[3.17] Wallach's Hierophant Freezing Pulse Totems (No Further Updates)

How much the nerf is going to afflict this build?

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ArionAthreides wrote:

How much the nerf is going to afflict this build?

Which nerf? The vengeful commander one?

Is a 6L soul mantle required for the build to work? it looks like it would be quite expensive as a starter. What would be a good starting chest?

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Jhoira wrote:

Is a 6L soul mantle required for the build to work? it looks like it would be quite expensive as a starter. What would be a good starting chest?

Nah, you don't need a 6L for quite a while. Usually when I start maps I'll just have either a 4L or 5L Soul Mantle. Soul Mantle is a pretty common unique so it's not very hard to get a 4L/5L and a couple Kikazarus very quickly in trade league.

You will want a 6L eventually like any build, but even then a 6L Soul Mantle is among the cheaper 6L uniques you could want. Until you have a Soul Mantle and Kikazarus together you just stick with the Holy Flame Totem setup, which doesn't require any uniques at all.

The build doesn't get expensive unless you want to invest into the build for the top end stuff. That part will feel expensive because you will want an Atziri's Reflection to get over the scaling plateau and get access to things like Pain Attunement, auras and Watcher's Eye mods. But it's not particularly expensive to get the build into the 2-3 million Shaper DPS range before all that, and the path to getting there from league start is one of the easiest in the game in my opinion (at least when you start as HFT and swap into FP when you can slip into the Soul Mantle setup).

Wallach are you going to do update videos for Hiest?

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Viktranka wrote:

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ArionAthreides wrote:

How much the nerf is going to afflict this build?

Which nerf? The vengeful commander one?

vengeful Commander, Divine Body, Glancing Bowl.

I don't think the nerfs overall are going to affect this build too much.

I may wind up just pulling all my Glancing Blows setup recommendations, as after that change it feels like it will no longer really be worth running without a Shaper shield on-block affix. But 3.11 was the only time I felt like it was worth considering, so it's not really much of a loss if it is no longer that reasonable to go for anymore.

Vengeful Commander nerf will cost us a little bit for sure, but we aren't really the primary target of that nerf and aren't as reliant on Hatred effect for overall DPS. Conversion builds are the ones that will actually feel that nerf.

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ShenLon wrote:

Wallach are you going to do update videos for Hiest?

Yeah, I'll definitely be doing more videos for Heist, and should be streaming again once the league starts. Whether I actually league start with totems again I haven't decided, but I'll be updating the guide either way.

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Wallach wrote:

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Jhoira wrote:

Is a 6L soul mantle required for the build to work? it looks like it would be quite expensive as a starter. What would be a good starting chest?

Nah, you don't need a 6L for quite a while. Usually when I start maps I'll just have either a 4L or 5L Soul Mantle. Soul Mantle is a pretty common unique so it's not very hard to get a 4L/5L and a couple Kikazarus very quickly in trade league.

You will want a 6L eventually like any build, but even then a 6L Soul Mantle is among the cheaper 6L uniques you could want. Until you have a Soul Mantle and Kikazarus together you just stick with the Holy Flame Totem setup, which doesn't require any uniques at all.

The build doesn't get expensive unless you want to invest into the build for the top end stuff. That part will feel expensive because you will want an Atziri's Reflection to get over the scaling plateau and get access to things like Pain Attunement, auras and Watcher's Eye mods. But it's not particularly expensive to get the build into the 2-3 million Shaper DPS range before all that, and the path to getting there from league start is one of the easiest in the game in my opinion (at least when you start as HFT and swap into FP when you can slip into the Soul Mantle setup).

Thanks for the quick answer!

Is the Soul Mantle change from curse to hex going to mess this up? I'm not really understanding the curse changes yet - need to read them again - but wanted to do this build again this league but that worried me when I saw it. We count on getting cursed for dps so not sure how to process this.

So patch notes are finally out, and while we won't get gem info until tomorrow, there are a few things I'm thinking about in terms of 3.12:

- Glancing Blows stuff is probably getting dropped from this guide. They are narrowing the usage of this keystone a little bit, and it's enough that I don't think it's a great recommendation for anyone not fully utilizing on-block procs from gear anymore. I personally won't mind freeing up a little text room in the guide anyway, nor was I the biggest fan of that variant in the first place.

- Soul Mantle is getting nerfed as a consequence of the overall curse changes. We will only be able to stack a maximum of 8 curses on ourselves now instead of 13; this is, in practice, a pretty small nerf because you can only ever stack this many curses on yourself in controlled opener situations (like right before triggering Shaper, Uber Elder, Izaro, etc). You'll note that every time I have provided a Path of Building example, it has always been done with 8 curses active, since this is a more reasonable amount of curses to have on yourself at any given time. It just turns out this is now the ceiling for contribution from Self-Flagellation. Overall, I wish they had compensated Self-Flagellation slightly for this change, but it is not a significant nerf in practice.

- For our purposes, Projectile Weakness (now Sniper's Mark) was nerfed compared to 3.11. Previously a 20/20 Projectile Weakness would result in 54% increased damage taken from projectile hits, and the new Sniper's Mark will only reach 40% at 20/20. The other new functionality added to Sniper's Mark, such as the projectile splitting and flask charges gained are not going to be relevant to us at all. Furthermore, we can no longer utilize Curse on Hit or Awakened Curse on Hit to access both Frostbite and Sniper's Mark, as that support gem is now restricted to Hexes only. This change will require some fiddling in Path of Building for me to decide how I will recommend this plays out. My current hunch is that we will simply self-cast Frostbite (optionally with the new Impending Doom support) and likely look for a Sniper's Mark on Hit ring at the high end after you have an Atziri's Reflection. Changes here will require some looking at new itemization options from Heist league as well, but in general this is going to be a downside at the highest end of gearing no matter how you slice it I think.

- On the plus side, self-casting Frostbite has gained new merit thanks to the addition of the Doom mechanic, and Frostbite gained an additional 10% chance to freeze which is a nice bonus for the earlier game. It remains to be seen how much magnitude Doom has on curse effect, but this change should help offset some of the potential loss for those that previously were sticking to a single curse and switching to Projectile Weakness in 3.11 or earlier. We'll also have the option of swapping out either Increased Duration or Spell Cascade for Impending Doom, though I personally do not expect that to be particularly helpful since clear is not something this build needs assistance with, and Impending Doom will have next to no impact on single target damage. I also very much doubt we will have enough reason to invest skill points into something like increased maximum Doom or Doom rate. It's something we'll still have to play around with when the league begins, but in any case we will get some gains coming to Frostbite.

- Vengeful Commander is also nerfed slightly, but is likely to still remain the option of choice to pair with Blanketed Snow on an ideal large cluster jewel. Just at a glance when looking at my final Delirium character (who was much better geared since I did not play much of Harvest league) this should amount to around around a 1.5% loss. Obviously more if you were taking a significant detour from my guide and running two large clusters.