[3.25] Ice Dancing Queen - Icestorm/Cyclone/CI - Viable For Everything

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Devilator wrote:

About CI and energy shield in general, do you have 75 all resist when you switch during the campaign? Right now in Act 7 I have 1k life 1.1k ES and resists between 55-65 and feeling a little squishy. Sometimes I can tank no problem, sometimes a single hit will take away all the ES and the next will kill me. When leveling the life/armor builds I usually play, I barely have to look at defense until I reach maps.

At 55, you're taking almost twice as much damage as 75. Capping is important if you don't want to feel squishy.

This is also a scaling build. Because it scales with int, it's less impressive during leveling. It remains important to kite effectively to prevent being overrun during the campaign.

Is it a problem if our cold damage cannot chill? Do we have some extra damage on chilled enemies in general?

I've got a pretty nice skill tree on a stuff, but the first passive is "Your cold damage cannot chill" :c

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SGBye wrote:

Is it a problem if our cold damage cannot chill? Do we have some extra damage on chilled enemies in general?

I've got a pretty nice skill tree on a stuff, but the first passive is "Your cold damage cannot chill" :c

First : what the hell is that tree?

Second : We use chill quite a lot, as it is a great defensive feature of the build. With that tree, though, I'd keep it anyway.

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WinterHiko wrote:

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SGBye wrote:

Is it a problem if our cold damage cannot chill? Do we have some extra damage on chilled enemies in general?

I've got a pretty nice skill tree on a stuff, but the first passive is "Your cold damage cannot chill" :c

First : what the hell is that tree?

Second : We use chill quite a lot, as it is a great defensive feature of the build. With that tree, though, I'd keep it anyway.

As far as I can tell, the only useful things here are crit chance and percent int, dunno if it's worth losing chill completely. I'll try to merge it with something else, perhaps

+2 frenzy charges is 8% more damage and cast speed.

+2 power charges is good QoL, even if we often reach cap.

Added Cold damage to spells get multiplied and is applied to each individual hit, so it makes a difference even if the numbers are low.

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WinterHiko wrote:

+2 frenzy charges is 8% more damage and cast speed.

+2 power charges is good QoL, even if we often reach cap.

Added Cold damage to spells get multiplied and is applied to each individual hit, so it makes a difference even if the numbers are low.

Yeah, power charges are capped all the time. Frenzies are nice on bossing, I guess, but during the map i always reach cap of them too coz of icebite support.

I wonder if I'll manage to merge this into something really cool!

Does anyone use the "XX% chance to gain a flask charge on critical strike" prefix for flasks? I haven't tried it yet but it seems like it would keep the flasks pretty much on the entire time for ones that have the "use when charges are full" enchantment on them.

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WinterHiko wrote:

At 55, you're taking almost twice as much damage as 75. Capping is important if you don't want to feel squishy.

This is also a scaling build. Because it scales with int, it's less impressive during leveling. It remains important to kite effectively to prevent being overrun during the campaign.

I specced into CI. No better place than the Act 8 sewers for it! I switched some things around, got Arcane Focus and the nodes up to it, now I am at 2k ES and it feels smooth and just exciting enough trying to not die when things get dangerous. Gear still sucks, some of it is life, and resists are not capped so there is huge room for improvement.

I am not sure I feel the effects of leech that much, but I don't have Soul Drinker yet. I will soon.

So CI is looking good for now and being immune to chaos is certainly fun. Not to mention that chaos is the hardest degen to spot visually when mapping, so I expect to feel the difference there too. The hardest part is reconditioning my brain and peripheral vision from "big red sphere = good" to "big red sphere = very very bad" lol.

Damage evaporates trash and you can just blink through the map, it takes some more time with rares though. That's ok, this is not supposed to be the fastest leveling build - but it can be very fast if you want and it is very QoL when you finally get it going. And all that with very easy to get gear and a straightforward skill tree progression.

Are the bolts from ice storm considered projectiles? As in would pinpoint support increase the damage of the single target setup? Got level 10 pinpoint on one of my WI crucible trees and was wondering.

Quick update since I had a great league start so far.

Took down all bosses by Day 3 (level 93) with no int % gear beside the belt, the build has great damage and the instant leech with ghost reaver keeps you immortal.

My favorite version of the build so far.