[3.23] Flaskccultist Winter Orb - CWC - Frostblink
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Thought I would share the build I've been playing this league. The template worked before, but several changes this league really pushed things to the next level. There's some interesting interactions going on and some of this might be interesting or useful for other people playing Winter Orb (any flavor).
Please reach out in-game (@dandylions) if you have questions. Thanks! Build Highlights - One-button build with auto-targeting and screen-wide clear - your only job is to pilot - 8MM DPS on a reasonable budget, scaling to 20MM+(+) with investment - All-rounder for content, including league-juiced rares - Scaling AoE to slightly absurd levels: Righteous Fire almost touches the top and bottom of the screen - Much tankier than your average Winter Orb build: deathless wave 30 Simulacrums and can easily live through a Shaper Slam - Almost no elemental resistance requirements on gear, so you can go hard on other suffixes (chaos resist, damage, regeneration) Build Limitations - Movement is chaotic and Flicker Strike-style and not for everyone - Absolutely cannot do The Maven at all (you just do not move precisely enough to survive the last phase with those beams)
Path of Building
https://pobb.in/u/dandylions/xzvfMea_srEY Note that my current incarnation is extremely high-budget because RNGesus has been kind to me this league, but I go through gear options in more detail below. The backbone of the build is pretty simple: leverage Dying Sun (with flask investment) instead of Greater Multiple Projectiles for an effective 7L.
Rationale
Winter Orb is one of the few skills that is allowed to shotgun. Shotgunning is probably the strongest scaling vector in the game, but there's a soft cap on this for Winter Orb due to how its projectiles are arranged. If you look closer, they fall along a rough line extending between your character and the target, and not a tight cluster arranged around the target as everyone assumes. At some point, additional projectiles (and their ground explosion) will start missing the intended target. A Dying Sun with 50% flask effect gives a total of four full-strength projectiles versus five projectiles at 75% strength from GMP. They equal out on paper, but the Dying Sun also gives 30% AoE, which ensures overlap of all four projectiles. Full-strength also means have higher chill and freeze effect, which synergizes extremely well with Frostblink of Wintry Blast. Awakened GMP isn't a clear winner either, given the above, plus it's expensive and the dexterity requirements are hard to fit. The only realistic way to do that is a Micro-Distillery Belt, which then means that The Traitor (Elegant Hubris) is also a pretty obvious step. Then we may as well run Coruscating Elixir to go true low-life, and everything else kind of falls into place... Gem Links
Winter Orb - (Awakened) Cast While Channeling - Frostblink of Wintry Blast
It's in the title. Frostblink hits like a truck, so Awakened CWC is far superior for the faster tick rate (as well as the stun immunity). Winter Orb is going to be faster than your CWC rate regardless so there's no concern about "missing" chill opportunities. Level 7 Awakened CWC hits a 0.29 breakpoint, which requires a +1 gems chest corruption.
Inspiration
Frostblink is very mana-intensive. It is possible to stack enough reduced mana cost to swap this out for another true damage link, but the downside of Inspiration is also largely negated by how Winter Orb functions: charges are gained at the channeling tick rate, which is (much) faster than the actual projectile cast rate. It takes just over half a second to reach five charges after the reset. Note that a Level 25 Inspiration hits the next breakpoint and gets 6% more damage per charge. This requires a base level 21 gem, a "+1 to Level of Socketed Gems" corruption implicit, and the Critical Mastery for "+3 to Level of all Critical Gems". The mastery is not worth using otherwise.
Damage Links
Increased Critical Strikes and Increased Critical Damage are always good choices. Keep in mind that critical strike change also scales your flask sustain, so you want to reach 100% critical chance on Winter Orb if at all possible. Power Charge on Critical doesn't generally pull ahead in terms of damage until nine or ten charges, but it is also a reliable source of charge generation. The other option is the "baby PCoC" corruption implicit on a wand. Empower pulls ahead at extremely high levels of gear and is the drop-in replacement for Inspiration. Various cold support links also work, but they're not the best choices. Dexterity is also extremely tight, which makes the Awakened versions even less attractive. I would stay away from Hypothermia due to the "removes chill on hit" feature on Frostblink of Wintry Blast. Ice Bite is a notable exception if you are charge-stacking. Supporting Skills and Damage Scalars
Hatred - Zealotry - Pain Attunement - Righteous Fire
The first three are pretty self-explanatory. Righteous Fire is a bit weirder, since Coruscating Elixir sets your life to one, which normally turns RF off. However, the mod "recover X% of life when you use a flask" applies after Coruscating Elixir's effects. This allows you to use both without having to constantly toggle RF back on. This is available as a Flask Mastery on the tree, and also through charms mods (and That Which Was Taken). Alternatively, you could just let it get turned off (it's instant cast, after all) and leverage the Arakaali pantheon bonus of "20% increased recovery rate of life and energy shield if you have stopped taking damage over time recently". By the way, Frostblink's blast radius is slightly smaller than a (20% quality) RF, but it's a handy indicator in gameplay.
Frostblink - Bonechill - Arcane Surge - (Increased Duration) - (Increased AoE)
This is normal Frostblink and serves many purposes. It's also instant cast and doesn't mess with your channeling. The Wintry Blast version has a relatively short maximum travel distance, so normal Frostblink will let you cross gaps that you may not be able to otherwise. Bonechill is a solid source of damage, and my understanding is that it should apply despite the "removes chill" feature of Frostblink of Wintry Blast. As long as the enemy is standing on the chilling ground created by Frostblink, they will have the Bonechill debuff. And as long as they have the debuff, then chills applied by any source -- including Winter Orb -- will cause increased damage taken. Arcane Surge is for mana sustain and a small amount of damage. Given the placement of the Elegant Hubris on the tree, the Arcane Capacitor cluster is a valid option to synergize with this. Increased Duration also applies to the Arcane Surge buff. Increased AoE improves the chilled ground coverage (which is slightly smaller than the damaging explosion radius, by the way). It is possible to obtain Elder boots with Increased AoE as a built-in link, allowing for you to run the entire 5L listed. This does increase the mana cost of Frostblink, but that also lets you level up Arcane Surge a bit more.
Other Mana Reservation
You can fit three 50% auras (Determination) on life with a Prism Guardian if you take the "20% increased life reservation efficiency" mastery and any other source of reservation efficiency. Replica Dragonfang's Flight works perfectly. A jewel corruption implicit is your other option. Arctic Armour exploits the fact that you are permanently stationary and synergizes extremely well with physical damage taken as fire. Discipline is a no-brainer if you are stacking energy shield. Clarity is for mana sustain and can be dropped if you stack reduced costs to a sufficient extent. Vitality and Purity of Fire to power Righteous Fire. I find having a decent amount of regeneration to be pretty important for a build to feel comfortable. And as elsewhere, it's nice to have recovery from multiple avenues: regeneration, leech, and instant leech. We're not investing heavily in Purity of Fire here, ending up at 80% maximum resistance (82% if you can somehow get to level 23). Precision, Herald of Ice, and Aspect of the Spider are pure damage increases if you can fit them. Blood and Stone and various Banner skills are defensive counterparts.
Open Link
You'll end up with one free 3L or 4L. This can be used for Portal and a Cast When Damage Taken setup. Or an Arcanist Brand setup. But with Increased AoE linked for a total of ~300% AoE (250% base plus the gem), the coverage on most utility skills will be comically large. Most of the screen. An entire Harvest plot and then some. The whole Delve encounter arena. Most of a Ritual or Ultimatum arena. Plenty of room to work with, even moving chaotically. You can go with either Sigil of Power or Frost Shield as a combination of defense and offense. Frost Shield is a better mechanically (and numerically until you get crit capped). For Sigil, you'll want to use Increased Duration to improve the overall uptime. It has an annoyingly long cooldown as well, and you will need to keep it under-leveled to ensure that you can actually ramp stages once per second. Despite all those downsides, it can add enough flat lightning damage to inflict a 5% shock on Pinnacle Bosses and so contributes much more damage than first glance. Alternatively, you can go with Cursed Ground, my latest obsession. At 300% AoE, it literally covers the screen. Touches the sides. Goes off the top and bottom. The texture is so enlarged it gets slightly grainy. It lasts for an amazing 34 seconds. That's an entire Ritual encounter, Simulacrum wave, or Delve event. It doesn't decrease curse effect. It doesn't require that you be inside it, unlike the other options, and appears at your cursor rather than around you. Best of all, it has no cooldown and can be repositioned at will. You can swap in a curse depending on need, with Frostbite, Elemental Weakness, and Punishment being the offensive options and Enfeeble or Temporal Chains being the defensive ones. Flasks Flask effect is pretty simple, because there are very few options available. 30% from a Micro-Distillery Belt base is the single largest source in the game by far and mandatory to hit 50%.
For the remainder, you can take two of three options
- 10% from Alchemist's Genius - 10% from a belt prefix - 10% from Natural Remedies on the tree Alchemist's Genius is available through two means: the Spiked Concoction notable through a flask medium cluster or the Essence of Horror craft on a belt. The latter is the most expensive option since the belt slot has a few other required mods and the flask affixes are inherently rare. (It's also available through Elegant Hubris notables, but that's not 100% uptime.) The belt prefix is craftable, and you only need the T2 Betrayal craft to get 10%. I find this preferable since it comes at a lower cost (-20% charges gained rather than -33%).
Flask Choices
Dying Sun, because that's a key item. You do want a good roll on this. The way the negative modifiers interact, it's much harder to sustain 100% in-combat uptime on a bad roll. Coruscating Elixir is mandatory for going full life reservation. You could change this out, but I think this is "worth" the most damage since it allows us to aim for a good double corrupt on Ghostwrithe. In any case, it would have huge cascading effects on your other build choices. Taste of Hate, because it's excellent defense. This build is heavily reliant on shifting incoming physical damage so that your minimal armour (7-12K) can actually function. A magical Topaz Flask with a suffix of your choosing. An increased armour suffix gets you the 12K quoted above (which is a noticeable decrease in incoming physical damage). The damage options are cast speed and critical strike chance, depending on whether you are capped or not. For defense, you could also get immunity to your ailment of choice. You could also go with something else entirely. Oriath's End is an interesting choice (flask effect scales explosion chance) and would still cover most of your lightning resistance requirements. A Granite Flask would substantially boost your armour, but then you do have to find resistances on equipment. (Some damage math below. I don't think it's necessary.) Flask sustain is trickier, especially since we are running four flasks on The Traitor. This gets us only 0.8 flask charges per second per flask. Like everything else in PoE, scaling multiple vectors is stronger than focusing on any single one. This means that you want to spread your flask investment across at least two if not all three of the flask sustain paths: duration, charges gained, and reduced charges used. You will need roughly 100-120% total sustain (for a net of 80-100% after the Betrayal flask mod malus). This gets you to guaranteed, permanent uptime on Coruscating Elixir and the Topaz Flask. Taste of Hate is close (you can 28% quality it with Betrayal to get closer) and should only be in danger of dropping off if you are spending multiple minutes idle. All three of these flasks are enchanted to be reused at end of effect (the most economical option). Dying Sun will have 100% uptime in combat. You can enchant either "used when you hit a rare or unique" or "used when full". The former is more economical, but the latter is better as it will also ensure 100% Alchemist's Genius uptime.
Flask Sustain
Reduced Charges Used is the rarest mod and is available as a suffix on belts with a single tier of 10-20%. This can be worth divining if you hit this alongside other perfect suffixes when rolling belts. I think the only other major source is the Careful Conservationist notable, which can be accessed through a Large Thread of Hope in the right-side power/frenzy charge jewel socket. There is a minor node in the Natural Remedies cluster as well. (That cluster as a whole is an excellent source of flask sustain, and you can add/remove points as needed to balance things out.) Increased Charges Gained is available through multiple places. Belt suffixes (up to 40%) and the Careful Conservationist and Essence Extraction tree clusters. Alchemist's Genius gives 20% when active. The Fasting notable on a flask cluster gives 20%. Lastly, Elegant Hubris can roll 10% gained on notables it affects. Increased Duration is available in the Natural Remedies cluster on the tree. It's otherwise mostly available through jewels, both cluster (6% per node) and Cobalt (up to 10%). As for the "gain a flask charge on critical strike" mod, it has some limitations to keep in mind: - It caps at 100%, so you can't stack both the Hunter prefix and a Watcher's Eye (Surgeon prefix on a flask and the flask mastery count as the same, but at <100% chance and are equally worthless) - It has an internal cooldown which seems to limit it to ~7.5 charges per second gained - It delivers one charge, scaled by flask charges gained, to a single eligible (not empty) flask With that in mind, the goal is to achieve 100% critical strike chance* and deliver roughly 4 flask charges per second to Dying Sun in combat (that isn't all of the charges, as your other flasks will "steal" some). Add in The Traitor and scale all of that by flask charge gain and it's more than sufficient to sustain Dying Sun even in a single target situation. Channeling skills are coded a bit differently than the rest in terms of how they interact with critical strike chance: they roll it per tick instead of once for the entire channel. (Otherwise, you could fish for a crit on this build and hold that crit for the entire map.) Wild conjecture incoming: It's possible that with Winter Orb and multiple projectiles, it actually rolls per projectile. If true, then this means that achieving >70% critical strike chance is sufficient for flask sustain, since that equates to a >99% chance for at least one of the projectiles to critically strike. The only reason I mention this is that gaining charges on hit (power on crit, frenzy on any) seems to happen faster than it should... Equipment With three permanent elemental flasks running, you need one elemental resistance affix of each element to get capped. Purity of Fire covers fire. Ideally, the Incursion cold glove mod covers cold. That means you need one source of lightning resist. As for chaos resist, you can cap it with three pieces alongside the Ghostwrithe. Purity of Flesh can help fill in the gaps. It is not worth taking the 10% physical shift as chaos mastery until this is (nearly) maxed.
Charms
The pure damage option is "critical strike multiplier per power charge" and "flat base critical strike at maximum power charges". However, the most fun option is "increased area of effect per power charge". Stacking that on all three charm slots plus a That Which Was Taken gets you to an easy 250% or so AoE. But this is absolutely the place where you can trade off for substantially more damage (roughly 10% more per charm). In terms of suffixes, I like energy shield regeneration, but you have many choices. Instant leech can be obtained here rather than investing on the tree (but I don't think the tree points are wasted).
Belt
The belt is the crux of the build. Interestingly (or horrifyingly), this means that this build does not (cannot) graduate to a Mageblood or Headhunter. On the bright side, the craft is only difficult in terms of rolling the suffixes you want. The remainder is deterministic. Total cost is about 8-10 Divines, majority of which is the base itself and a suffix lock. You want a Hunter-influenced Micro-Distillery Belt that has suitable suffixes. Prefixes are irrelevant unless you somehow manage to roll an organic T1 flask effect mod (you need that 50% breakpoint!) alongside good suffixes. In that unlikely scenario, you would get flask charge on crit from a Precision Watcher's Eye. You need at least one high-tier flask sustain mod. (Landing both flask mods is a truly heinous process.) Alchemist's Genius if you can afford it. (Alchemist's Genius plus both flask mods would be the holy grail.) This is also a good place to get strength, which you will need. A nearly perfect roll with catalysts solves all strength requirements, so a case can be made for rolling the belt using Essences of Rage. Remember that your flasks will be permanently active, so any "during flask effect" mods will also be. The Hunter "X% increased attributes" mod is good if you are stacking ES through stacking intelligence. From there, you lock suffixes and Harvest reforge critical. The Hunter mod for "gain a flask charge on crit" is guaranteed. You should have at least one prefix slot open and can craft the T2 Betrayal flask effect mod for the missing 10%. Exalt and pray for something useful.
Boots
The big decision to make is whether you want to use Ralakesh's Impatience. That will guide all other gearing decisions. Ralakesh's Impatience - Cheaper option, but lower defense ceiling - Enables Malachai's Loop, which is an amazing shield in terms of offensive power - Enables a bunch of other uniques (Willclash, Tulfall, Badge of the Brotherhood) You don't have to use all of the enabled uniques, either. I think the shield is a no-brainer and the amulet is close behind, but you will have to solve for the shock from Malachai's. Stormshroud or your available Topaz Flask suffix are both good options. Rare Boots - Prism Guardian to get three 50% auras on life - Replica Dragonfang's Flight to handle both reservation and attribute requirements - You get to use/craft more rares In this case, your goal is to get as much ES as possible on either Arcanist or Sorcerer Boots. Keep in mind that intelligence scales ES (hard at high gear levels). You can live without a move speed modifier on the boots since you rarely walk anywhere, which means you can really stack all three ES prefixes. Ideally, you will also try to fit in chaos resistance here (and can do so deterministically with Essences of Envy or Harvest reforge chaos). Note that the Delve cart uses your character's movement speed for its own movement speed. At base movement speed, you can easily outpace the cart when channeling.
Weapon
Void Battery is the obvious choice. Cheap and there are a few different corruption implicit options open to you. - Clean: Without Malachai's Loop, you're not stacking a ton of increased damage, so this isn't actually an awful choice - Elemental penetration: The highest damage option, by about 2% - AoE: To get the next breakpoint - PCoC: Occultist Forbidden Power charge generation is kind of slow, so it's nice to have another source Your other options are a +2 rare (not better until you get to very expensive options) or Divinarius (also expensive, and AoE in this league is so easy to stack that this isn't worth it).
Shield
As mentioned previously, Malachai's Loop or Prism Guardian. A case could be made for some rare options, but keep in mind that dropping Prism Guardian is a huge blow to life reservation efficiency since Arrogance has a 200% multiplier. One obscure option is the Delve mod that grants ~70% increased cold damage plus a decent chunk of flat cold damage to spells, since Frostblink of Wintry Blast has an excellent (180%) multipler for added damage. You could also double up on Void Batteries, the non-shocking charge stacking option.
Helm
If you go Willclash, then you will want to aim for a good corruption implicit. Power charge or mana reservation. The ideal rare helm is going to be T1 flat ES, T1 increased ES, and suffixes of choice. This lets you craft the Betrayal physical taken as fire prefix with minimal loss in ES. At higher budgets, keep in mind that chaos resist can be forced through Harvest, in which case you will probably want a fractured suffix (intelligence) on the base. This lets you roll prefixes (fossils, essence, whatever), lock them, and reforge chaos for at least two guaranteed suffixes. This technique applies to the boots as well, if you go the rare route.
Chest
Ghostwrithe is what I landed on as the best combination of offense and defense. As a unique armour, this lets you aim for a good double corrupt, which is a very large damage increase. And because Winter Orb has so many tags, there are quite a few applicable options: all gems, AoE, duration, and projectile. The 50% chaos resist doesn't hurt either and makes it pretty easy to cap. You want +2 AoE since it affects both of your main skills. Beyond that, +1 all gems is BiS by a very small margin, but that combination is BiS for many other builds too. +2 to a Winter Orb-only category alongside +2 AoE is the most sensible option. The conversion mod on the chest works like damage conversion, meaning that energy-shield-which-used-to-be-life is scaled as both energy shield and life. This gives the dual life-ES nodes on the tree particularly good value (at least until high gear levels when intelligence scaling wins out). In terms of wilder options (that may require extensive rebuilding): - Cloak of Flame would make you near-immortal, especially with Arctic Armour - Shavronne's Wrappings would let you drop Coruscating Elixir for a different flask (but you will lose a ton of ES along the way) - Sporeguard has an amazing stationary bonus that you can take full advantage of, but its rarity makes getting a good double corruption difficult - A rare would be less damage since you are giving up the corruption implicits, but there are definitely influenced juicy mods available (base crit, additional curse, aura effect, physical damage shift)
Gloves
You want a high ES rare. This the easiest place to fit Aspect of the Spider if you want to use it. (It is nice, especially since the AoE scales with your stats and so covers most of the screen. Finally, a reasonable example of "nearby".) Ring suffixes have stronger options, whereas the main competition here is intelligence. In terms of other damage options, the Incursion Temple cold mod is the best. Betrayal also provides options, both the combination global critical strike chance and elemental damage and the "damage during flask effect" mods. The latter cannot be unveiled on items you craft and is a prefix, so it also interferes with stacking maximum ES.
Amulet
Replica Dragonfang's Flight if you are not using Ralakesh's. Badge of the Brotherhood if you are. I have not been able to math a better rare, even some monster +2 skills, 20% cast speed, 40% crit multiplier beast. You really want a perfect attribute reduction roll on the Dragonfang's to get things to fit neatly.
Rings
Frostbite on hit is a substantial damage increase if you can fit that in somehow. In my opinion, a fractured Delve ring or as an implicit is best. Ideal suffixes are cast speed, critical multiplier, critical chance, intelligence, and chaos resist. As for prefixes, rings are a major contributor to fixing your mana problems. At medium budget and above, the goal is to unveil either flat mana regeneration or reduced mana cost on both rings and craft flat cost reduction as well. Keep in mind that with Ghostwrithe, the flat life that comes with the first mod counts as 30 flat ES and you can still slam actual flat ES on top. Polaric Devastation is an enormous damage increase but will cause mana problems. Tree and Pathing Nothing fancy happening in the tree. You want Pain Attunement, so you path that way. You ideally want to get all three power charges somehow, which brings you close to the aura (Sovereignty and Influence) and spell crit (Arcane Potency and Doom Cast) clusters. You generally take all of the hybrid life-ES nodes (Purity of Flesh, Melding, Written in Blood). Divine Judgement and Disciple of the Forbidden are obvious candidates for damage. I take Zealot's Oath and also the instant leech mastery through Light Eater. You have access to two cluster jewel sockets if you need them. More details below. If you do path all the way to get Infused directly, that jewel socket allows for you to reach Careful Conservationist through a Large Thread of Hope alongside a few other juicy nodes (Assassination, Mark the Prey). Utmost Intellect is only worth it at high gear levels.
Cluster Jewels
So many options here. Unless you get Alchemist's Genius on your belt, you will need at least one medium flask (duration) cluster. In terms of large cluster jewels, Blanketed Snow is the highest damage notable. Disorienting Display is an overlooked but very good suffix notable (and happens to make getting Blanketed Snow on the "bottom" more reasonable). In terms of medium, you have a few options: - Flask duration: Special Reserve is a pretty good notable to roll alongside Spiked Concotion or Fasting - AoE: Vast Power and Magnifier allow you to scale AoE to an even more absurd degree - Channeling skills: Precise Focus is amazingly good value and Enduring Focus is one of the only ways to generate endurance charges without being hit, but you do need two clusters to make it reliable Small clusters can be used for reservation efficiency, but should be avoided if possible. Jewel sockets are valuable.
Elegant Hubris
Obviously critical to the build, as the Balbala version is what enables The Traitor. The two good locations for this are the very top of the tree (Hex Master becomes The Traitor) and the left-hand side (The Agnostic). I think The Agnostic wins out, since there are five notables that might be worth taking (depending on what the Elegant Hubris rolls on top) and the +4 Dexterity per small node adds up. In fact, it can be sufficient to satisfy your gear requirements. The argument for the Hex Master location is that you can also run Impossible Escape there and just pluck the best notables. You would need a source of dexterity on gear in that case. There's some additional synergy if you're willing to take Liege of the Primordial via Forbidden jewels alongside Golem Commander, but the golems still don't survive very well in juiced maps and is more conceptually fun than anything else.
Impossible Escape
Impossible Escape is an amazing item and there are a few use cases available for this build. Arrow Dancing gets you access to the best flask sustain cluster on the tree. Hex Master gets you Heart of Ice and Breath of Rime, the two best cold damage nodes on the tree. Your ability to freeze is scaled by duration, which is why Breath of Rime is so useful and will allow you to freeze map bosses even at relatively low damage. Unwavering Stance enables Brink of Death (4% regeneration) and a large amount of maximum resistances.
Watcher's Eye
This is the other source of "gain a flask charge on critical strike" (when affected by Precision). Beyond that, there isn't anything build-enabling here. In the Prism Guardian version, you are running a ton of auras, so there's plenty of flexibility here. You have your usual damage suspects which I won't go into detail about. In terms of defensive options, there are two Discipline-aligned mods worth commenting on: - ES gain on hit: This works even if you don't deal damage, meaning it functions as sustain even in the Delve darkness. But this buildn't isn't ideally positioned to make use of it (a decent but an overwhelming number of hits per second) and is probably not worth it given the expense. I find instant leech is just as good (better if you ignore Delve). - Increased ES recovery rate: This is a global scalar on ES recovery of all types, and because we utilize two types (regeneration and leech), it gives significant value. Defenses The obvious ones are maxed resistances (80 fire with Purity, 76 lightning with Unnatural Calm) and three permanent flasks (one of each elemental type). That gives you an effective 82.5% elemental resistance at all times. Arctic Armour's less damage taken bonus should always apply in combat. Physical is handled through a combination of endurance charges, physical shift, and armour. You can stack shift through Taste of Hate (22% shift with 50% flask effect), a corrupted shield implicit (8%), helm mods (8% Betrayal craft, 6%+ Eldritch implicit), and an Armour and Energy Shield mastery (10%). The Faith and Steel cluster is not the greatest value, but it also falls inside the Elegant Hubris radius and so can be buffed somewhat. Assuming 2,000 incoming physical damage: - With 40% physical damage shift (flask, tree, and shield) and four endurance charges, the build takes about 320 final damage (200 physical) at 7K armour and only 220 (100 physical) at 12K. - Adding a 14% shift helm (54% total) on top gets us to 260 damage taken (110 physical) at 7K armour and 215 (a measly 65 physical) at 12K. Recovery is a combination of regeneration (~1,000 per second after Righteous Fire) and leech. Because of pathing to the mastery, we are able to leech 16% of ES per second, of which 1.6% arrives instantly (almost 100 ES per hit at 6K total ES, times four per volley times almost six volleys per second, plus six hits per second from Frostblink). Righteous Fire can always be turned off (well, not turned on) for rough maps. Gameplay - Hold down channel (keyboard button is better than right-click) - Point mouse curser in rough direction of enemies - Hold on Use (normal) Frostblink to avoid slams and to apply Bonechill. Lay down cursed ground for anything that doesn't die instantly or if it's cued (Essence, Delve, Ritual, etc). Frostblink has both a minimum (ugh) and maximum teleport distance, so you have to move each time, and you will be moving at least 3.3 times per second. This can make fine adjustments... difficult, so open maps are much easier. Doorways can be somewhat infuriating if you just happen to be the wrong minimum distance away. The skill seems to function by drawing a line between your character and the cursor, then projecting your character along that line until either it arrives at the cursor or hits something along the way. As such, you cannot "cut corners" when traveling. At a certain point, Frostblink of Wintry Blast does enough damage that it becomes sufficient for clear and Winter Orb is really only for tough rares or bosses. And for single target, the best approach essentially to circle-strafe-teleport around them, close enough to ensure that Frostblink hits twice and make their targeting completely unable to keep up. Foul Ritual Altars can be problematic. (Or whichever one inflicts grasping vines.) That will disable Frostblink. If you do enough damage, this is fine and you just channel Winter Orb in place. Otherwise, you'll need to walk a bit every three teleports to keep the vines off. Mana Siphon rares are deeply problematic. The minimum teleport distance is exactly wrong for navigating the siphon donut. Your best bet is to stay outside entirely. Frostblink can still hit them at high enough AoE and Winter Orb definitely can. Lightning Warp can be swapped in for Frostblink of Wintry Blast, but you'll probably want to do so in Standard only, as you absolutely need -100% duration to make it feel acceptable. I will note that it has different mechanics than Frostblink: - Lightning Warp gets snagged much more easily on things (your character body seems to be bigger in the projection) - Lightning Warp has no minimum distance and allows for channeling in place - Lightning Warp has an insane maximum distance and so is much faster in truly open environments - Frostblink seems to be slightly "smarter" targeting in that it will bounce you backwards if you are stuck against a corner or wall (Lightning Warp absolutely does not) - Lightning Warp damage is nothing amazing, whereas Frostblink is pretty insane (a single massive hit of >1,000,000 damage with +70% freeze duration, meaning anything in the game that can be frozen, will be) Last edited by dandylions on Jan 13, 2024, 8:09:39 PM Last bumped on Jan 13, 2024, 5:31:31 PM
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