Whirlwind Lancer

This is an off-meta Whirlwind Lance Gemling build built around scaling Collapse damage to absurd levels.

Whirlwind Lance has historically felt pretty terrible, but Gemling changes that completely. With Advanced Thaumaturgy and enough quality, Whirlwind Lance gains massive more damage per stage, extra elemental damage, and much easier Frenzy Charge sustain.

The result is a build that can clear smoothly with Whirlwind Lance and Glacial Lance, while still reaching ridiculous boss damage through fully staged Whirlwind Collapse hits. In my current tanky mapping setup, the build is already capable of deleting pinnacle bosses, and with weapon swap / higher investment, the damage can scale into the 200–300 million range.

Important notes:

-We use Split Personality so we can start at the monk tree rather than mercenary (much stronger). To do this, all you need to do is connect the merc tree with the monk starting tree. Then you can place the Split Personality wherever you want. After that, you can remove the mercenary starting nodes once they are connected.

- Make sure you get a Megalomaniac with Mystical Rage or use a "Raven-touched shard" to anoint it onto your helmet if you want to use Crown of Eyes. Or else you barely benefit from using Crown of Eyes and in that case just use a regular rare defensive helmet.

-Make sure you have identical amounts of Strength/Dex/Int support gems for your Gem Studded to work. Very important! This way you gain all the three bonuses. Also socket in as many supports as you can for Thaumaturgical Infusion if you're using it. It doesn't matter what gems you slot in as long as you have identical amounts of Dex/Str/Int gems. You can swap this out for one of the damage ascendency points if you want though.

Requirements:

Pretty much none. Just stack gem quality and reduced chance to consume charges together with anointing Thaumaturgic Generator somewhere and you'll be good. Pair this with a The Taming and you'll be dealing millions of damage. Anything more than that is mainly just stacking more damage cus it's fun.

Mapping

Mapping is simple.

Throw out Whirlwind Lance, move toward your whirlwinds, and use Glacial Lance while moving for extra clear. Once the whirlwinds collapse, packs disappear.

Gemling makes Frenzy Charge sustain much easier because we can reduce the chance to consume Frenzy Charges. With enough investment, this can be pushed extremely high, making the build feel much smoother than a normal Frenzy-based setup.

Bossing

For bosses, the goal is to set up your Whirlwind Lance properly and collapse your whirlwinds with full stage scaling. You just allow yourself to get 5 frenzy charges via Thaumaturgic Generator, then you press Barrage, send out your Whirlwind Lances towards the boss. Walk into them, and he'll die instantly.

The main skill is Whirlwind Lance.

When you cast Whirlwind Lance, it creates whirlwinds that collapse when you run into them. You can have up to six whirlwinds active, and the skill can gain an additional whirlwind stage by spending Frenzy Charges.

The important part is that we are not just scaling the base hit. We are scaling the Collapse through stages.

With Gemling Legionnaire, we gain access to Advanced Thaumaturgy. This allows skill quality to become one of our biggest damage sources. With enough quality, Whirlwind Lance gains a massive amount of more damage per stage, and since we are consistently playing around four stages, the damage ramps extremely hard.

On top of that, quality also gives us extra elemental damage. In my setup, I’m getting around 100% extra elemental damage from quality alone. This stacks on top of the extra 50 % elemental damage from ground effects.

This is where The Taming becomes ridiculous. Since The Taming lets us benefit from multiple elemental ground effects at once, we can stack several conditional bonuses together and turn Whirlwind Lance into an actual nuke.

This build is still experimental and extremely off-meta, but that’s also what makes it interesting. There are barely any people playing anything like it, which means there is still a lot of room to optimize.

Even in a tanky mapping setup, the build already has insane clear, massive damage and enough survivability to feel comfortable. With more investment and a proper weapon swap, the damage ceiling becomes completely stupid.