Chain Lightning - Emperor Palpatine

Chain Lightning is looking middle of the pack for Season 10. It's finally free from being an Azurewrath Lucky Hit vehicle though, so purists can rejoice. Axial Conduit will be 20% stronger as a Chaos Unique, but it's moving from a defensive slot... to another defensive slot to get that 20%. In addition, Axial Conduit's Explosion Damage that compromises most of the builds damage does not benefit from Advanced Techniques.

With all of this being said... Chain Lightning is still a pretty strong build and should have no issue stomping the life out of Torment 4, soloing Belial, and absolutely ripping through Infernal Hordes. If you like Chain Lightning, this isn't a bad season to give it a whirl. It has some legs to it.

1) Cast your basic skill 3 times every 5 seconds to maintain a 60% damage buff (In content where the damage is demanded)
• You can also weave it by casting every 1.66 seconds
2) Cast Wizard's Blizzard (at least every 8 seconds) to freeze packs and to maintain it's passive mana regen for Mana Shield Seasonal Power

Those are the two Major things to be aware of. The rest of the loop is relatively simple
3) Spam Cast the shit out of Chain Lightning onto enemies
4) Evade around for movement.
• Raiment Versions will clump enemies this way
• Non-Raiment versions typically have the KRY rune go off every 5 seconds for grouping enemies
5) Cast Unstable Currents, Ice Blades, and Lightning Spear whenever they come off of Cooldown

Chain Lightning is now built to deal it's own damage. The whole Lucky hit chance to deal Lightning damage and Azurewrath sword are gone after they bug fixed some hidden attack speed scaling. The build is essentially the same just with less pressure on Lucky Hit. Spam Chain Lightning, Axial conduit procs go off, blow shit up.

The differences this season with why the skill bar looks dumb is the seasonal powers. Mana Shield is our main power. It sets out max life to like 20, and grants us around 10,000+ max mana that acts as our new life pool. This lets us use Power Siphon and Advanced Techniques to scale up our Chain Lightning Damage, and mostly negates their intense negative trade offs on resource cost and max mana. In the Public Test Realm we just used static surge to regen all the mana, but it was too free so the devs nerfed the crap out of it.

To solve the inevitable mana drain, we use Wizard Blizzard which survived the post PTR changes. When a blizzard is active, for every 20 max mana we get 1 mana regen. At 10,000 mana this is 500 mana per second. As long as you keep a blizzard down you should be fine. If things get really hairy, Mana shield has a built in safeguard where if you don't take any damage for 2 seconds, you get 5000% mana regen. What this means is you can disengage and regen back up your life if shit hits the fan.

If things are just NOT working out, you can swap Explosive Combinations for Invigorating attacks, which restores your mana to full when you cast a basic (5 second cooldown). You could also swap Lightning Spear off the skill bars for Flame shield to give you a nice little window to proc it whenever you want to. Tenuous Destruction would just need to come off the build. The next best thing we can use is either edgemaster, elements, or maybe unbroken tether. All kind of suck though, so you would want to move Lightning rod to the amulet, or Shredding Blades if you are on a splintering lightning spear speed farm hybrid.

1-60 Leveling Builds

Frost Build, no crit chance to worry about, massive area size, easy on mana
Blizzard ❄️ Pure DoT

Burn Build, no crit chance to worry about, massive area size, easy on mana
Firewall 🔥 Pure Burn

Incinerate, annoying because you gotta stand still, but if you have the aspects it absolutely hoses
Incinerate 🔥 Need Aspects

Teleport Evade Guide

• In S10 you can get -4.0 sec per attack having Flickerstep Chaos Armor
• This allows you to perma TP even with very low cooldown reduction!
• There are breakpoints depending on which boots you use +TP skillranks
• Rule of thumb is you get around 4-5% cooldown on top per teleport rank
• This means you can multiply your TP Enchant CD times 0.82 with 5/5 TP
• For Flickersteps you want your Teleport Enchant to show max 3.4 sec
• For Legendary boots with 1.5 Implicit you want to reach 2.0 to be save
• If you only have the base point in Teleport, you want at least 2.7 or 1.7

Blizzards tooltip doesn't show cooldown reduction you get from ranks

Example:
• Tooltip says 2.3sec in town, you have 5 points in Teleport and you use Vex:
• Only added ranks count, therefore you have +7 in your Teleport skill, this means you get another 26% cooldown reduction on your enchantment:
• 2.3 multiplied by 0.74 (1-0.26) = 1.702
• This means even if you attack 5 times per second (every 200ms/12 Frames) you will have permanent Teleport
• Simply multiply your tooltips cooldown by the number shown below:

+1 Rank = 0.95 (5% CDR): TP Skillpoint
+2 Ranks = 0.90 (10% CDR): TP Skillpoints
+3 Ranks = 0.86 (14% CDR): TP Skillpoints/Vex
+4 Ranks = 0.82 (18% CDR): TP Skillpoints/Shako
+5 Ranks = 0.79 (21% CDR): TP Ranks on Chest
+6 Ranks = 0.76 (24% CDR): TP Ranks on Chest
+7 Ranks = 0.74 (26% CDR): TP Skillpoints+Vex
+8 Ranks = 0.72 (28% CDR): TP Skillpoints+Shako
+9 Ranks = 0.70 (30% CDR): TP Skillpoints+Shroud+Shako
+11 Ranks = 0.66 (34% CDR): TP Skillpoints+Shako+Vex
+12 Ranks = 0.65 (35% CDR): TP Skillpoints+Shako+Vex+Shroud
+15 Ranks = 0.62 (38% CDR): TP Skillpoints+Shako+Vex+TP Ranks Chest
+19 Ranks = 0.60 (40% CDR): (maximum)

Credit: Zaramos

Chaos Armor

Priority Number 1 is Chaos Axial Conduit on Chest
• If you get Axial on Boots, just run Chaos Flickersteps in Chest or Pants to cover the loss of Orange Herald Boots

Chaos Armor is a special seasonal drop, mainly from the new Infernal Horde boss Bartuc.
They can also be found from other world sources, such as boss kills or gambling obols, but at a much lower frequency.
Chaos armor drops a specific set of unique's in different slots than normal. They can drop as Helm, Chest, Gloves, Pants, Boots.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/24226702/rally-against-hell-in-season-of-infernal-chaos

This build has 2 slots for Chaos armor, chest and pants. If you get Chaos Flickersteps in chest or pants, you can slot something for Chaos Boots. Flickersteps are an alternative to your Orange Herald Boots.

Priority Number 1 is Chaos Axial Conduit on Chest
• If you get Axial on Boots, just run Chaos Flickersteps in Chest or Pants to cover the loss of Orange Herald Boots

Here are your three other options to use for the last slot (Chest or Pants), in order of preference.

1) Crown of Lucion - 90% damage and a Cooldown roll that enables a 1 attack teleport evade with perdition

2) Locran's Talismen - 48% crit chance and 80% damage when the Mana Shield seasonal power is equipped.

3) Fist of Fate - 80% damage on average, attack speed, lucky hit chance, and crit chance. Damage is just very spiky.

Seasonal Powers

Mana Shield gives us 10,000-15,000 max mana and that becomes our Life and Mana source. If we don't take any form of damage for 2 seconds, we activate 5000% mana regen. We use flame shield to give us an opportunity for this to occur when we need it.
• You are basically unkillable with this as long as you had good mana regen (Why we have Wizard Blizzard for 500+ a second)

Advanced Techniques grants us increased core damage per rank we have in the skill, at the cost of costing way more mana to cast. Which is not a problem due to mana shield. Ranks to core/Chain Lightning are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
• Advanced Techniques does not affect the damage of Axial Conduit, but it still scales up our actual Chain Lightning damage

Power Siphon grants us 2x core damage, at the cost of reducing our max mana by 20 per cast for 6 seconds. This max mana reduction effect stacks, but the entire stack doesn't refresh upon cast. It's like a rolling amount. Again, because of mana shield... we are moisturized and unbothered.
• This affects Chain Lightning itself, AND Axial (Idk man spaghetti hard code)

Explosive Combinations - casting a basic increases all of our damage by 20% for 5 seconds, stacking up to 3 times for 60%
Every 5 seconds you will cast your basic skill 3 times and then go about your business until it expires. In farm content you can probably just ignore doing this.

Elixir/Incense

Elixir - Advantage II for 15% attack speed
Incense 1 - Sages Whisper for 100 Intelligence. Use 60 All stats one if you need to hit paragon reqs
Incense 2 - Song of the Mountain for 300 armor
Incense 3 - Soothing Spices for all resistance, max all resistance, and some armor

9/18/25 - Build Created for S10