In POE 3.23 Affliction League, GGG revealed a lot of changes to skill gems, introducing the new Transfigured Gems and removing all alternative quality types. 

With this new gem system, Tornado Shot received a very important buff. Even if all the helmet enchants were removed, the +1 secondary projectile that we usually got from the helmet enchant is now provided by Tornado Shot gem quality itself, making it so much cheaper to start playing Tornado Shot. You can save a lot of POE Currency for this.

Because of these changes, we can now scale the number of secondary projectiles by just investing into gem quality. Let’s find out all the possible ways to do this.

Increasing Tornado Shot Quality

The first POE Item that comes to mind is the gem Enhance Support. 

You can either run level 4 Enhance, which provides 24% quality, or the very expensive level 5 Awakened Enhance with 32% quality. With these gems, we get to secondary projectile number 5.

Next up, we have Ashes of the Stars, which was sadly recently nerfed by removing the increased reservation efficiency of skill. However, the 30% quality of all skill gems is still extremely good for our strategy. You can get up to 6 total projectiles when using level 4 Enhance and 7 total secondary projectiles when using level 5 Awakened Enhance.

The next and last piece of the puzzle is an influenced rare body armor (Ghoul Wrap Coronal Leather) with the Elder prefix +1 to level of socketed support gems, which increases the level of our Awakened Enhance from 5 to 6, obtaining a total of 40% bonus to quality. This alone is already +2 secondary projectiles, which is pretty good. The +10% quality of socketed support gems is also pretty nice for damage, but not really mandatory at all.

The other important modifier on the item is the Elevated Shaper or Warlord +1 to level of socketed skill gems and, more importantly, +10% quality of socketed skill gems, which brings Tornado Shot from 20% quality to 30%. Crafting such a body armor is expensive, but pretty easy because the entire process is deterministic.

First off, you want to pick an Elder-influenced base and get the +1 to support gems along with any other influenced modifier. You can do this by Alteration spamming, Chaos spamming. But the fastest way, not necessarily the cheapest, is to reforge attack with Harvest. 

The only attack modifier that you can get on an elder body armor is the influenced mod ‘attacks of extra Critical Strike Chance’, so you can deterministically obtain that each time you roll. And whenever you get the +1 to support gems in addition, you simply use your Orb of Dominance, hoping to elevate the right modifier.

In a very similar way, you must prepare a second Shaper-influenced base and reforge caster until you get the spell Critical Strike Chance and +1 to socketed skill gems. At that point, you again slam your Orb of Dominance and pray for the correct model to be picked. 

After you obtain both the bases with a single Elevated influence modifier, you can use the Awakener’s Orb to merge the 2 modifiers into a single new item.

Also Read: An Ultimate Build In Path Of Exile 3.23 Affliction League - The Forbidden Rite Build

Summary Of Tech Setup

Let’s do some simple math together to see the final results and build options.

With the cheapest setup, we have 20% quality from Tornado Shot gem, 24 (+ 8)% from level 4 Enhance and the Elder-influenced +1 to support gems, and 30% quality from Ashes of the Stars for a grand total of 82% quality.

Instead, with the high-budget setup, we run 20 (+10)% quality from Tornado Shot gem and the Shaper-influenced +10% to quality of skill gems. Then, we’ve got 32 (+ 8)% from level 5 Enhance and the Elder-influenced +1 to support gems, along with 30% from Ashes of the Stars. 

This results in a grand total of 100% quality and 8 secondary projectiles. This can go even crazier in Standard League with a legacy helmet enchant plus 2 secondary projectiles to Tornado Shot for a total of 10 secondary projectiles. That’s really insane.

Now, this Tornado Shot tech that I showed you today has some important limitations. Ashes of the Stars gets to directly compete against Crystallised Omniscience, or the Foe Collar Simplex Amulets with 20% quantity and 100% rarity. 

In the same way, our rare body armor (Ghoul Wrap, Greed’s Embrace & Hyrri’s Ire) gets to compete against Grace and Brace, Hyrri’s Ire, and other unique options. So, there really should be a balance between the number of secondary projectiles you want, the magic find you care about, and the damage of your single secondary projectile.

Whatever your choice will be, never underestimate how important the number of secondary projectiles is. People used to consider Tornado Shot completely unplayable without the helmet enchant. And GGG took its time to nerf the original helmet enchant +2 secondary projectiles to be just +1, which was considered a massive nerf back in the days.

Awakened Fork Support

Before concluding this guide, I want to give you a final thought about Awakened Fork Support, with some of my own tips and tricks. 

Many players do not allocate any passive skill inside the tree for fork. I think this is a mistake. I really like both Split Shot and Forking Angle. To better explain why I like Forking Angle so much, you should take into consideration some close layouts. 

Let’s say you have a room, which is opened and you enter with a Tornado Shot attack. Now, you have 4 projectiles, right? 1 projectile will enter the room like this and will kill one of the monsters. At that point, the projectile will split and will hit the other 2 monsters. 

But following next, what happens with the second hit of Tornado Shot is that you can kill 1 extra monster inside the room. But if there are any monsters that are more like split behind some walls, you may fail at hitting those, right?

Let’s see the same exact condition but with Forking Angle. With the first hit, you hit the monster in front of the door. Then you hit the monsters that are a bit more laterally positioned behind the walls. And then, with the following hits, you just can end up killing all of the other monsters, all of this without entering the room. Without Forking Angle, you couldn’t do this. You would have to enter the room to kill the remaining 2 monsters.

I think that for clearing, Forking Angle can be really useful when you play close layouts.