[3.6] The Blizz Sorc - Icestorm/Winter Orb CI Occultist - Viable For Everything

I see Icestorm mentioned in the patch notes...

Good morning kel

its since 8 hr or so :-) we hope it will be a buff not a nerf

i am really happy now. I did first time with this build chayula and it worked. i had 8 sek over. Tried it with 3 builds long bevor and never worked. This build is not the best for incursions but for all other contend it works really really good.

so if they destroy it tomorrow (i hope not) i had a good time. I would try now uber elder as it is the only guy i cant kill. But my atlas is corruped. No shaper no masters. the icons are there but they dont work.

3.6 Development Manifesto is up. Parts that may affect this build:

- Winter Orb damage nerfed. It wasn't our primary damage spell anyway. As long as its damage is still enough for trash, it's Ok.

- Channelled skills cost less mana. Good. Makes it easier to start using WO.

- Many spells with long cast time have their cast time lowered. While this does not directly affect us, I hope this is why Icestorm is mentioned in the patch notes. It had a very slow cast time.

- Spell Cascade buffed. Great!

- Boss curse mitigation nerfed. Awesome!

- ES leech. This is the biggest change. VP will no longer do anything for ES leech, so we no longer need the entire south branch of the tree. That's a lot of skill points to re-allocate. GR will do everything VP previously did. However, the leech cap is only half of what it was with VP. But there are some new ways to raise it on the tree. And new sources of ES leech that may or may not let us replace the LL gem.

- Templar and Shadow area tree changes. This may result in a loss or gain of 1-2 points depending on the pathing.

- Crit chance is capped by 0-100% instead of 5-95%. Say goodbye to Controlled Destruction. Probably to be replaced by Hypothermia.

Overall, everything but the leech changes seems minor. How much leech do we really need? Not quite sure. I think we'll still have enough for all content. We can also pick up a few % ES regen to compensate by taking ZO.

I will try your build on the next season

<<The Whispering Ice's Icestorm skill now has a 0.75 second cast time and a 6% chance to critically strike.>>

So we're good there. Still reading the rest of the notes.

Hmm, so Icestorm gets a buff instead of a nerf? Very nice.

Pissed but not surprised to see the fossil nerf for Delving. It did seem a bit too easy to find valuable fossils at low levels (that's how I funded the 40 ex or so I spent on gear for this build in Betrayal). But not the end of the world.

Still confused by all the new leeching stuff but I'm sure we can make it work!

Build should remain fine. Perhaps the buffs to the ES leech from Ghost Reaver will offset the VP nerf?

Either way Whispering Ice buff is very nice!

If I'm reading the new nodes correctly, taking the ES leech clusters, we will have around 30% ES leech per second max (10% base, doubled by Ghost reaver, and 50% increased from passive tree nodes). This is down from 40% with Vaal Pact. So it's quite a nerf on our overall sustain. The flip side, is that there is PLENTY of ES base leech that we will be getting (quick count shows around 1.7%) so no curses, life leech gem, or vitality aura needed to max leech.

You'll likely want to hunt for ES Recovery Rate Watcher's eyes... as well as use the Soul of Arakaali for the extra 50% boost.

For almost all content you probably won't notice the lower leech rate, but you may when pushing Uber Elder, or something similar, unless you have a truly obscene amount of total ES.



TLDR: Cons: ES recovery took a hit, but not a "horrible" one.
Pros: No more need for life leech gem, vitality aura (watcher's eye), or
Warlord's mark.

Pro or Con, depending on how you want to look at it..... The tree will need to be seriously worked over and tweaked as there are a few more "mandatory" nodes and a the entire bottom half of the tree is now open for reallocation.

I might try this as a first HC char for the new league. Hopefully it scales well with no gear initially and it's not super expensive to reach endgame comfortably.

Seems WI is once again alive! We need to see the skill tree in PoB since a lot of changes happened there! Hope PoB will be upgraded soon with the new changes!