Cold ANIMATE WEAPON Summoner | League-Start & Leveling Guide

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OmniscientlyMe wrote:

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OmniscientlyMe wrote:

Make a shield with "100% of Physical Damage Converted to Fire Damage", then allocate Necromantic Aegis. Obviously, this is just to check DPS numbers.

You can do minions gain 100% of physical damage gained as X element, you just need to turn on 100% physical damage reduction. I don't have the exact setting handy but it works well.

I was using this technique for 100% chaos converted spiders/zombies last league.

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And there are other side reasons to not use cold right away:
- getting 4 green in Triad Grip is not trivial

Probably the hardest part of all. Which says a lot about how hard everything is.

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- the mana situation is harder (higher mana reservation with Bonechill)

13% mana unreserved for a build which doesn't spam anything? For a skill which will see its mana cost reduced? How much do you need?

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- Added Cold gem has highest dex requirement, which must be met with gear

You need dex on gear in any case, and we are talking about what, 11 more dex than the fire build? Is it supposed to be a real issue?

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- gem socket colors make it hard to auto-cast Bladefall, as it probably has to go in gloves

The fact you want to autocast everything so you can play with 2 buttons is beyond me. Using manually five skills is humanly possible, I promise.

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- don't have minion life gem socket available for Animate Guardian, so it needs to be higher leveled to not die

Solution: Don't use animate guardian, use frost bomb instead. Which, btw, is the reason the build actually needed 70 added damage to beat the fire build, since with frostbomb, the cold build vastly outdamage the fire build, even without any added damage. (400K dps for the fire build, 440 for the cold, that's 10% more damage before the scaling kicks in).

I forgot that you removed core skills from the cold build in your pob.

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13% mana unreserved for a build which doesn't spam anything? For a skill which will see its mana cost reduced?

Have you played SRS before? The build is absolutely spamming spells, we need to Bladefall and then cast 10 AW as quickly as possible to go start killing stuff. If you jump into an Incursion, for example, this is very relevant.

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The fact you want to autocast everything so you can play with 2 buttons is beyond me.

Clear speed is more than DPS. Not casting Bladefall manually makes the gameplay faster because you spend less time standing still.

If cold kills a boss in 5 seconds, and fire does it in 7 seconds, but I clear the map twice as fast with a fire setup...

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Solution: Don't use animate guardian, use frost bomb instead. Which, btw, was the reason the build actually needed 70 added damage to beat the fire build.

Animate Guardian with good gear is probably 15% more DPS all the time, it's just not being calculated in POB because I'm lazy about doing that.

I don't trust Frost Bomb, it's not reliable against bosses that move around and if the timing is off a little bit it might not work. Also you have to path up to Avatar of Fire to use it. The damage from it looks good in POB but it sucks to play with.

Anyway, we'll see when the patch hits - if damage effectiveness on AW got nerfed, fire will suck, and if the added physical on it got nerfed, cold might suck. Just have to wait and see.

1) Bladefall won't ever leave 10 blades at once. Meaning that each time you open a map, you need to wait for at least two casts (and so for that big 5s CD) until you have enough blades to cap out AW. If the maximum is not 10, but more (heard about 13 or 20), it's worse. So please, don't start saying that autocasting bladefall is better for clearspeed. It's the exact opposite. You are automating something which doesn't need to be automated.
2) You need to cast bladefall in TWO situations. When you enter a new map, and when you are close to a boss with no momemtum (and it's no big deal to self cast bladefall once or twice in such a case). That's all. The rest of the time, you have access to regular weapons, which are doing the trick perfectly.

And for frost bomb... Please, try at least a bit, I don't know. It has a 2,5s CD, you cast it on the top of the dude, the debuff is here for 8s even after it moves. Using it is not a dps loss, as you don't have anything to do during fights. It's impossible to fail, even if you try really hard... And AoF is 2 points away, what are you talking about?


Ps: just for information, AW will be 40s duration (and is currently at 37,5s at least), SRS is 5s duration. Are you sure you should assume that the "spamminess" is the same between the two?

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Keyen wrote:

Ok, let's be clear. Bladefall won't ever leave 10 blades at once. Meaning that each time you open a map, you need to wait for at least two casts (and so for that big 5s CD) until you have enough blades to cap out AW. If the maximum is not 10, but more (heard about 13 or 20), it's worse. So please, don't start saying that autocasting bladefall is better for clearspeed. It's the exact opposite.


And for frost bomb... Please, try at least a bit, I don't know. It has a 2,5s CD, you cast it on the top of the dude, the debuff is here for 8s even after it moves. Using it is not a dps loss, as you don't have anything to do during fights. It's impossible to fail, even if you try really hard...


Ps: just for information, AW will be 40s duration (and is currently at 37,5s at least), SRS is 5s duration. Are you sure you should assume that the "spamminess" is the same between the two?

You have a point, it may actually be better to not autocast Bladefall due to cooldown. Or perhaps it needs to be linked to Spell Cascade when autocast so that it makes enough blades (if that works). Some of that depends on how AW targets stuff on the ground, and whether we need to BF all the time or can easily target weapons as they drop.

So much of this depends on how the spell scales damage, its mana cost, its cast speed, how many weapons etc etc etc that we don't know. We will have to revisit this topic once we have actual numbers and then gameplay experience to work from. I am very open to changing the guide in dramatic ways as we learn more.

If someone has a version of the build where spectres aren't used to generate frenzy or power charges I wonder if Soul's Wick could be used with animated weapons.

Of course it wouldn't be good in many situations but maybe with some monster knowledge you could grab a few before entering a boss arena for a brief damage spike. 3 Spectres at base 20s duration so pretty limited.

You could treat them like meaty blades and just let them inherit aura damage or use a minimal 3-4 link setup maximizing their life in case you get suicidal monsters which often scale their dmg based on max life.

How many specters will we be able to raise with this build assuming normal recommended gear?

What would be the dps loss if we were to use a G-G-G-R Triad Grip?

This way, we could put hatred-generosity/bladefall/desecrate into it. It might solve some socket issues at the cost of some dps but how much?

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dexxx69 wrote:

What would be the dps loss if we were to use a G-G-G-R Triad Grip?

This way, we could put hatred-generosity/bladefall/desecrate into it. It might solve some socket issues at the cost of some dps but how much?

Right now that looks like about a 2% loss of DPS, about like losing an average damage node.

2% DPS lost = e-peen 2" shorter = totally unacceptable, obviously.

In seriousness, I think the socket issue can be avoided without too much trouble. I'm thinking about ways to improve the efficiency of gem setup, but waiting for patch notes before posting a big overhaul of that section.

Ever since I saw the new interaction with blade skills I've been thinking about great this will work with ssfhc. Probably not going to go with triad grip because of the defense loss of 100+hp/armor, hoping that the new stats for aw make up for the dps lost. Would the increased damage as cold still be enough of a reason to get ee just by itself?