GC Totem Hiero Link Question

Hey guys,

I have a pretty solid GC totem Hiero (https://pastebin.com/SWP0feJi) and i'm thinking about investing in a 6l soul mantle. It's a decent chunk of my currency so i wanted to ask something before i do.

Right now the guide i'm using says to use cold penetration, but when i put in elemental focus, my dps shoots up. It's a good 35k higher dps if i replace cold pen and 60k higher if i add it. I know the cold pen calcs can get funky, should i use ele focus instead of cold pen? Would using both be worth it?

With soul mantle your links should be: GC + Ele Focus + Conc Effect/inc aoe + Cold Pen + Controlled Destruction + Faster Casting.

Penetration shines mostly on bosses, and with GC you have 20x more than enough damage to melt everything else in spit seconds.

Why not ask in the thread for the guide you're following?

Anyway, there's no single right answer for best links, they depend on your gear setup. That's what PoB is for, and there's nothing wonky about the way it calcs cold pen, you can trust it. Set it to sort gems by DPS and go. Looks like your best supports are:

conc + hypo + controlled d + cold pen + inc crit

Swap hypo for ele focus if you want slightly more damage, but losing the freeze sucks IMHO, and the damage difference isn't very big - 5.3% according to PoB.

Your spec is a whole different issue. It doesn't match either of the build guides I'm familiar with on these forums, and frankly it kind of blows. The trip to the scion life pizza is too expensive for too little gain, when you could go over to shadow for incredible crit bonuses AND some life. Celestial judgement is also shit, as is investing in power charges in tree unless you have some synergy for them. You're just getting 40% crit for 2 points. Blah. Follow either of these guides for a lot more damage, without really losing much/any life:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1976479

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2108654


With a 6L soul mantle and optimal gems under your current build, you'd have 119k shaper DPS per totem. With a more standard (and good) tree, that jumps up to 152k shaper DPS with almost no trade-off (you lose 1% life).

There are other issues with your build, such as single kika + self flag? No. Either do 2x kikas, or flask off your curses. I could go on and on, but then I'd just be writing a guide, and they already exist for you to read.

edit: I should add, for the cost of a 6L you could upgrade your weapons and probably gain significantly more damage than the 6L gives. Your mainhand dagger is particularly meh.

thank you! appreciate you taking a look and all the pointers!