Lightning Rod, Lightning Ball & Static / Spell Cascade Runemaster Build Guide

Uses spell cascade. So not exactly meta. More to the unorthodox

Actually uses damage from runic invocation and its decent

Good offense and defense

Very passive defenses

Not much gear needed for 300 corruption

No need for cooldown recovery, no need for cast speed, no need for mana regen

Scaling for INT, Armor, Health

Easy to reach max crit chance

Possible endgame

Moderate Mono clear

Good boss killer

No flame ward

Requires knowledge about Runic Invocation, specifically Spell Cascade

Dungeon bosses will require timing

Can be somewhat squishy without enough defense on higher corruption

Can go into negative mana if not careful

Avoid critical damage for mobs and bosses can be a nuisance

The main question is – how does Spell Cascade exactly work?

The description says it will cast random skills from the hotbar, corresponding to the active runes that you have. But here is the thing and its quite the game changer. As long as you have only one skill that is actually available for cast, that skill will be used three times.

To make things easier we will see a few examples:

Fireball:

• On the tool bar, we have Fireball Flame Rush Focus Glacier Runic Invocation.
• We use Fireball three times getting us Aergon's Greater Fireball. As long as we have 12 Runic Energy we will cast Aergon's Greater Fireball That will also proc three Fireball's .

Static Orb:

• Static Orb Focus Flame Ward TeleportRunic Invocation.
• For a difference, we will channel Focus for a few seconds, having the damage node Energy Overflow . This will give us Ball Lightning . On cast this will proc three Static Orb.

Glacier:

• For some skills this can be very mana intensive. You can imagine casting Glacier three times, roughly 60 mana, only to trigger Revik's Blizzard, which will proc three more Glacier (very spectacular to watch) . Thats roughly 180 more mana plus the 60 from the blizzard.

Now If you get the main idea I just advise you to just tinker and have fun with all of this, but here are a few things that you should know.

Some tips and tricks that you should know (not mandatory for this build):

• Skill that are on cooldown, will not get activated. This can force you to not trigger Flame Ward or Snap Freeze .
• As you understood, ice rune will not proc fire and lightning. Skills with double affinities will get procced. So if a fireball has both the Fire and Lightning tag, just using one of those will get it procced. Same rule applies to skills with triple affinities.
• Many skill nodes, will not get activated (or the so called, only on direct casting). As of 0.92 there are quite a few bugs with synergies.
• Casting a 3 rune invocation will get you to 6 runic energy. Aka a 60 skill mana cost will give you 6 runic energy. That means you somehow need 6 more for spell cascade. If you use a gate staff, this can bring you to 9 runic energy.
• Using Teleport refund you can go above the runic energy limit. If your limit 36 runic energy, casting teleport static 200 mana will bring you to 56.
• Almost all skills can be procced this way.Not travelling or channeling. This does include Mana Strike and Flame Reave.
• Triple cast Mana Strike, can get you to 180 mana.
• For Flame Reave you can actually be a rune caster, not needing attack speed.
• Some skills are useless this way, Frost Wall, You would think you could trigger its explosion 3 times, but its just clunky. Glyph of Dominion casted this way seems fairly useless too.
• Having two active skills on the hotbar is viable too. I tried mana strike and static orb. Interestingly enough the trigger rate on 2 skills is fairly even. Almost always I get 1 mana strike 1 static orb and then either one of the two. You do occasionally get triple mana strike or triple orb. So the RNG can be wild, but overall its even.

Now lets get back to the build.

Here is how our hot bar looks like Frost Claw Focus Static Runic Invocation Disintegrate.

Focus to move around. It it also your *huge boss AoE incoming button*.

Disintegrate Each node is important here. Mana regeneration, by using Laser Focus. Note you absolutely have to take Twinbeam This skill node essentially doubles your mana regeneration from Laser Focus.

We use Lucomancer to get that sweet -40% mana cost on Static and also +40% damage on Static. Because static is insta cast skill, it can be used while using Disintegrate.

Galvanized Defense will give us -35% damage taken, but only if we have gear for it. Even with 3 points, its -21% which is still pretty good.

Make sure to not go into negative mana, this can be easy to do. The mana you receive is not *mana regen*. Instead you get big chunks of 80 mana each second(which is quite a lot, consider you can go only up to around 35 mana regen with a full gear) As a good rule having 220 -240 mana is enough for casting static and runic invocation. Even if you do go into negative mana, casting focus will fix this. Disintegrate gives us Goh runes.

Static Usual node distribution. You play with 100 charges. 125 charges is viable too. Main node here is the Imbued Lightning. This will get +20 spell damage on your next skill, which happen to be Ball Lightning It is fairly good, because of Copied Scrolls . Static will get you above 12 runic energy. Most of the time on solo boss, 14 runic energy(unfortunately the discount from Disintegrate lowers your runic energy, but its still worth it).

Runic Invocation After static, you use Runic Invocation which will get you, 70% of two Ball Lightning and also three procs of Frost Claw that is our only spell that can be casted (static is on cooldown) Note that you actually need to aim the Frost Claw. It's easy on big bosses. That will instantly get you to 100 charges of static and then you just repeat the cycle.

Frost Claw Its there to cause crits and give armour shred . Volley of Glass will make sure overall you get 15 projectiles, on each crit you get Surge plus the Ball Lightning, is going to almost insta give you 100 charges, Huge Arcane Idol with static charges per second will help too.

You can level up with either Glacier and Mana Strike or with Frost Claw.

Most of time you should have no problems almost one/two shotting most of the mobs or even elites with the Static / Ball Lightning combo. We use Focus to teleport around, its on fairly low cooldown.

When you reach 300-400 corruption, with the proper blessings you should have no problem for dungeons and and tier 4 Julra. Your damage will be enough, the most important thing is to not get one shotted while you are not channeling. This means you need to get sufficient defenses and to properly recognize the boss mechanics. Farming Stout Lagonian Idol with PrefixHealth and SuffixHealth will help you a lot.

Because of Iron Stance 4/4 you can somewhat *cheese* some of the attacks from the bosses, since your armor rating will almost always hit the cap.

To improve your build and push higher corruption, you can try min maxing equipment stats, getting a lot of INT and getting enough spell critical.