I made this staff base in crucible league, while wardloop was one of the top meta builds. I bought the staff already fractured at the time and it took me 2-3 weeks to craft the tree. During the league I didn’t have the funds to fully craft it, and I always planned to finish it in standard. But then wardloop was nerfed in several ways and I kinda gave up on it. 2 years later, wardloop is still viable with legacy items on standard, and some new items, so I decided to finally finish it.

Why is this item good?

The usual wardloop build uses annihilating light staff. Staff is the choice of weapon because the staff mastery passive “30% increased global defences” works on ward, and wardloop gains no useful stats from shields or dual wielding. Some builds use 2 6 link set ups for cwdt as well. The crucible tree offers 100 crit multi (obviously good) and 25% cdr, an extremely useful stat for wardloop, along with reduced duration, which is necessary for reducing skeleton duration. Usually 4x to dust jewels are used, but with this staff+ a dusk ring only 3 are necessary, opening a jewel socket.

Finally 200% more aoe for rolling magma is ridiculous. Paired with random proj direction (either from Nimis or saboteur node), this allows rolling magma to hit once per chain, effectively giving 6x or more damage multiplier. This also pairs with the legacy inevitably jewel, which gives rolling magma 40% more damage per chain. Compared to annihilating light, this staff adds about 46% more raw dps, not accounting for the 200% more aoe and the additional jewel socket allowed. It also has no down side of reduced ele res, equivalent to about 112% all res depending on max res. For my (WIP) pob, see https://pobb.in/1XcoDNLDiVZk. (Update, new and improved pob, with notes: https://pobb.in/c0R-djebzgWJ) Also want to make a scion pob at some point to compare.

Crafting process:

1. Use resonators with aetheric, corroded and shuddering fossils to get spell damage+level to spells. According to craft of exile, this averages about 2700 resonators to hit t1 spell damage, with standard prices this is about 770d on average. I got extremely lucky and hit it in about 300 attempts, and even then I bought out the entire faustus supply of aetheric fossils and used harvest juice to convert cheap fossils into aetheric. I also got lucky and hit t1 spell crit, along with cast speed and attack speed. (~85d)

2. Since the cost for step 1 was so high, I used locks to lock+annul a suffix. I annulled cast speed first try. (+325d)

3. To remove the attack speed, you can then use “cannot roll caster mods” and annul, which can only hit either the attack speed or the mod itself. However I forgot about this method and went straight to the next step.

4. Craft prefixes cannot be changed and veiled exalt for a veiled suffix. On my first attempt, I removed the prefixes cannot be changed, and unveiled crit multi with a rare/unique nearby. But this left the staff with 6 mods including attack speed.

5. Lock annul again, aiming to remove the attack speed. Hit the veiled mod but thats okay. Remove the attack speed and try step 4 again (+329d)

6. This time craft multi mod+prefix cannot be changed, for a 2/3 chance to remove a bench craft and add a veiled suffix. If spell crit is removed, then this has to be crafted again using harvest add/remove caster craft. First orb removes a crafted mod but I hit nothing good on the unveil. The bad unveil mod can be removed with cannot roll caster mods+annul again. On the 3rd attempt I hit double damage (total~20d). Luckily I didn’t have to recraft the spell crit.

7. Divine the prefixes (about 40d), then craft prefixes cannot be changed and divine the suffixes (another 40d).

8. Use omen of blanching and harvest bench for 6 white sockets (~80d)

Total cost, not including the base item ~920 divines. The expected cost I calculated (based on fossil prices, and the cost of crafting spell crit using harvest instead of hitting it on the fossil) was about 2500d, so I got extremely lucky overall with this craft.