Path of Exile

Finally landed on a build I like this league. I theorized when it was buffed last league, minefield support is quite good. If you're just interested in mapping Exsanguinate Mines with enough throwing speed to compensate is quite good. You can even juice it enough to be decent at bosses.

Minefield support solves the problem where one right click of a mine skill was small in damage. Especially since swift assembly was the popular choice, sometimes you get 1 mine, sometimes you get 7+. It made getting a clearing rhythm very hard. Now you 5 get mines every time, consistent clearing.

I was still playing Exsanguinate for bit but decided to drop it after understanding a few mine intricacies. Reserving life, even if temporarily, I suspect was getting me killed. Additionally, there's a really powerful medium cluster that allows mines to detonate an extra time. Mines can only rearm after they've finished casting. This is why mine skills have cast speed. If you play mines like a sane person, you put detonate on LMB. So you have mines rearming after casting a 0.6-0.8s spells, but you're spamming detonate on a 0.2s, and you have multiple detonate chains speeding up at initially 0.25s.

If you've looked for it, in the times you're allowed to spam mines, if you have a chance to detonate again, you'll notice your placed fluctuating rapidly, reaching your max placed, and wasting thrown mines. My theory is that you can frequently run into situations where your detonate chains(you can have multiple) exhaust themselves and then a whole bunch of mines rearm and you're throwing more on top, leading to overflow and wasted mines. The kicker is, at least for Inquisitor(better than Sab for some mine builds) doesn't really have a comparative medium cluster to replace the additional detonate chance. And as we'll see, additional detonate is really powerful.

So, I went looking for a new skill. The wasted mines, even if it wasn't much and you really shouldn't stand still and spam dps anyway, was just bugging me. Enter Pyroclast Mines, probably long forgotten by most(including me) since they nerfed its projectile chaining(to be fair, playing this without buffed minefield support would blow). Fuck that part of the skill, they left the aura intact and its ridiculous. Spamming detonate on LMB, you can easily average 15 mines placed, which comes out to 60% more damage before any aura effectiveness.

It seems to be about the only skill, sans cast speed investment, that is built for chaining and rearming. The 0.18s cast time means they rearm much quicker and you starve your detonate chains less often. Thus you can hover closer to your max placed without actually hitting it(much). Anyone that frequents reddit might recall a thread where someone complained that GGG broke chaining mines with Tremor Rod(100% chance for extra detonation) except for Pyroclast. I don't care about chaining mine skills. You can theoretically write a crude AHK macro to automate somewhat long chains, but fuck that. A chain of 20 averages you ONE extra pyroclast projectile hit over the entire chain. I'm only mentioning that reddit thread because reinforces the importance of mine cast speed and even after 7k+ hours played, it's something I always overlooked. Maybe you did too?