3.11 Cyclone (Second Sight/Varunastra all content cleared!)

No, nobody still uses varunastra. It's a bad weapon. There are zero builds using varunastra on the poe.ninja ladder, and only 2 on the delve ladder. One of them is me!

I like the item, the aesthetic, the idea. It's a completely dead unique item, especially now that people can swing 700+ dps foils, but it'll still do 1-3m shaper DPS depending on your gear. For me, that's about enough.

It's also relatively consistent in terms of items required, minimizing the time I need to be spending on trade. I play this semi-SSF style where I buy the sword early on and just...ignore the trade forever. Unfortunately, since I do rely on a capstone unique, this makes the build not SSF viable. Or HC. Or...yeah. One man's love for his sword.

Varunastra needs all the love it can get, being a 300 dps sword. It accepts all one-handed melee weapon modifiers, which lets us scale varunastra with intense amounts of critical strike multiplier. Added phys damage on jewelry slots helps to alleviate the low base damage of the weapon.

The Dance with Death keystone frees up a diamond flask slot and makes bossing more consistent in the absence of flasks sustain from say, a hunter's belt, cheapening the build significantly. However, because of this, we cannot use a helmet. We use an elegant hubris jewel dedicated to Asenath. Rolls are not so important, but getting max life or evasion is always nice. Some notable rolls to look out for include life, evasion, and phys as cold, but the jewel only touches 2 notables, so don't go broke on it.

We have a small amount of crit

Varunastra counts as any weapon, allowing us to run both close combat and nightblade.
Defences


Items

Armor

Gloves

Boots

Jewelry

Jewels

Flasks

Cyclone-Impale-Close Combat-Nightblade- Infused Channeling-Awakened Melee Physical Damage This setup lets us cap impale chance and gives us intimidate from awakened melee physical damage.
Dash-Blood Magic-Second Wind Don't leave home without dash
Pride-Blood and Sand-Dread Banner-Enlighten Standard auras
Maim-Flesh and Stone-Portal Maim stacks with flesh and stone.
CWDT-Tempest Shield-Ancestral Protector-Steelskin CWDT1 with tempest shield 1 if you wanna press steelskin manually. I'm a lazy fook.

https://pastebin.com/XxkNg93g Focus on picking up the claw and generic and life nodes while levelling. The build can get much more DPS if you sacrifice 1k hp if you unspec the Scion circle for Feller of Foes/Claws of the Falcon for an additional 80% crit mult.

Focus on claw nodes first and level with a claw.

Alira until you have resists settled, respec into kill all

Everything but reflect phys without the proper preparation. You can get through no leech maps with caution, but it's pretty annoying. Reflect ele doesn't hurt you so much since your effective crit chance is >95% and the ele damage taken is really little, even with 15% gained as fire.