[3.17] Wallach's Hierophant Freezing Pulse Totems (No Further Updates)
" What's your dps like? Sounds low. It's been a little while since I've done it with a totem build, but from what I recall the time/difficulty of Drox dropped exponentially with greater dps. If it's taking you that long to kill a banner, I'd say your damage is too low for this fight. Once you can kill the banners quickly, you can also kill Drox quickly. |
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" Something definitely sounds amiss with your damage. While the standard budget version of this build doesn't have great single target DPS, it definitely shouldn't be so bad that you are struggling to that extent. Do you think you could make your characters public in your profile so that your Hierophant could be imported into PoB? It's hard to help without being able to see your character to identify any issues. " I'm not sure if I am going to league start with this build in Heist, but I should at least have time to do some basic updates. I haven't gotten the impression from what has been teased thus far that any massive updates are going to be needed, even if some of the details wind up changing due to alternate quality gems, curse changes, replica uniques, etc. The general setup of this build should remain intact unless the manifesto throws us a real curve ball. |
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" 50000 - 120000, or at least so say the Freezing Pulse Button. Yesterday I defeated 4 Stone Baran without even dying once, Veritiana too, so far only Drox is so hard for me. " My character has been set public in the forum, is there anything else I should do in order to make them visible? Last edited by ArionAthreides#0856 on Sep 12, 2020, 3:39:08 PM
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With the PoB for this guide, if I want to try a different skill with totems, say the new crackling lance, I would still follow the same path more or less and just pick up the lightning damage nodes instead of the cold?
If I league start totems next league, I might try one of the new skills with totems, crackling lance, blazing salvo, or maybe the reworked firestorm or glacial cascade. |
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What do you think about other skills than freezing pulse? i want to start totems as league starter, but not 100% sure about freezing pulse.
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I;m going to transition to this build from a shockwave totem build, because the shockwaves aren't, uh, intense enough I guess visually.
Is there a end-game min-maxed build link I can nab? I want to try it on t-16s. (for leaguestart next league) "Bonus points if it is Scion/Witch because they have nice knees. Ranger has ugly knees and other characters are men so playing them would be homoerotic." - CAKE, 10/20/21 Last edited by darciaz#7624 on Sep 12, 2020, 6:49:51 PM
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" No, that is all that was needed, thanks. Taking a quick look over your character, your main issue right now seems to be your rare gear pieces. In particular your wand is pretty light on effective damage overall for where you are at in progression, but I think most of your rare pieces could stand to be upgraded. I'd say in order of priority of slots you should be considering: Weapons - These two slots are generally your biggest damage contribution slots, so having weak pieces here (particularly your shield) are costing you quite a lot of potential damage. If you aren't able to get a +1 to maximum totems Shaper shield, I would highly consider instead using a second wand to ensure this item slot is contributing as much as it can to your build. We have enough other rare slots to push some of these defensive considerations to. Flask - The Foreboding mana flask should be tossed out for a Wise Oak. Try to keep your uncapped resistances in mind when changing out any of the rare pieces so that your Cold will be highest so you can utilize Wise Oak offensively (don't forget you can Blessed Orb your Kikazarus to lower your uncapped Lightning resist if need be). Amulet - this is one of the higher damage capable slots after your weapon slots, so your amulet only having a low critical multiplier roll is costing you a lot of potential damage. Boots - Not a damage heavy slot, but your current boots actually offer almost nothing to your build at the moment (even defensively), so some of that pressure you currently feel to get resists in slots like your amulet or shield is coming from this slot not doing work. Try to find a much more defensive piece here (life and resistances mostly) so that you can more easily get the above two slots into higher damage pieces. Helmet - Not quite as much of an issue as your boots slot since it is carrying some resists, but really only Chaos resistance and isn't offering you any life. While a helm enchant would be nice, I think it's secondary to just improving the defensive stats here (again so we can get more mobility to get higher damage pieces in our offensive slots). Gloves - These are actually okay, and while it would be a clear upgrade to get a similar looking set of Puhuarte gloves, it's something that can wait until all of the above slots are improved. Belt - Probably your best rare slot item, and other than the life roll not being great is a pretty strong piece. Don't touch this until all of the above pieces have changed. Aside from your gear I don't think there are a ton of things you'd really need to adjust. Obviously grabbing a 21/20 Freezing Pulse would be a nice bump, but I'd probably do that after your rare gear is in a better place. I would recommend that you reset your Cold Snap's CWDT back to level 1, and find a lower level Cold Snap so that you can more frequently access that damage gain. Cold Snap's level doesn't really matter much in this context because we're using it to debuff enemies with the Bonechill support gem when it triggers. A level 1 CWDT can support up to a level 7 Cold Snap, which is as high as I would level that gem. You could also probably get a small amount of damage shifting the points out of Mental Rapidity to finish your Doom Cast notable line. Either take the 3-point line until you hit 92 and respec after, or steal the floating 5% life node behind Cruel Preparation and just replace that after you hit 92. But this is a minor improvement relative to your rare gear changes. " I didn't play a lot this league so I don't have one for myself this time, but there seem to be some pretty good examples at poe.ninja to browse through. Just select Hierophant, filter for Freezing Pulse and sort by DPS. Some of these are going to be on the glass cannon side, but you'll see a variety of setups in the top end to glean from. This one struck me as a pretty good example of a straightforward high-end example (though I think even this setup probably would have benefited from some tweaks, like adding a Cold Conduction medium cluster). " Well, I wrote this guide because I felt Freezing Pulse was such a good totem skill, so I'm sure I'm biased in some regard. That said, I think Divine Ire and Shockwave Totem both look like pretty strong totem skills in the current game, and Glacial Cascade may regain some use in 3.12. As far as pure league start efficiency is concerned, Shockwave Totem is pretty much off the table due to the reliance on Astral Projector, so if I were going to consider a totem league start with what I know right now it would probably only be between Freezing Pulse and Divine Ire. " It's a little hard to say without seeing the new gems myself, but in theory it should be a fine baseline. Adjustments will need to be made for the individual skill's mechanics, obviously - anything that needs to scale area of effect is going to have slightly different priorities, and a skill like Glacial Cascade is going to need consideration to the fact that it will absolutely want to be running Hatred from the jump rather than only after you get something like Atziri's Reflection (Hatred is far too effective for a conversion skill like Glacial Cascade to put off until later). Beyond that I can't really speak to the effectiveness of something like Crackling Lance as a spell totem; I am pretty sure the "collapsing beam" effect is not going to function when linked to a totem, so it will functionally be more like a spammable lightning cone skill that lives in a similar usage lane to Freezing Pulse. Blazing Salvo I think is going to require both the gem and some in-game testing to see how totems get on with the targeting, as it does look like a skill that benefits from more deliberate spacing than you might get out of a totem. |
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" Those are the best rare pieces I could afford. I'm not even sure how to get a better one. It took me the whole league of harvesting to even manage to get to this point after various attempts at crafting using Seeds. I don't even have a single idea on how to get the shaper item. I'vent yet manage to get a Tier 4 seed or get a Items that will be able to put Shaper effect on one and an influence Orb cost as much as 180 Chaos ... my riches amount to 2 Exalt and a little less than 700 Chaos And what do you mean by weak? How I figure something is Weak or Not? The Archon Shield is the strongest Tier of STR/INT shield. Puharte? I saved all the funny looking influenced items I found so far but those have way worse stats so what makes this Puharte stuff better for me? I should use them for a base for rerolling? I've checked guided after guide but none talk about it. The mana flask is here because I have not yet found a Wise Oak so far and I found myself in someplace where I could not regen mana while trying to do the Unrevealed Maps Challenge. Could you explain the whole cold snap better? CWDT? Sorry for harassing you with questions but this is my first venture on this game and sometimes so I'm really a newbie here. Last edited by ArionAthreides#0856 on Sep 13, 2020, 3:04:38 AM
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" If you've got almost 700 Chaos Orbs, you should have plenty of currency to do some trading for upgrades in those rare slots. Mind you, prices in Harvest league are extremely inflated because the league is ending in a couple days, so really at this point it's more about understanding what kind of pieces you should be looking for (assuming you try to use this build again in the future). Crafting these pieces using Harvest was fairly easy, but I feel like we're out of time to really go over how to use Harvest crafting, since these crafting mechanics will not be returning to the game in Heist league. To that end you should prioritize learning the core crafting systems (learned crafting recipes and Veiled affixes from the Betrayal league Syndicate members) and how to utilize the trade site to search for listed items from other players. As far as evaluating each piece, my gear section does list a general guideline for the kind of affixes that each slot should be shooting for. For example, your boot slot is generally a heavily defensive piece, so your priorities here are life, multiple resistances, mana, and good movement speed. Secondary affixes like "increased effect of non-damaging ailments" (Redeemer influence) can also be strong when you are using a Cold Conduction cluster jewel notable for improved effect of your Shock. So when searching for boots on the trade site, you should start with some kind of baseline of affixes, like ~60 maximum life, ~30 of a couple different resistances, and maybe ~25 movement speed and start sifting through the results to see what prices look like. Shifting around the search parameters can help you find better deals (sometimes for example someone will list a much better deal for boots that have cold & lightning resistance, compared to what might come up when you search cold & fire resistances). The weapon slots are pretty important to learn how to evaluate. My general recommendation is to look for Incursion base weapons, which are items with special affixes that only drop in the Temple of Atzoatl (or through other league mechanics like Metamorph or Delirium which have the ability to award Incursion items as well). "Topotante's" for example is a strong Incursion prefix appearing on wands and scepters that pairs ~75-79% increased cold damage along with ~12-29 added cold damage to spells in a single prefix. This makes it a pretty strong starting point for a good weapon. Just searching for "Increased cold Damage" with a min value of 75 on the trade site will return a lot of wands - if you hover over the affix shown on the item in the results, you can see which ones have that Topotante's prefix, and it won't be hard to get one that also has something like increased cast speed or critical strike multiplier for fairly cheap. Especially keep an eye out for such a wand that still has an open suffix, which would allow you to craft another good suffix onto the weapon (so searching for ~75 increased cold damage as well as ~13 increased cast speed min values, then looking for a weapon that has an open suffix you could craft critical strike multiplier onto). Puhuarte's is another such Incursion specific affix, which appears on glove bases. This one can come with "30-50% increased damage with hits against chilled enemies" and 46-48% cold resistance in a single suffix. Much like with boots, we generally treat gloves as a defensive slot; when looking for items on trade, especially at league start I will often just search for the "increased damage with hits against chilled enemies" affix and browse what results come up. Besides the Puhuarte's suffix, we're mainly looking for the same affixes as on boots - life, resistances, mana, maybe Dexterity. Regarding the Shaper shield, I personally don't favor running a shield prior to investing in an Atziri's Reflection anymore. Generally the only time I consider it worthwhile for us is when it is a Shaper influenced base that has the "+1 to maximum number of summoned totems" affixes alongside at least a couple other strong affixes (such as "+1 to all Cold Spell Skill Gems"). If you really want to try crafting one of these, you need a Shaper influenced shield - preferably a pure Intelligence base with a decent Spell Damage implicit - that is item level 70 or higher. You can either search for such a base item specifically through the trade site (shield base, spell damage as an implicit, item level 70 minimum) or run maps with Shaper influence (which can be forced onto maps via Shaper Scarabs) and hope such a base drops for you from the enemies in those maps. From there you'd generally just reduce the item to a magic base (Scouring Orb -> Transmutation Orb) then start using Alteration Orbs until you hit the +1 to maximum totems affix. Once you find that, slap the item with an Augmentation Orb if it doesn't have two affixes, hit it with a Regal Orb to turn it into a Rare item, then craft another affix of your choice onto it with the crafting bench. All that said, were I in your position, I'd simply look for two wands and replace both of your weapon slots with solid wands as it will be cheaper and much simpler (and generally more effective overall given equal opportunity cost). Check the descriptions in the gear section for each slot to see what kind of affixes you should be looking for on each slot. The official trade site is a powerful tool so the more time you spend learning how to use it, the easier it will be to figure out how to best apply your currency for upgrades. As far as your question about Cold Snap, this should be listed under the gems section. Cold Snap is linked to Cast When Damage Taken so that it automatically fires at the enemy that hit you and triggered it. Bonechill is linked to Cold Snap so that any enemy that is affected by the chilling ground Cold Snap places also takes increased cold damage from any source, so they will take more damage from your Freezing Pulse totem hits. However, the Cold Snap itself is not going to deal any damage itself, because we take the Ancestral Bond keystone. That prevents us from dealing any damage ourselves in exchange for being able to place an additional totem. That means increasing the actual gem level of Cold Snap doesn't have much value - we only really want the spell to trigger so it places the chilling ground, which will then debuff the enemies via the Bonechill support. To that end, we just leave Cast When Damage Taken at level 1 for this link, which ensures it will trigger at a very low amount of damage taken and results in the trigger being much more frequent. Since Cast When Damage Taken has a limit to what level gems it can support based on its own gem level, we just need to keep Cold Snap to a low enough level that it can still be supported; that means your Cold Snap gem should be level 7 or lower so that a level 1 Cast When Damage Taken can still trigger it. The Bonechill Support can (and should) be raised to maximum level as Cast When Damage Taken only checks the level of the active skill gem it is triggering, and not any of the linked supports. |
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Thanks for your reply, sadly I found all the stuff you said quite demoralizing.
First, because I thought this build was something it wasn't, or the whole Templar so far, I'm basically playing a subpar mage when I hope a class based on STR and INT should be more definitively tanky. I seriously doubt I will play this build on Heist since I've seriously doubt I'll investing time on POE anyway. Going beside the story Act was like drowning in random systems after random systems. Is already incredibly random getting a III level room let alone the one and I should hope the random Architect should drop the right piece of item with the right suffixes, even buying my Armor took me a week since nobody answered my PM because in an economy dependent game you need to see people face to face to buy something ... This game isn't made for me unless somewhere there is a build that can go around using only items that need not be rolled casually. I came here to get a fix of old school Diablo-like monster-killing not trying to figure affixes, suffixes, bonus and how should I get in INT or DES to the decimal measure since you need to play a fully optimized build to ever go past the story mode. This game is too much tryhard for my tastes and unnecessarily complicated. I'm sorry for wasting everyone's time. |
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