The Fulcrum Blade Blast Elementalist - Not A League Starter, Realistic DPS ~7-12mil, Geniuses Only.

Depends. Blade blast is hard to determine due to it relying on overlapping tons of small hits. But basically the build does (vs sirus) on average 163000 damage per blade blast pre-flasks and gets off 60 blasts per second. Assuming only about 2/3 of those overlap (boss might be moving, has a non-giant hitbox, random position of lingering blades) that's 6.5 million dps. Applying 1.15 damage multiplier due to convergence's 50% uptime 30% damage bonus, that's 7.5mil. With flasks up each blade does on average 216782 damage, applying the same multiplications as above that's 9780000. This can go up to nearly 11mil if you use a bottled faith instead of atziri's promise, or nearly 12mil if you replace the warding quartz.

So it's a lot even when being realistic. Oh and I guess those numbers are higher in game cause pob doesn't account for a 40% bonechill.

It's all held up by The Fulcrum:


It causes any ailments you inflict to be reflected back to you, alongside some bonuses while afflicted. So why did it previously suck? Well, unless you were playing a cheiftain you were very likely to kill yourself with ignite. And what's good about it? Not a whole lot on it's own, but then you incorporate the following:

Winterweave, so that being chilled makes you faster instead of slower. And Shaper of Winter, to make it so you always chill for up to 40%, which this build manages at all times, even against sirus-tier bosses. Which becomes a 40% increased action speed modifier on you, 5x the base effect of tailwind. And 10% ele pen while chilled from the fulcrum itself is nice.
The other benefits of the fulcrum can also be utilised, mainly that it lets you turn any physical spell into whatever element you want, with the right rolls. Because hatred gives huge benefits to phys converted to cold spells, bonechill is easy increased damage from chill effect and shaper of winter needs majority cold damage to multiply chill effect, the cold conversion mod should be as high as possible. You can convert to cold higher with a watcher's eye or crusader gloves, I prefer gloves as other watcher's eye mods lead to higher damage. The lightning conversion only needs to be as high as needed to fill out 100% conversion and fire conversion should be as low as possible, but not 0, as you want to deal some fire damage to ignite yourself and gain 40% phys as a random element.

You can however die from your own ignites unless you build right, due to the 40% added phys as a random element mod being able to choose fire. Which is why I have low phys to fire conversion on the fulcrum itself, but also use a specific small cluster jewel notable: Fire Attunement.
It stops you igniting yourself for 4 seconds after being ignited, and you only deal significant fire damage while ignited, so you never deal a high damage ignite to yourself. Prior to 3.13 this method didn't work with elementalist because of igniting conflux. The alternative is to have a ring corrupted with 'cannot be ignited' but that loses out on damage - the points to use fire attunement are worth it.
Another method is using the elevated mod 'unaffected by ignite' available on shaper or warlord boots, but making a good pair of boots with that mod is very difficult and expensive AND it's a prefix, so you'd have to lose out on either life or movement speed to use it. Not recommended until you're rich. EDIT: Turns out these are necessary in order to use HH unless you're okay with accidentally killing yourself sometimes. See bottom of post for more infro.

Fire attunement should also reduce the duration of your self-ignites, but due to the ways it's coded the reduced ignite duration on you mod only effects ignites applied to you by enemies. If you have any increases to ailment duration (earlier in the builds life I needed the shadow passive elemental focus which adds 10%) it means you can potentially have an ignite longer than 4 seconds, then being able to self-ignite with the 40% added as fire, hurting yourself a lot. So you need to reduce the duration of your ignites, for which the best option is Yoke of Suffering (trust me, I looked through every option)
A BIG upside here is that with an ignite duration lower than 4 seconds you can benefit from the Soul of Arakaali mod that grants 50% increased life and energy shield recovery rate, which is practically always in effect after the first few seconds of combat. Unless you get 1-shot, it's quite hard to die.

Now you've also got to deal with shock and freeze, which will also be reflected to you. For freeze, you just use the rin boot craft. This unfortunately locks you out of using a nice prefix influence mod like elusive on crit or endurance charge on kill unless you wanna skip out on life, but it's necessary. The craft costs an exalt, but the 80% chance to avoid version is only 4c and you can use elemental focus (shadow area passive) and a harvest-crafted-implicit 10% chance to avoid freeze jewel prior if you wanna save an exalt early on.

The fulcrum mod lucky damage while shocked isn't particularly useful, so you can just get immunity to it. Shock immunity can come from various sources: cyclopean coil, that early game fairgraves hat, stacking chance to avoid being shocked with crusader boots and jewel implicits/abyss jewels. You can also get 'unaffected by shock' from replica winterheart and inpulsa's broken heart. I don't trust stacking reduced effect of shock on you to work just because of how ignite duration on you doesn't work.

Out of all those options the best are cyclopean coil, replica winterheart and inpulsa: winterheart can't be used with yoke of suffering, and I preferred to use a different belt, so I went with inpulsa, but if you'd rather have a different chest coil is an option! BUT you would need to reduce your strength and increase your dexterity or you won't be able to self-ignite anymore.

Why blade blast? Because it's the best physical spell in the game, by far, and the fulcrum only shines with a physical spell. With the huge amount of cast speed this build gets you can lay down 30 bladefall blades in ~0.3 seconds without unleash and casting blade blast itself only takes 0.2 seconds. So optimally you can get off 60 blade blasts per second, a lot of them overlapping to deal massive single target damage. I wanted to use any other skill, I really did, but every one I've tried has been nowhere near as good as the bf/bb combo.

By reducing the aoe of bladefall as much as possible while increasing the aoe of blade blast as much as possible, you get more overlapping blasts dealing way more damage. Spell cascade means bladefall puts out 15 blades per cast over a line, meaning you only need 2 to get near the 40 cap. So an echo'd bf cast followed by a blade blast is optimal dps.

Anyway, links:

Blade blast
Energy leech (builds source of ES leech)
Divergent inspiration (necessary to bring down mana cost, divergent does so more)
Elemental penetration (better than cold pen due to still significant lightning conversion)
Hypothermia
Awakened area of effect (more overlaps = more damage)

Bladefall, level 1, 0 quality (saves mana, reduces aoe of lingering blades for more overlaps)
Spell cascade, level 1, 0 quality (we want to reduce aoe as much as possible)
Anomalous concentrated effect (more aoe reduction)
Divergent inspiration (saves mana, faster charge generation)
Anomalous spell echo (cast speed for quality is better)
Faster casting

Prior to 6-linking the fulcrum I didn't have divergent inspiration on BF, instead using clarity. And before I had a ring with assmark on hit I used the gem itself, meaning I didn't have gem space for clarity and I took the arcane will mana node instead.


Hydrosphere
cwdt lvl 1
Bonechill
Culling strike

Hydrosphere is perfect for applying exposure as it doesn't have a cooldown, applies lightning as well as cold and hits immediately and often, so bonechill can apply its 40% increased cold damage taken without any delay. Culling is just for convenience and not necessary, if you need a gem slot that's the first one to get rid of.


Flame dash
Frost bomb (for manual exposure application vs bosses, don't need to get hit first)
Second wind
Arcane surge lvl 7


Hatred (necessary)
Flesh and stone, sand mode (best defence for 25% mana res, blind aoe is boosted by build)
Steelskin (on M1 for automatic casting while moving around)
Vitality (Not necessary, can be replaced, but very good due to watcher's eye. Also helps vs DoT)

What makes the build. Fulcrum rolls should be as high as possible on cold, low as possible but not below 5ish on fire and middling on lightning. Before I could get ahold of the fulcrum I used duskdawn and played the build like any other crit caster.


Can be replaced if you use cyclopean coil for your belt and reduce your strength and raise your dexterity. Used for the shock immunity, build already had corpse destruction through freezing. Cold conduction and shaper of winter means the shock explosions are able to shock and thus chain explosions, which is nice. +2 corruption isn't necessary by any means but hey it's more damage.


Most common helmet to have the cold leech corrupt on, very cheap. Before I could get one of these I used retaliation charm corrupted with cold leech instead, also very cheap and common. The chill effect double corrupt isn't necessary as you reach 40% chill with hydrosphere, but before that procs you can potentially have only 38% against sirus-tier enemies, which that extra 30% brings up to the 40% max. Again, it isn't necessary.


Cold conversion gloves are necessary, stun avoidance is also very nice, otherwise it's just for life and res. Can swap the damage bench craft for whatever else you'd prefer.


Pretty much just life and res, can't do anything fun because the cannot be frozen mod is necessary. The warlord influence isn't needed. Mana regen enchant saves on having to take mana nodes. I realise you could fit tailwind on crit as a suffix here, but I need the res.


Necessary to reduce ailment duration due to odd coding. Does also provide damage and res. Anointed with hardened scars for reason explained in flask section. Before I had yoke and a 6l inpulsa I used replica winterheart with a rare chest and a flask with ignite immunity.


Where assassins mark comes from. Life on hit a highly desired mod due to the number of hits this build manages, added cold damage and spell damage both good, otherwise just wanted more life. Could have mana regen mod here over strength if you'd prefer, or dexterity if you're going the cyclopean coil route.


The oddball choice. No one uses this thing. But it's the highest single-slot source of phys taken as elemental, which is not only reduced by resistances but also mitigated by bastion of elements. The only downside is that you need to have hit the enemy first, but that's about it. It also gives needed dexterity and some life, alongside ailment duration, which is nice to bridge the gap on how much yoke reduces it. You only need a very small amount of reduced duration for ignites to not matter and become beneficial, and having longer chills means you're faster for longer between packs. Can be swapped for headhunter with no issues, too. Oh yeah and the enchant is good for getting more blast overlaps, not super necessary though.


A foreboding hybrid flask causes its suffix effect to apply for the full 5 seconds no matter what. This is great on its own, but combined with the hardened scars anointment it means 5 seconds of fortify! Very smooth mapping with this combo.

Phasing is way too useful to give up imo. Diamond is necessary. Movement speed affix can be anything else you'd prefer.

Rumi's is great. I know I need to get a 20/10 version. Atziri's promise can be replaced with bottled faith for higher boss dps, or you can replace the phasing flask instead for even more deeps.

EARLIER GEAR


Before I had an assmark on hit ring I used the taming and would self-cast assmark. The taming is a 70% increased damage ring with 48% all-res, so it took some work to be able to replace it suitably. The gloves and boots below are what I used for a long time and they're nothing stellar.



Before I had yoke and a 6l inpulsa I used replica winterheart with a rare chest and a flask with ignite immunity.

The passive tree in the POB is the most optimised I can get it to be but can be modified however you'd prefer, just be sure to keep ailment effect and mana in mind.

The first cuts I would make to save points would be removing the converted fire walker as it's likely your timeless jewel won't make that node worth taking (2 points). Second would be removing the overshock/inspired oppression jewel and instead taking arcane will for mana regen (1 point). Coordination and the life node before it are also not necessary until you have a lvl 21 blade blast due to dex requirement (2 points). If you want to live dangerously, you can cut the life&chaos res nodes in the purity of flesh cluster too (2 points). Sanctity and the life node before it are also not necessary (2 points).

If you do want to try something different, thread of hope replacing the red nightmare is a good spot to take the divine judgement/wrath/fury nodes. I don't because it'd mean needing another 10 all res and losing out on end charges. EDIT: Turns out the 5% phys gained as fire from divine fury is actually pretty dangerous if your damage is high enough. Skip that until you can afford unaffected by ignite boots.

Ascendancy nodes chosen are the best possible. Shaper of winter is necessary, mastermind of discord and heart of destruction are big damage, bastion of elements is good defence. Shaper of storms is unnecessary with cold conduction and the golem path would require too much retooling of the build and elemancer's ailment avoidance goes against how the build works. Oh and this whole time I neglected to mention that making all enemies always 40% slower is good defence too! Sirus' die beam is very easy to avoid when he's chilled.

Bastion of elements reaches 4200 with the number of notables taken, a really helpful amount of damage reduction, which is why I took some unnecessary nodes like sanctity.

The doryani corrupted soul keystone is the easiest way for any life build in the north part of the tree to increase EHP, it's plain necessary. I got extremely lucky and had 2 ritual of mights appear on my timeless jewel, you'd save 2 points not taking the converted fire walker, making everything needed for the build possible at level 96.
You're able to use both Hotheaded jewels for a good amount of cast and movespeed, you run real fast so long as you've hit something in the past couple seconds.

Fire attunement is necessary to prevent dying to your own ignites.Cold conduction is necessary to be able to have a significant shock effect against bosses. Blast freeze isn't necessary but does make mapping safer. Inspired oppression gives necessary mana regeneration, as with cold conduction you're always shocking. Overshock isn't needed and astonishing affliction would be better, but because reduced ignite duration on you doesn't work you can't be increasing your ailment duration.Prismatic heart gives needed resists, stormrider is how the build generates power charges due to not having quality on assassins mark. Widespread destruction isn't taken but is needed to get the passives in the right order. Ideally the watcher's eye would be a 3-mod hatred one, but the crit chance mod gives the highest damage on its own. This build hits many times a second even against single targets, so life on hit with vitality is great for being able to heal to full in less than a second.The least necessary jewel, I use this purely for endurance charge generation to make mapping safer. It also gives block making it sort of useful even for bosses. Corrupting blood immunity isn't necessary but again, makes mapping safer.

Ideally, all jewels are harvest-crafted to have the 10% chance to avoid stuns implicit. That's taking me a while.

For bandit go Alira and stay with it, the mana regen and resists are both needed and the crit multi is a damage boost good enough that losing the prior 2 benefits isn't worth trying to get more damage with 2 points instead.

For pantheon, soul of arakaali's life and energy shield recovery rate bonus will practically always be in effect due to self-igniting, so it's a great choice. You can go with brine king or solaris instead if you prefer though. For minor, Shakari is good because chaos is a particular weakness to the build.

Why not low life? I prefer life builds and low life without a shield seems like a bad idea. But you can do it I guess.

Why not use elemental focus on blade blast so you only ignite yourself with the weak bladefall? The coverage of blade blast is way more than that of bladefall, as in BF is one small strip of the screen while BB is the entire rest of the screen. Not applying ailments with BB makes clearing feel like real crap.

Why not headhunter? Cause I don't have one. But more seriously because it's unnecessary it just makes you clear faster, I want to kill bosses.

If your build is so good why aren't you level 100 with 40 challenges complete? Cause I wanted to do rippy content and I haven't actively been going after challenges.