(Retired Thread) Wallach's Hierophant Freezing Pulse Totems

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faytte wrote:

Understood, but just a question for me.

If you tied curses to coldsnap (curse on hit and bonechill) and changed frost bomb to something like 'Frost Bomb', 'Trap Support', 'Charged Trap', 'Increased Area of Effect', then you would still only have 2 button presses outside of Totems (albeit, it would be more spammy without increased duration). Maybe not worth 12% more damage though.

Yeah this would work, although like you mention you lose the increased duration link and you will reduce the radius in which you apply curses pretty significantly. You'd also have to reconsider what you have Arcane Surge triggering from probably.

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Wallach wrote:

Yeah this would work, although like you mention you lose the increased duration link and you will reduce the radius in which you apply curses pretty significantly. You'd also have to reconsider what you have Arcane Surge triggering from probably.

I'm not saying this is a wise route, but my thought is that coldsnap is a valuable steroid for our damage and having it accessible on demand is good, and if it is also taking care of our curses then everything should largely remain cursed. Frost bomb being delivered via a trap does unfortunately lower area and the debuff duration, but in fights without adds to kill we can stay topped off on frenzy charges.

For Arcane Surge, I imagine flame dash is the way to go. I suppose I'm used to not using portal, but I get its a fantastic escape tool. My issue with arcane surge on frostbite is that even with increased duration there is a lot of downtime on your arcane surge uptime unless you are using curses more often than their near max duration, at which point using cold snap to apply them seems to make more sense to me.

Disclaimer: I've not actually played this like you, certainly not to 100, certainly not as well or with as much thought as you have put into it (which is incredible! I'm playing your build in 3.8 barring any surprises in patch notes), so this is just napkin thoughts I understand could not pan out in actual gameplay.

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faytte wrote:

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Wallach wrote:

Yeah this would work, although like you mention you lose the increased duration link and you will reduce the radius in which you apply curses pretty significantly. You'd also have to reconsider what you have Arcane Surge triggering from probably.

I'm not saying this is a wise route, but my thought is that coldsnap is a valuable steroid for our damage and having it accessible on demand is good, and if it is also taking care of our curses then everything should largely remain cursed. Frost bomb being delivered via a trap does unfortunately lower area and the debuff duration, but in fights without adds to kill we can stay topped off on frenzy charges.

For Arcane Surge, I imagine flame dash is the way to go. I suppose I'm used to not using portal, but I get its a fantastic escape tool. My issue with arcane surge on frostbite is that even with increased duration there is a lot of downtime on your arcane surge uptime unless you are using curses more often than their near max duration, at which point using cold snap to apply them seems to make more sense to me.

Disclaimer: I've not actually played this like you, certainly not to 100, certainly not as well or with as much thought as you have put into it (which is incredible! I'm playing your build in 3.8 barring any surprises in patch notes), so this is just napkin thoughts I understand could not pan out in actual gameplay.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with what you're suggesting, just that in practice I think you'll find the management of Arcane Surge and debuffs to be a lot more finicky. It'll be more apparent probably in map clearing than boss fights, though Arcane Surge may be more annoying in both situations since Flame Dash just has such a tiny base mana cost to start from. You can obviously lower your rank of Arcane Surge to help deal with this, but obviously that is another numerical tradeoff that has to be considered.

I think the best thing to do is simply try the links out for yourself in the new league and see what you think about how it feels in practice. That's pretty much exactly how I came to the links I have in my own setup. Map clearing smoothness in particular is very important to me, so my builds tend to reflect that. Typically the first thing I'm willing to peel back on in my builds for improved moment-to-moment gameplay is damage, mainly because the content currently doesn't often reward chasing min/max damage improvements in that meaningful of a way. Even the Uber Elder fight is starting to reach that point; for the most part it is starting to feel like really deep Delve content is the only place where it continues to hold full value.

Hey towards the end of legion i tested this build and fell in love with it! Will be playing as a league starter, looking forward to the patch notes for potential changes.
Also something to keep in mind which might affect this (and all totems builds) in the future is the removal of +1 to traps/mines thrown modifier from gloves as i fear with the same reasoning GGG would remove the +1 to max totems from shields.
If this comes it probably will be a few leagues down the line. Let's hope it doesn't happen tho.

hey @Wallach - big thanks for Your build and work put on it.
I play almost all Legion leage on this totems :) Very powerfull / fast gamestyle / izi do all content / 40 chalanges / lot of currency and lot of fun :) Rly enjoy it ! Hope will be no any nerfs and we can make some noise on Blight with totems.

cheers

Agreed fully, and I think I could only attempt this if the pro/con works out well. That being said I have a question for you about your arcane surge set up. Level 16 arcane surge in your build requires 213 mana spent before it triggers, and the total cost on your curse set up looks like its 127.4‬ mana, meaning its only popping every other curse? If that is the case, doesn't that mean you have to be casting 2 curses every 7 seconds (due to inc duration) to maintain arcane surge up time at 18% (which looking at your racecourse map, you maintain almost all of the time!). Having arcane surge on flame dash looks like it have about as much uptime (a flame dash every 4 seconds) but for a smaller bonus (12%) and likely some gaps where arcane surge which no doubt fall. That said, if you are double cursing every 7 ish and instead we are double cold snapping to apply the curses, then (and I might not properly understand the bonechill mechanic) but that is another 16.3% more damage from the chilling ground plus the frenzy charges more damage and cast speed. Might make up for arcane surge falling off periodically, and it seems like a similar # of key presses.

That said Coldsnap AOE is not the bestest (even with increased aoe support), so it might be terrible in practice. I'll try it out in 3.8 and report back!

Personally I'm probably going to throw Arcane Surge on Flame Dash and test the CoH setup.

Cold Snap (Vaal?) + Bonechill + Curse on Hit + Frostbite
Flame Dash + Arcane Surge + Inc Duration
Frost Bomb + Inc Duration + Inc AOE + Intensify
CWDT + Steelskin + Vaal RF + Inc Duration

I think this will work well. You lose AOE on your curse but TBH you only care about cursing very specific targets, trash mobs don't matter at all. This also lets you control it better.

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Dmillz wrote:

Personally I'm probably going to throw Arcane Surge on Flame Dash and test the CoH setup.

Cold Snap (Vaal?) + Bonechill + Curse on Hit + Frostbite
Flame Dash + Arcane Surge + Inc Duration
Frost Bomb + Inc Duration + Inc AOE + Intensify
CWDT + Steelskin + Ball Lightning + Blind

I think this will work well. You lose AOE on your curse but TBH you only care about cursing very specific targets, trash mobs don't matter at all. This also lets you control it better. Lastly I'm going to try out Ball Lightning + Blind on CWDT. Blind is really nice defensively and Steelskin is really only used to block burst damage which it should still do.

That's actually very clever. I forgot entirely about vaal cold snap, which should give us a way to generate frenzy charges on bosses. Only longer bosses would pose an issue and that is basically only Uber Elder, (which doesnt seem worth building around. This build already seems to crush him).

Where are you going to gem Vaal RF + Inc duration though? The 7 second burst of damage seems too good to give up. I don't know the math on this part either but IRC they made it so monsters have a higher chance to hit characters that have low evade values, so while blind is powerful, does it do much for someone whom only has a 5% or so chance to evade?

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faytte wrote:

Where are you going to gem Vaal RF + Inc duration though? The 7 second burst of damage seems too good to give up. I don't know the math on this part either but IRC they made it so monsters have a higher chance to hit characters that have low evade values, so while blind is powerful, does it do much for someone whom only has a 5% or so chance to evade?

Err, don't call me out like that when I forget sockets :) I knew there was something else I wanted to fit in so I couldn't use Blind!

So I just did some research on Blind and instead of it reducing their chance to hit by a flat 50% like I always thought (lol OP) it would indeed only be useful with high evasion values. Which is good because we don't have sockets for it anyways!

Just wanted to say thank you for putting time on this great guide, I will be returning to totems on Blight and this is exactly what I was looking for, thank you very much for the great work on this and the channel, you got a new subscriber.