But of course, if you have to stop and cast spells to damage yourself constantly, you’re not exactly making the most of Demon Form’s mobility.

For mana stackers, a very cheap unique body armour presents an interesting way to stay in Demon Form for a significant period of time while passively meeting the life recovery thresholds necessary to counteract the life loss. The Black Doubt sacrifices 10% of your maximum mana per second when not on full life to recover that much life. At 6.5k mana this amounts to 650 life recovery per second that can be scaled by life recovery modifiers (but not life regeneration modifiers).

An easily accessible life recovery modifier is annointing Hale Heart on your amulet for 15%, bringing that 650 life per second to almost 750 instead. This means you can stack Demonflame to 40 stacks before you even start to degen life, while you accumulate 120% more spell damage.

With an Undying Hate that can stack life recovery even higher, allowing you to passively stay in Demon Form up to 75 stacks or higher, amounting to a whopping 225% more spell damage. This is perhaps not worth the investment of points on the tree, as this build already makes excellent use of crit, ignite, and ailment clusters to provide strong multiplicative bonuses to its outgoing damage, but if you want to stay in Demon Form and stay mobile then this is the best way of doing so in the game at present!

This is detailed in the below guide featuring a 5-stack Life Recovery Undying Hate on a much lower level of gear investment with 4.5k max mana. At this mana I’d recommend running the regular version of the build, but if you’re a Demon Form fan this might be for you!

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Ascendancy

The primary impetus for this build comes from Bringer of Flame‘s ability to make all damage contribute to flammability and ignite magnitudes; this enables Archmage-supported fire-infused Comet to roll enormous ignites, capable of hitting 20-30m dps in optimised gear. This makes for one of the quickest bossing builds in the game, capable of dropping a Comet on a boss as soon as it becomes active and killing it inside a second, even with the boss Damage Reduction added to the game this league!

Grinning Immolation is also always chosen for the crit damage scaling it affords. Because we’re not a traditional life or energy shield stacker, we can even ignore the 15% life/ES self-ignite penalty on this notable because it simply doesn’t deal that much damage relative to our huge mana regeneration!

The final choices after this depend on which build variant you run. The build recommended at most levels of investment takes Altered Flesh for some effective physical mitigation via chaos resistance (15% phys mitigation when chaos res capped), and then takes one of the following:

• Beidat’s Will reserves 25% of our life in exchange for a big chunk of spirit, which can help meet your spirit requirements for the many buffs this build packs. This is necessary if your amulet and chest lack spirit, to be able to run Archmage and Charge Regulation on our bossing tree.
• If you have enough spirit to support these buffs without Beidat’s Will, instead take Beidat’s Gaze to get around 400-500 extra maximum mana, scaling our damage and mana recovery.

An alternate setup is possible, as mentioned before, that instead takes uncapped Demon Form, but is not worth running unless your character has very high max mana, approaching 6.5k without your chest slot.

This build technically works with just Bringer of Flame and Grinning Immolation, but it’s really not recommended to run this setup until you have 4 ascendancy points, as a more traditional ED/Contagion Witch build will be more functional at lower gear investment and player levels.

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Gem Info

A full skill planner for this build is presented below.

Some notes on the skill setup:

• Your mapping setup uses all the persistent aura buffs presented here, and has a rare scepter to meet the spirit requirements. Your bossing setup for casting Comet uses a staff and drops some non-necessary auras. The auras run for mapping only are Blasphemy, Siphon Elements, and Discipline (which is tied to your scepter). Archmage and Charge Infusion must be run at all times.
• The flat Energy Shield from Discipline is added to your Total mana via Eldritch Battery conversion, which is why we choose this particular scepter implicit.
• The crit chance support gems used here guarantee that Arc and Comet crit against full life targets, while Ice Nova is guaranteed to crit vs any target once Inexorable Critical I is stacked (which functions well given Ice Nova is a skill you very infrequently use, giving Inexorable Crit plenty of time to stack).
• Rising Tempest has all three elemental skill types satisfied by a recent cast of Elemental Weakness which has all three elemental tags. This amounts to an easy 36% more damage modifier against bosses.
• As we’re always considered to be at low life, Execute III is a free 30% more damage modifier which is preferable to run with Arc over the stronger Considered Casting damage modifier to keep your casts feeling smooth.

The following support gems are very valuable and should be acquired as you progress through the build:

• Rakiata’s Flow makes Arc’s clear considerably more powerful. This support gem eliminates the need to acquire Lightning Penetration on the passive tree and turns maps where monsters have bonus elemental resistance into a slaughter. It also facilitates Arc clearing out more tanky rare monsters that have some Lightning Resistance. This is a very high priority upgrade, although the build is still quite smooth without it.
• Dialla’s Desire is an excellent addition to Blasphemy, making our defensive mapping curse auras more powerful and cost less spirit. This should come later in your upgrade path once you have good rare gear pieces.

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Skill Tree

A skill tree planner for a character with mid-90s levels and wearing a Cloak of Defiance to mostly deal with Mind over Matter affixes is presented below. This corresponds to a more budget-friendly setup given how accessible Cloak is at present. If you want to run a rare chest with the damage taken from mana before life desecration suffix, you’ll want to supplement your MoM with the 18% on the cluster at Chakra of Thought, and optionally re-path to pick up the 18% afforded by the Lucidity cluster.

This build uses an inexpensive From Nothing jewel to allow remote allocation of passives near Wildsurge Incantation as indicated below. The 4 notables are all taken on the primary tree, while the small passives are split to take the ignite magnitude node on the bossing tree and the flammability nodes on the mapping tree.

Some notes on the tree setup:

• The cast speed Passives at Final Barrage and Overzealous offer a combined 41% cast speed for 4 points, only paying an increased mana cost of skills penalty which the build can easily handle with how much mana regeneration it stacks.
• The Full-Life themed clusters in the dex region, Preemptive Strike and First Approach, take quite some travel to get to but are very worth running. Against Full Life targets these provide a combined 100% increased damage with hits, 40% increased Crit Chance, and 210% Crit Damage Bonus (that gets boosted by our more modifiers to be a staggering 409% Crit Damage Bonus, more than most builds manage in their entirety).
• Take as much dexterity and strength on your small travel nodes as needed for support gem requirements and then dump the rest into intelligence to boost your maximum mana.
• Lightning Penetration is the most valuable dps stat for the mapping tree before you acquire Rakiata’s Flow, allowing us to chew through rare foes and maps with increased Monster elemental resistance. Rakiata’s frees up a significant number of tree points to be used on other more valuable stats instead like the more max lightning damage at Pure Power, or more generic crit damage scaling at Heartbreaking.

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Gearing

Unique Gear

This build uses a single cheap unique throughout its progression, Coward’s Legacy. This allows a single Beidat’s reservation ascendancy notable to keep you in the Low Life state at all times, benefiting from Pain Attunement and a variety of other bonuses. This is a very cheap unique in its base form and corrupted variants with an elemental resistance are freely available on the trade site. This is also a Vaal unique and so can be double corrupted: a particularly valuable outcome would be the removal of the strength penalty to be replaced with % life regenerated per second but this is a low priority as an upgrade.

At lower budget the buffed Cloak of Defiance can be a great choice. It can supply up to 600 flat mana for the build, less than a good rare chest but still very respectable, and 100% mana regeneration rate. More importantly, it supplies 65% of your damage taken from mana before life requirements when run with The Greatwolf’s Rune of Willpower, freeing up a lot of passive tree points to take more damage clusters.

While Defiance is a solid option, it lacks the spirit we can acquire on a rare chest making a swap desirable at some point in progression to drop Beidat’s Will for Beidat’s Gaze for more max mana. Alternately at very high investment, an Atziri’s Splendour unique chest with high energy shield that treats soul cores as socketed as in the helm slot can boost Maximum Mana to absolutely ludicrous levels when used with 6 Soul Core of Zalatl for a ludicrous 18% increased Maximum Mana and up to almost 1500 flat mana.

An optional unique depending on your particular taste is to run a Dream Fragments in one of your ring slots. The quality of life that the chill/freeze immunity this ring provides cannot be understated, letting you ignore a number of affixes that can otherwise slow down your casting and present a challenge for the build. This is only worth running if you get a max-rolled % increased Maximum Mana roll on the ring, which can also be corrupted up to 21% when appropriately improved with Neural Catalysts.

For speed-farming on high rarity, being a permanently low-life character we can use the Wondertrap boots and sacrifice some player power for up to 61% increased item rarity on just this slot. As such it’s nice to have some gear swaps available elsewhere so you can remain resistance-capped even with these equipped.

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Gear Affixes

Your general stat priorities are:

• Stack as much maximum mana and energy shield as possible.
• Cap your elemental resistances.
• Get your chaos resistance to at least 40%, but the closer to cap the better.
• Meet your Spirit requirements on chest/amulet/sceptre.
• Take life on any further available prefixes.
• Stack mana regeneration on suffixes to match your Archmage-boosted spending recovery.
• Any further cast speed and crit bonuses suffixes can be useful.

A full breakdown per-slot is presented below.

Slot	Base	Prefix	Suffix
Main Hand (Mapping)	Wand	1. Mana 2. % Increased (Spell/Elemental) Damage 3. Gain % of Damage as Extra Ele Damage	1. +5 Level of All Lightning Spell Skills 2. % increased Mana Regeneration Rate 3. % increased Critical Hit Chance for Spells
Off Hand (Mapping)	Scepter (Discipline)	1. High increased Spirit 2. High Mana	1. % increased Mana Regeneration Rate 2. Str/Int
Weapon Swap (Bossing)	Staff (Sigil of Power)	1. Mana 2. % increased Spell Damage per 100 Maximum Mana 3. Spell Damage/Gain % of Damage as Extra Ele Damage	1. +7 Level of All Cold Spell Skills 2. % increased Critical Hit Chance 3. % increased Critical Damage Bonus 4. % increased Mana Regeneration Rate
Helm	Energy Shield	1. High ES/Mana 2. Life (prefer ES)	1. Elemental/Chaos Resistances 2. % increased Critical Hit Chance
Body	Cloak of Defiance	1. High ES/Mana 2. High Mana Regeneration
Gloves	Energy Shield	1. High ES/Mana 2. Life	1. Elemental/Chaos Resistances 2. % Increased Critical Damage Bonus
Boots	Energy Shield	1.% Increased Movement Speed 2. High ES/Mana 3. Life	1. Elemental/Chaos Resistances
Belt	Coward’s Legacy
Ring 1/2	Breach Ring (Mana Catalyst)	1. % Increased Mana 2. +X to Maximum Mana 3. Life	1. % increased Mana Regeneration Rate 2. % increased Cast Speed 3. Elemental/Chaos Resistances
Ring 2 (Option for Freeze Immune)	Dream Fragments	1. High % increased Mana (18-21%)
Amulet	Spirit/Life/ES/Resistance Amulet	1.+X to Maximum Mana/% increased Maximum Mana 2. + to Maximum Energy Shield 2. Spirit (Warning: expensive) 3.+X to Maximum Life/% increased Maximum Life 4. % increased Spell Damage	1. Level of All Spell Skills 2. % of Damage is taken from Mana before Life (less necessary with Cloak of Defiance) 3. % Mana Regeneration Rate 4. Elemental/Chaos Resistance 5. % Increased Critical Damage Bonus/% increased Critical Hit Chance 6. All Attributes or Intelligence

Augments

This table shows the list of socketable augments that work well for this build. Some of these have limits and so are ordered in priority.

Slot	Socketable
Main Hand (Bossing and Mapping)	1. Assandra’s Rune of Wisdom 2. Saqawal’s Rune of the Sky 3. Greater Iron Rune (almost as good)
Off Hand (mapping)	1. Rabbit Idol 2. Greater Resolve Rune
Helm	1. Jiquani’s Thesis (Ancient, only good on high ES helm) 2. Soul Core of Zalatl
Body Armour	1. The Greatwolf’s Rune of Willpower 2. Craiceann’s Rune of Warding 3. Soul Core of Ticaba 4. Resistances
Gloves	1. Courtesan Mannan’s Rune of Cruelty
Boots	1. Farrul’s Rune of the Chase

Corruptions

This table shows a list of useful corruption or sanctification effects to aim for. Some of these are very accessible, some are a significant investment.

Slot	Corruption/Sanctification Effect
Main Hand (Mapping/Bossing)	1. +1 to Level of Spell Skills via sanctification 2. +1 to Level of relevant Spell Skills enchant 3. +1 Socket
Off Hand (Mapping)	1. % increased Spirit enchant 2. +1 socket
Helm	1. +X Spirit enchant 2. +1 socket
Body Armour	1. +1 socket 2. % additional Physical Damage Reduction 3. % to Chaos resistance
Gloves	1. +1 socket
Boots	1. % increased Movement Speed enchant 2. % to Elemental Resistance enchant 2. +1 socket
Belt	1. % to Elemental Resistance enchant 2. remove -str, gain regenerate % life per second
Rings	1. % to Chaos Resistance enchant 2.% to all Elemental Resistances enchant 3. % Increased Damage enchant
Amulet	1. +1 to Level of Spell Skills and other good rolls via sanctification 2. +1 to Level of all Skills 3. % to all Elemental Resistances enchant

Rare Jewels

Being a crit damage and ignite build, we can make excellent use of rare Sapphires. Each of the following affixes are tremendous for damage:

• % increased Magnitude of Damaging Ailments you inflict with Critical Hits
• % increased Ignite Magnitude
• % increased Ailment Magnitude (affects ignite *and* shock)
• % increased Critical Damage Bonus
• % increased Critical Spell Damage Bonus

Meanwhile, the following are solid pickups for damage but a tier below the above:

• % increased Elemental Damage
• % increased Spell Damage
• % increased Magnitude of Shock you inflict
• % increased Critical Hit Chance (can free up passive points)
• % increased Critical Hit Chance for spells (can free up passive points)

The following offer solid defensive power or other utility and can also be considered:

• % of Damage is taken from Mana before Life
• Recover % of maximum Mana on Kill
• Recover % of maximum Life on Kill
• % increased Mana Regeneration Rate
• % increased Curse Magnitudes

Unique Jewels

A Wildsurge Incantation variant of From Nothing can be powerful for saving a good few points on the tree. These have the benefit of being generally unwanted otherwise.

Attaining a Heart of the Well jewel that gives lightning damage a chance to be Lucky and some other useful modifiers helps Arc’s clear become more reliable.

Many otherwise inaccessible notables provide a huge amount of power for this build, making aMegalomaniac a solid choice if you can find two or more useful passives on one. Any passives that scale crit damage, ignites deal faster damage, ignite magnitude, all can offer substantial power.

A Prism of Belief for Arc could be very powerful for this build, smoothing out the clear, but these are tremendously expensive and absolutely not required for the clear to feel great. Comet options are also very expensive but even less necessary; we already kill a T3 Xesht per second with Comet‘s ignite, there’s absolutely no need for more bossing damage.

For very high budgets you could also consider a Time-Lost Sapphire or an Against the Darkness to meet spirit requirements, stack more maximum mana for better EHP, or stack ailment magnitude or crit damage.

Flasks and Charms

On a budget you can make do with a strong generic Life Flask and the new Lavianga’s Spirits Mana Flask for a reliable 30 mana recovery per second; small in the grand scheme of things but every little helps your resource regeneration.

An Olroth’s Resolve can provide a very welcome extra Guard buffer for your Life pool, which works particularly well on a setup with high Mind Over Matter, preserving the Guard for when you need it the most.

For Charms, the following are recommended at all budgets:

• A magic Stone Charm provides stun immunity for a precious few seconds. As we discussed before, Stun Threshold is one of the weaker parts of running a Mana stacking build at present, and this helps prevent you getting stun-locked to death. You’ll still eat the first stunning hit, but after that you’re free to reply and kill everything in front of you with an Arc cast.
• If not running a Dream Fragments, a magic Thawing Charm works very well to prevent Freezes from slowing you down, and is particularly valuable if you run Strongboxes which routinely freeze you on activation.
• If running Dream Fragments for Chill/Freeze immunity, any of an Amethyst, Silver, or Dousing Charm can also be welcome.

For high investment variants there are several Rite of Passage charms providing useful affixes. Bear/Boar give some excellent Damage Reduction, while Stag/Wolf provides some Skill Speed and Movement Speed. The Primate variant can be interesting for letting all damage contribute to Chill for the duration, making you slow down anything you hit (but realistically outside of juiced abysses, anything you hit will already be dead!).

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Changelog

• 31/12/2025 – Archmage Assassin Infernalist guide first added.