In this article, I'll introduce a poison based on Occultist Herald of Thunder with a hude damage potential. 

How It started?

When the changes to Voltaxic Rift were announced at the beginning of this league, the first thing I thought about was I could convert Herald of Thunder to Chaos Damage. 

To me this meant that I could realistically run an Occultist because the Ascendancy now had a synergy with the build, not just having the benefit of Profane Bloom. So, I went for it. 

The damage wasn't great to start with until someone suggested to me why not try poison at first? I thought this would be hard. There are not very many poison passives near the Witch and that makes getting enough poison chants challenging. That is until we introduced Cospri's Will. Cospri's Will makes all hits against cursed enemies poison. 

So, as long as we're cursing, we poison and of course we have Temporal Chains on hit and that is the base of this build. The roux that makes Poison Herald of Thunder work while Voltaxic Rift to convert to chaos Cospri's Will to poison cursed enemies and a Temporal Chains corruption on our gloves to apply Temporal Chains on hit. 

Damage Potential

Once we had this formula figured out, the damage actually came pretty easy. We already had Wither, so we can stack on Despair and 20 million plus damage was not out of reach for the build. But the survivability felt off, so now we need to make the build feel good to play no need to be tanky. But we also don't want to get annihilated by every monster we see for our defenses. But it comes at the cost of losing all other aura skills.

Damage Mitigation

We are primarily utilizing Eternal Damnation, which gives us Additional Elemental Damage Reduction equal to half of our Chaos Resistance. This comes at the cost of a lower maximum resistance that isn't quite enough on its own, though we also have a bit of Maximum Lightning Resistance Petrified Blood Progenesis, which is basically a mini Petrified Blood. And finally, we have cast from damage taken Molten Shell, which is giving us a defensive layer based on our armor.

Now, for our armor we are utilizing iron reflexes on our Relic, which is converting all of our evasion into armor with flasks up. This is usually giving us something around 15,000 armor. 

How It Went?

This build has been a ton of fun to put together and ended up being able to kill Uber Eater, which exceeded my expectation. I think this build has more potential than I ended up getting out of it. But I'm happy calling this wild experiment a resounding success. 

The damage potential has me thinking maybe scaling Harold of Thunder through poison is the right way to go.

In the end, this version of the build hits right around 16 million single target DPS, which in the world of Herald of Thunder is pretty respectable if you want to give this build a go.

How To Herald Of Thunder (Quick Version)

Here is what you need to know Harold. With Thunder, builds need at least one Storm Secret to really get going. This makes you take damage when you hit something with your Herald. 

But in return, it hits more often and activates when you shock an enemy rather than when you kill a shocked enemy. You will also almost always need a Calamitous Visions Small Cluster Jewel. This gives you Lone Messenger, which essentially doubles the damage of your Herald of Thunder. 

And last you need some mechanism to shock your enemies and keep your storm rolling. In my build, we have two methods. We have Storm Brand and we have Crackling Lance, which is linked to cast from damage taken Storm Brand. we are casting manually. 

Crackling Lance is cast whenever we take a certain amount of damage. They are both linked to overcharge to give more shock chance and Withering Touch to apply extra Wither and Culling Strike to go ahead and call those nasty bosses we are dealing with. By the way, if you want to beat these bosses quickly, you can also use POE Currency to equip yourself.

Sigil of Power

Another little discovery that I made that I didn't actually calculate into our DPS is Sigil of Power.

Sigil of Power gives added lightning damage that is totally generic. This is important because most Lightning Damage buffs come in the form of two attacks or two spells or two attacks and two spells. But Herald of Thunder is neither and so in order to add damage to it, we need generic Lightning Damage.

Edition Sigil of Power gives us that generic Lightning Damage. However, getting Sigil of Power stacked to the stages that we need is a little difficult. So, while it's a nice DPS boost, I didn't include it because it seems pretty iffy to me as to whether we'll actually get it going. This knowledge should get you started on your own Herald of Thunder journey. 

Harold of Thunder for me is a feel-goods skill and one that I love experimenting with.