[3.21] ShakCentral's Cold DoT Elementalist For Everyone

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Laxxus wrote:

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Dayme wrote:

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Laxxus wrote:

Don't think you are missing much else. You know about EE and Chest, getting at least a 5-link makes already a big difference and EE is even bigger. If you change your wand, you could use EE manually with Orb of Storms or Storm Brand but it can be annoying (and ofc sucks when you forget to cast it :D ).

Another thing is a curse, I haven't seen one on your setup. So you could think about a Witchfire Brew, that boosts your damage quite a bit. And thanks to the explosions from Profane Bloom Ascendancy any Curse improves your clearing speed.

The thing is, even with the EE wand and the 4l comparison, I make around "97k effective dot dps", the linked pob link makes around 350k. So there's still a big difference which I can't spot. It's not the 4l and not EE. Got a new wand to compare it with the EE trigger, still the same.

EE almost doubles your Dot damage in PoB, also have you activated stuff like "enemy is chilled" in PoB? That makes a HUGE difference, also Frenzy charges.
Activating all this for your character I get to 214k Dot dps on a 4 link.
(For EE, you need to activate "Ignore Skill Hit damage" and "Enemy was hit by lightning damage")

Noticed that, still around 100k less than the guide version. I can't spot the missing thing.

First of all, I'm legit laughing out loud at the guy who asked if I was ok because I hadn't commented in a while. It had been less than two days at that point, and overall I'm pretty sure I'm in the top 1% of guide creators in active responses. Carrying on..

I've gone through all of the posts since Friday, and I've got nearly 25 things I wrote down to make a note of. Here a short explanation/answer for them:


Elemental Equilibrium, Trigger Mod, and Spells

- EE, in most cases, will boost your damage anywhere from 50-100%, depending on enemy resistance values. If you don't have access to the Trigger mod, either because you're SSF or don't trust crafting services, self-cast Storm Brand on bosses for now. EE is mostly for shredding resists on high health targets, and is rarely needed for white and blue trash.

- REMEMBER TO NEVER HAVE "ADDED COLD DAMAGE TO SPELLS". This will override the desired EE effect with each proc of Storm Brand and OOS and will result in a cold res GAIN for your enemies.

- If you are playing in Softcore Trade league, I can craft the Trigger mod for you. Message my ShakCentral character in-game and bring 5C with you.

- If you're SSF, don't get discouraged! It took me over 50 unveiled weapons to find it this league, and that's actually near my fastest.



Flame Dash

- Any mention of Flame Surge is a mistake and should be Dash. I'll update the guide.

- Flame Dash is the only skill that needs to be linked to Arcane Surge. Tempest shield won't be a high enough mana cost, so it's fine to leave it unlinked if your gear only has B, B-B links.



Clarity, Blood Magic, Prism Guardian, Mana Reservation, and Enlighten

- In order to run a 50% mana reserved Aura with Blood Magic, it must be level 19 at minimum. At level 20 Blood Magic, your ability to run Clarity will depend on your overall health, as clarity reserves a flat amount. Clarity is a Quality of Life increase, but not vital.

- A level 21 Blood Magic is almost certainly more costly than the value you get from it, but it's a great option for the very rich and min-maxers.

- Prism Guardian is one of my favorite weird things about Vortex. An uncorrupted version is only 1C, but I consider it a very late-game item. It's a big survivability loss with a BIG damage increase. I would recommend using a higher ES shield until you're very comfortable with the manual dodging/defense side of the build, and then swap to Prism.

- If you can't afford or obtian a lvl 3 Enlighten, you can temporarily make use of the mana reservation nodes on the left side of the tree. I used this from level 91-93.


Curse and Aura choices

- I cannot stress this enough : Make Vortex your own! There are a huge number of curses and auras you can choose from to customize your play experience. Vaal Discipline is literally the only curse or aura that I would consider "mandatory". The options include:

- Malevolence, Clarity, Hatred, Flesh and Stone, Aspect of the Spider, Zealotry, Summon Skitterbots, Precision

- Temporal Chains, Enfeeble, Frostbite, Elemental Weakness, Despair

Mix and match, try stuff out, and find the best combination for you!


Elemental Focus

- The initial hit of Vortex and Cold Snap cannot freeze or chill, but the ground effect left behind chills, with all of the chill effectiveness built into the build. Still works.


Elemental Reflect

- You can run ele reflect maps by dropping Vortex and Cold Snap near mob packs and aggro-ing them into the ground degen. It's slow and pretty bad, but doable. I've do a T16 with it each league just to be sure and it's still fine, but super slow and probably should just reroll the map.


Catalysts

- Just a quick update for those who don't know : If you use the life catalyst on Presence of Chayula, you can achieve even more life > ES conversion. Enjoy!



I'm gonna do one more post with a couple quick hits on the people that wanted gear advice.

Malfetus,




Krygenic,




Dayme,

Hey Shak !

If you have time, I'd like to have a quick review on my gear too ! Got 9ex in stash but really don't know where to start...

Thanks and have a nice Christmas holidays !

Allow me two comments:

your wands adds flat cold damage. To everything. So it messes up EE. (at least that's my understanding, or does "adds 28 to 50 cold damage" apply only to the wand attacks?)

you can spare 3 traveling points by connecting the big resourceful wheel on the right through Soul Thief.

you can craft a better "increased energy shield" for your shield (biggest is
74%)

edit: oh, and I would start here: 6L 600ES vaal regalia

edit to remove incorrect info

Hi and thanks for all your work with this amzing build. If you have time please consider reviewing my gear, i recently switch to LL.

I am still wondering if the "add X cold damage" on my wand messes up with EE as monsters still show "vulnerable to cold damage" when I proc OOS or Storm brand". Also when I look at my skills description there is no added cold damage (storm brond or OOS).

Can you confirm it ?

Thanks a lot.

"Adds X to X Cold Damage" is a local modifer to weapons that adds damage to attacks. The only added damage you're worried about is added cold that's specifically "to spells".

I just investigated and yes, I was flat out wrong. Basically if it shows up at the top of the weapon, it's local ("Elemtal damage: 20-35")

So it can be nice to fire/lightning if you use shield charge. In short: you are safe.

Hey guys, thanks for the recent tips.
I’m doing t16 al5 now and my single target is really abysmal, t15 metamorph taking me a min or so.
I’m lv90 and cannot figure out what is holding me back on the dmg side. I did most of the things guides are flowing into.

https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/darkwolf004/characters
-> VortexScript



Thanks ahead for the answers.