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

Wallach, adore your guide and adore that you looked at the patch notes so quickly. Was quite concerned about Soul Mantle -- considering trying the ol' build for Heist (in HC nonetheless) -- so thank you for the voice of reason!

Hello there , i didnt see you mentioning the biggest change to projectile wekaness (now snipers mark) - it being able to apply on 1 target at any given time only. Is it worth getting on ring/wherever just for single target purposes?

I guess I was worried about our rings protecting us from curses but now we are getting hexed. I don't see that they are changing the ring as well as Soul Mantle. Can we still self curse and be immune?


Edit: Don't want to post again but wish I could "like" Wallach's responses! :)

Thanks so much for being here so fast to explain. I love your build - I've run it twice so far and seriously considering it for third time this league.

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Wajcik wrote:

Hello there , i didnt see you mentioning the biggest change to projectile wekaness (now snipers mark) - it being able to apply on 1 target at any given time only. Is it worth getting on ring/wherever just for single target purposes?

At the point where you have an Atziri's Reflection, you're pretty much trying to scale your single target damage because you will have way more overall damage than you really need to clear everything that isn't a boss pretty fast. The issue is going to be that you now need a different source of +1 to maximum curses because Awakened Curse on Hit will no longer be able to apply Sniper's Mark. You could instead still use Awakened Curse on Hit (or Hextouch or whatever it is called now) and instead do something like Frostbite + Elemental Weakness, but I don't know if that will really be worth the opportunity cost of your anointment when paired with whatever the loss of Doom scaling on Frostbite winds up being. Before I would often never go up to 2 curses and just switch out Frostbite for Projectile Weakness, so I don't know if the investment of +1 max curses is going to be worthwhile anymore with the value of our second curse being lowered.

Edit - I should clarify that Sniper's Mark not being affected by boss curse effectiveness may be more than enough to justify the lowering of the effect and still be worthwhile. But the opportunity cost has changed enough with the loss of Awakened Curse on Hit that I'm not sure yet if it will be worth the actual investment to do so compared to putting that currency in some other part of your character. That's what I need to fiddle with to understand more, and would like to see what the value of Doom is against a self-cast curse to better evaluate.

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Jenarie wrote:

I guess I was worried about our rings protecting us from curses but now we are getting hexed. I don't see that they are changing the ring as well as Soul Mantle. Can we still self curse and be immune?

Near as I can tell, Kikazaru and Atziri's Reflection should still affect all curses (both Hexes and Marks). The only change on that front will be that Atziri's Reflection will not be able to reflect Marks used by enemies, but that's of no real concern either way.

2 questions:

1. do you think impending doom / doom blast will work or will ancestral bond render it useless?

2. how about stacking frostbite and ele weakness with awakened curse on hit instead of proj weakness that is gone? or maybe the new punishment? or will the culling / overkill effects not work with totems either?

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Viktranka wrote:

2 questions:

1. do you think impending doom / doom blast will work or will ancestral bond render it useless?

2. how about stacking frostbite and ele weakness with awakened curse on hit instead of proj weakness that is gone? or maybe the new punishment? or will the culling / overkill effects not work with totems either?

I'm actually not sure what the source will count as for Impending Doom, but I'd lean towards it being blocked by Ancestral Bond. It's just easy to fit into the build in the case where we can utilize it (or for example if it improves Doom effectiveness to where we'd want it instead of Increased Duration for our Arcane Surge or something).

As far as dual-hexing goes, it'll still come down to opportunity cost, and personally I often found it hard to justify Awakened Curse on Hit even with Projectile Weakness (at least in trade league). Given that switching to it will now disable Doom scaling for Frostbite on bosses I feel like it will fare worse than before since single target is really the only context where +1 curse matters. Punishment may be a weird case where it gains abnormal value due to Sirus' health percentage starting so low in his final phase, but set against curse effectiveness penalty against him I don't know if even that will shake out that well.

Regarding the actual effects of Punishment, I don't see any reason those would not work with totem hits.

@Wallach - Simple question. Wouldn't it make sense to consider the new glacial cascade as opposed to freezing pulse as the base skill?

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Fleksz wrote:

@Wallach - Simple question. Wouldn't it make sense to consider the new glacial cascade as opposed to freezing pulse as the base skill?

Well there's nothing wrong with considering Glacial Cascade with a Soul Mantle. But it is a more different build than it might sound.

Glacial Cascade is a physical converted to cold skill rather than pure cold. This means that Hatred is way more powerful for Glacial Cascade than it is something like Freezing Pulse, because you'll benefit from both elements of Hatred's aura. This in turn means you really want Hatred active from the start, not just after you invest so much into the build that you could afford an Atziri's Reflection. So you have to do some reconfiguring in the build and/or play style to handle that.

You also have to keep in mind these two skills are pretty different functionally. This new Glacial Cascade especially is going to be pretty mediocre as a clear skill, because it has a fixed travel distance of what you see in the demo video. The tradeoff will be an easier to scale single target output, though one that comes with some more positional requirements as you will be needing to ensure that final burst is making contact with your target.

Ultimately you're making a fairly different build with different goals. Glacial Cascade is never going to map clear anywhere as good as Freezing Pulse, and (at least in theory) Freezing Pulse is going to need a lot more investment to put up similar single target damage. It'll also not be as simple to fit Soul Mantle into a Glacial Cascade setup because of how important Hatred will be for that skill.

Hopefully it is just an oversight, but there qas no mention that self-flaggeration would be updated to work with hexes?

Well even though we will only be able to have 8 curses this isnt much of a damage nerf overall. You can get 2 ilvl75+ crusader rings instead of kikazarus and get up to 42% reduced curse effect on you with catalysts along with reaistnaces, life and potentially up to 25% spell damage on each ring. Also keeping up more than 8 courses is also very hard during mapping.