[3.2] Elemental Crit Cyclone Raider - Fast, fun, deadly! - Ready for Bestiary league

I plan to acquire the jewel (Crit variant to start, ideally a crit/flat or crit/pene version) for my ice shot/barrage build, at which point utilizing the jewel for this build would be bonus. [Very similar tree except scaling bow and barrage, has far superior damage potential to this build (lul chin sol barrage @4mil dps), but this has easy access to fortify, about 10-15% more life, and I just really want to play cyclone on an alt].

You are of course correct- I merely wanted to see what the damage looked like while focusing on cold pene w/ the watchers eye/wise oak/frost bomb, so that's why it is in there. If wise oak were not present, I would likely run HOI/blasphemy+enfeeble, maybe HOT for some extra shock during clear. The main reason to focus on one single element is for ease of running wise oak combined with the potential to use say, cold pene or lightning pene, ability to pick up "Cold % dmg" on tree, and to take advantage of the power of the extra penetration provided by frostbomb. Also, with high enough focus on cold damage, running hypothermia for bosses (even potentially shaper) becomes a realistic possiblity. Another interesting note for running such a cold focused build is adding "The Pandemonious" amulet into the build, yes we lose weapon range and potentially clear speed, but blinding all enemies that are chilled is very powerful when combined with enfeeble + an evasion focused build- and grants another 20% cold pene.

It's possible that going lightning using the storms choir amulet for extra crit, wise oak, and vinktars is comparable or superior, but then you potentially lose much of the clear of HOI- and all protection offered by chill/freeze.

I've leveled with frostblades before and it feels great in low density situations- but in high density it feels very subpar compared to reave, sunder, ice shot, tornado shot, cyclone, etc. Also by virtue of dealing damage by moving, cyclone of course moves faster. My main motivation here is a cyclone build. My brother was playing one in SSF and asked me for some help, and while looking into how to help him in a low budget situation I decided I wanted to delve into one as well. I'm mostly looking at either an ele crit version (as discussed above) or a ngamahu pathfinder version. This one has far, far higher cyclone DPS, does cold damage (safety of chill/freeze is very real), but its hard to estimate the actual dps of ngamahu when it has a potential 1.4mil dps if all 9 fireballs hit one target. So then for clear speed it comes down to HOI clear vs HOA clear (both builds have similar weapon range in a clear-speed setup) since 200k cyclone is plenty to clear trash in maps...at the end of the day, I lean towards this build because 6k life w/ >50% dodge, 20% block, high evasion, fortify, and massive cold damage for freeze/chill (and potentially blind as well) seems much more survivable- and I love me some easy to play, high survivability map and boss killing builds. (I like to farm while watching TV.)

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Varek wrote:

Spoiler

I plan to acquire the jewel (Crit variant to start, ideally a crit/flat or crit/pene version) for my ice shot/barrage build, at which point utilizing the jewel for this build would be bonus. [Very similar tree except scaling bow and barrage, has far superior damage potential to this build (lul chin sol barrage @4mil dps), but this has easy access to fortify, about 10-15% more life, and I just really want to play cyclone on an alt].

You are of course correct- I merely wanted to see what the damage looked like while focusing on cold pene w/ the watchers eye/wise oak/frost bomb, so that's why it is in there. If wise oak were not present, I would likely run HOI/blasphemy+enfeeble, maybe HOT for some extra shock during clear. The main reason to focus on one single element is for ease of running wise oak combined with the potential to use say, cold pene or lightning pene, ability to pick up "Cold % dmg" on tree, and to take advantage of the power of the extra penetration provided by frostbomb. Also, with high enough focus on cold damage, running hypothermia for bosses (even potentially shaper) becomes a realistic possiblity. Another interesting note for running such a cold focused build is adding "The Pandemonious" amulet into the build, yes we lose weapon range and potentially clear speed, but blinding all enemies that are chilled is very powerful when combined with enfeeble + an evasion focused build- and grants another 20% cold pene.

It's possible that going lightning using the storms choir amulet for extra crit, wise oak, and vinktars is comparable or superior, but then you potentially lose much of the clear of HOI- and all protection offered by chill/freeze.

I've leveled with frostblades before and it feels great in low density situations- but in high density it feels very subpar compared to reave, sunder, ice shot, tornado shot, cyclone, etc. Also by virtue of dealing damage by moving, cyclone of course moves faster. My main motivation here is a cyclone build. My brother was playing one in SSF and asked me for some help, and while looking into how to help him in a low budget situation I decided I wanted to delve into one as well. I'm mostly looking at either an ele crit version (as discussed above) or a ngamahu pathfinder version. This one has far, far higher cyclone DPS, does cold damage (safety of chill/freeze is very real), but its hard to estimate the actual dps of ngamahu when it has a potential 1.4mil dps if all 9 fireballs hit one target. So then for clear speed it comes down to HOI clear vs HOA clear (both builds have similar weapon range in a clear-speed setup) since 200k cyclone is plenty to clear trash in maps...at the end of the day, I lean towards this build because 6k life w/ >50% dodge, 20% block, high evasion, fortify, and massive cold damage for freeze/chill (and potentially blind as well) seems much more survivable- and I love me some easy to play, high survivability map and boss killing builds. (I like to farm while watching TV.)

Alright, I understand your thoughts better now. The idea is valid, I'm not certain what would be the best way to execute it but I'll just share some of my thoughts and maybe you can figure out something cool.

1. I'm not convinced focusing on a single element is beneficial over accepting rainbow damage as you've aptly called it. If you allow rainbow damage your gear choices will be much more flexible and easy to acquire; the foil, jewels and jewellery will be harder to find if you're only looking at cold. If you balance your wise oak for lightning and cold, which shouldn't be that hard to do, you should reach a higher average DPS without considering chill. The main benefit of going pure cold will probably be chill+hypothermia/cold pen+pandemonius vs endgame bosses, but even then your gear will need to be very good if you want to chill Shaper - afaik you need a cold hit of 66,628 to chill him, see why in spoiler below (copied from guide text). I haven't found confirmation on this mechanic, but this is how I assume it works.




2. Look into using Opals or other rings crafted with Essence of Horror if you want to focus on cold damage. They look like this:

For them to work in PoB you need to manually add "Adds" in front of the "4 to 7 cold damage per frenzy charge" modifier. These are expensive to craft and there aren't many builds that use them afaik so they can be hard to find on the market as well.


3. I have no idea if it's even worth trying but maybe you could do some sort of hybrid phys conversion/flat cold scaling? It seems worth exploring at least if Hatred is what you're building around. You could use Hrimsorrow and Winter Spirit for 90% cold conversion, but that means you can't use Tombfist so you'd need Deceiver for Intimidate, losing 3 Abyss jewel sockets might be too bad to justify it. Good phys foils are also much more expensive than suffix foils with 1 or 2 ele rolls, but maybe you could find a "Hybrid" foil that no one else wants but would be perfect for your build.


4. There are two cold-focused raider cyclone guides that I think you should look at for further inspiration. The latter one uses Frostbreath with flat cold stacking, honestly the whole idea doesn't really make sense to me when you could just be using crit foils instead of Frostbreath but the mechanics used all make sense together and he gets around chill mechanics by using Arctic Armour. AA+movement skill sounds stupid but the point is chill rather than phys mitigation and since you're Phased you can spin through bosses, dropping chilled ground on top of them.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2033057
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2027833

5. I'm assuming you used the PoB from my main post as a base for yours. That PoB is from 3.0 and I haven't updated it, take a look at the updated passive tree section and my 97 character's current tree.



I'd appreciate further updates on your progress, whether you want to post them here or send me PMs. The idea is interesting to me and Watcher's Eye jewels are a permanent addition to the game so I'm very interested in seeing them applied to a variation of this build.

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Mr_Ven wrote:

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My Gear so far, it isnt perfect yet but your build is really fun so far :)

Hey, it's my Pandemonium Saw I sold ya! I hope you're enjoying it well. Make sure to get wrath linked up to an empower gem.

I dont have the place for it atm, i got a cwdt setup in my helmet, curse on hit setup in the weapon, movement setup in the boots, wrath and frost bomb in the gloves and Ancestral Protector in the shield with portal gem. I think a procetor gives me more single target dps then a empower gem, and i dont really need more dps for map clear so far.

My gear now:



I also managed to balance cold and lightning resi but running with 57% Fire resi now, but it's no problem so far because of wise oak.

Best build i played so far :)

Is this foil gonna be good for this build?

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damosan69 wrote:

Is this foil gonna be good for this build?

The rolls are good, but the base is not optimal. In my PoB it's around a 10% DPS loss when compared to my Blood Song.



You ideally want one of the 1.6 APS bases but Tempered has 1.4. Refer to this list to see which bases are ideal, APS is the most important stat:
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/List_of_thrusting_one_hand_swords

Hi,

Just want to say really enjoying the build and had a quick question. Was wondering your thoughts on Shroud of the Lightless in the chest with 2 the taming rings. Been running that set up for about a week now with no issues. Just curious if their are any downfalls using that set up that i am unaware of.

Thx

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steaks1088 wrote:

Hi,

Just want to say really enjoying the build and had a quick question. Was wondering your thoughts on Shroud of the Lightless in the chest with 2 the taming rings. Been running that set up for about a week now with no issues. Just curious if their are any downfalls using that set up that i am unaware of.

Thx

Your character is impressive, near-perfect gear overall.

The Taming makes perfect sense and should probably be mentioned in the main post actually, I just never thought of using one. The big downside is the lack of +life but your character has a big life pool even with two of them so you've got that covered.

Shroud of the Lightless makes sense if you're using a lot of abyss jewels and you're using 7 of them so why not. Bronn's is still higher damage even vs Shaper and it is also faster so personally I think I would always go with Bronn's instead.

However, your life total at 5.7k is very good and equipping Bronn's over Shroud takes it down to 5.3k so already Shroud is much stronger defensively even without considering Shade Form. Haven't used Shroud so I don't know how useful Shade form actually is, maybe you could enlighten me? How is the uptime on it?

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Euploid wrote:

"

steaks1088 wrote:

Hi,

Just want to say really enjoying the build and had a quick question. Was wondering your thoughts on Shroud of the Lightless in the chest with 2 the taming rings. Been running that set up for about a week now with no issues. Just curious if their are any downfalls using that set up that i am unaware of.

Thx

Your character is impressive, near-perfect gear overall.

The Taming makes perfect sense and should probably be mentioned in the main post actually, I just never thought of using one. The big downside is the lack of +life but your character has a big life pool even with two of them so you've got that covered.

Shroud of the Lightless makes sense if you're using a lot of abyss jewels and you're using 7 of them so why not. Bronn's is still higher damage even vs Shaper and it is also faster so personally I think I would always go with Bronn's instead.

However, your life total at 5.7k is very good and equipping Bronn's over Shroud takes it down to 5.3k so already Shroud is much stronger defensively even without considering Shade Form. Haven't used Shroud so I don't know how useful Shade form actually is, maybe you could enlighten me? How is the uptime on it?

Thank you, worked pretty hard to get the gear. Actually just esssence rolled the sword about 2 hours ago.

Unfortunately shade form is not super useful as it is only a 3 sec duration with i want to say 40sec cd (not sure on that)and it goes off on socketed ability use, so it really isn't that helpful for mapping. Sometimes bosses if they are still alive. Mainly thought of using shroud for the penetration.

"

steaks1088 wrote:

Thank you, worked pretty hard to get the gear. Actually just esssence rolled the sword about 2 hours ago.

Unfortunately shade form is not super useful as it is only a 3 sec duration with i want to say 40sec cd (not sure on that)and it goes off on socketed ability use, so it really isn't that helpful for mapping. Sometimes bosses if they are still alive. Mainly thought of using shroud for the penetration.

Thanks for the reply, 40 sec cd seems reasonable for physical immunity tbh but it makes the item even less interesting to me. Someone asked about it soon after Abyss league launched and after running the numbers for damage it turned out Bronn's is better DPS vs bosses and also faster so I just dismissed the idea. With how expensive it is as well, I would probably prefer Belly if I wanted more defense and Bronn's if I wanted more damage.

I added notes on The Taming to ring section of main post and reworked gloves/belt section to make my current recommendation of Tombfist+stygian over rare gloves+deceiver more clear. I wasn't quite sure at first but at this point it seems obvious to me that 2-socket Tombfist is best in slot. Gives you 3 Abyss jewel sockets and on top of that the simple fact that rare belts are usually better than rare gloves for this build - and Stygian Vises are dropping for everyone all the time so prices are relatively low.

Great guide well detailed
but i got a question in mind atm done shaper and co with a molten/frost blades raider and got pretty much bored and now i'm just farming shaped vaults with bisco's. So would your cyclone be as fast or close to a projectile build who can almost offscreen ?

Because i love cyclone but if it's 2-3x slower gotta go fast :p

anyway thank's for the guide !