[3.6] The Blizz Sorc - Icestorm/Winter Orb CI Occultist - Viable For Everything

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Added a new Strength/Dexterity Skill Gem - Flesh and Stone: Casts an aura that reserves a portion of your mana, causes nearby enemies to be Maimed while in Blood Stance, and causes those enemies to take increased physical damage. While in Sand Stance, this aura causes nearby enemies to be Blinded, and causes enemies not affected by the aura to deal less damage to you.

Any value in this for us?

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Immortal Call
No longer makes you immune to physical damage for a duration.
Base duration is now 1 second at all gem levels (from 0.4 seconds).
Now causes you to take 25% less elemental damage and 25% less physical damage at gem level 1, with the values growing based on the gem level, up to 34% less elemental damage and 35% less physical damage at gem level 20.

Is CWDT still useful? If not, it frees us a gem slot. Improvement to movement skill? Another aura?

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Vigilant Strike
Now has +2 to melee range at gem level 1 (from 0), up to +4 at gem level 20 (from +2).

Buff for us.

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It now requires 12 separate Incursions to enter the Temple of Atzoatl in the present (up from 11). This gives you an extra attempt to upgrade or change a room before you enter the Temple with Alva.

Tiny buff: double corruptions are super valuable for us.

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You no longer have to pay Vaal orbs equal to the cost in Chaos orbs to apply Zana's crafting modifiers to corrupted maps.

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Shaper's Strongholds now always contain additional monsters and Anomalies, as well as a bonus effect at random.
Shaper-influenced maps now always contain additional monsters.
Monster packs in Shaper-influenced maps with Anomalies now have a 20% chance to spawn with an Anomaly (down from 50%). These Anomalies now spawn a pack of monsters on death, which grant items and experience when slain.
Agents of the Void from Shaper-influenced maps now spawn monsters on death, which grant items and experience when slain.
White- and yellow-tier Shaper-influenced maps can no longer spawn Shaper clones which attack you. Red-tier Shaper-influenced maps now have a 25% chance for the Shaper clone encounters, in addition to other Shaper-influence mechanics.
Elder-influenced maps now always contain additional monsters.
White- and yellow-tier Elder-influenced maps can no longer spawn Elder slam tentacles. Red-tier Elder-influenced maps now have a 25% chance for the Elder slam tentacles, in addition to other Elder-influence mechanics.

Pretty nice.

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Winter Orb
Deals 30 to 37 cold damage at gem level 1 (from 25 to 31), up to 232 to 291 at gem level 20 (from 232 to 289).
Base duration is now 1.2 seconds (from 0 base duration, building solely on stages).
Now states that increases and reductions to cast speed now also apply to projectile frequency (actual behaviour is unchanged).
Now has a 20% reduced target acquisition range.
Now fires projectiles every 1.6 seconds (from every 0.8 seconds)
Now gains 25% increased duration per stage (from +0.4 seconds to base duration per stage).
Now has 100% more projectile frequency while channelling.

I never played the WO version of this build, presumably the base duration and projectile firing speed are the nerfs for us? Seems to me that this still helps with clearspeed, so it's still better than Scorching Ray.

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Occultist
Wicked Ward has been removed.
Vile Bastion: No longer requires any Ascendancy notables. It now grants 1% energy shield regeneration per second for each enemy you or your minions have killed recently, up to 10% (from a maximum of 30%). No longer grants +150 to maximum energy shield.
Each of the small passives on the Occultist Ascendancy tree now grant 6% increased energy shield (from 8%).

This does not sound like the end of the world either.

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The Dense Fossil can no longer craft increased Armour, Evasion or Energy Shield suffix modifiers and now has new mods it can craft on each slot.
The Dense Fossil modifier "15% increased Energy Shield from Body Armour" was incorrectly acting multiplicatively with other sources of increased Energy Shield. This has been fixed, and affects all existing items with this modifier. To partially (but intentionally not entirely) compensate for this change, it now grants 20-30% increased Energy Shield from Body Armour. Existing items with this modifier can be updated to the new values with a Divine Orb.

The biggest nerf?

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You can now queue skills. By using one skill while another skill is in progress, that skill will be used immediately after the current skill has finished.

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Projectiles are now treated as having a smaller collision size with regards to terrain than monsters. This should alleviate the frustration of casting Freezing Pulse through a doorway and watching your projectiles vanish before hitting anything.

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Smoothed the transition between resolutions while Dynamic Resolution is enabled.

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Improved performance of various game elements, with a particular focus on high-intensity visual effects.

QoL for us, hopefully we're included in the final quote...

wow thats hurts really hard.
no es is a big hit so perhaps the scion version of the build will be really good again ? The reflect immun is also a nice thing. perhaps with legion reflect will be a thing ?

will see. All in all its not fine. :-(

I thinkt the biggest nerf will be the immortal call thing. With that mino was a cake, but it will hurt all classes and armour or eva will be buffed against es with it.

Managed to import the new tree in Path of Building via reddit info thread and compared the new tree on a previous end game character of mine (OccWItrayed lv 100 Occultist from Betrayal league -so no Synthethis league mods on any piece of gear) with the old tree:


Note: It seems that we cannot use anymore Might of the Meek jewel in the slot above Witch since it disable Light Eater notable passive :( so i replaced in new tree with a decent rare (cold dmg/spell dmg/intelligence) and updated the difference in ES and DPS values

There are some changes regarding ES as following:

-overall loss of ES - 2300 (from 18.407 down to 16.088) this kinda hurts :)
-in Ascendancy instead of Wicked Ward which no longer exists i took Profane Bloom notable - so this is a nice DPS boost for clearing.
-average Shaper hit for single target remains almost the same (old 44.837 vs. new 44.454, no Frenzy Charges taken in consideration for both variants due to dropping Blood Rage)

some tree changes:
- Arcane Focus node lost 2% increased maximum energy shield.
- Light Eater cluster (3 nodes) was moved left of Cruel Preparation cluster in Witch area so to get it you need 1 more skill point(+ 10 intelligence) compared to old tree
- all Ascendancy minor nodes lost 2% increased maximum energy shield
- Vile Bastion Ascendancy notable has now 10% max energy shield regen per second down from 30%.

We can go even further and instead of Vile Bastion nerfed notable we can take Malediction notable (which didn't get nerfed) and to resolve Stun issues we can use fully updated Soul of the Brine King Pantheon (as we used before in Scion version)

So overall in my opinion build is still viable in Occultist pure cold version using WO as support for clearing, we get less ES and less ES recovery rate (no more Soul of Arakaali/Blood Rage and no more IC) but we get higher DPS thanks to Profane Bloom and some damage mitigation/DPS buff eventually if we take Malediction(2 curses, Malediction effect on cursed targets) notables.




Made a simulation on the same char (OccWItrayed lv 100) but now as Ascendant (Elementalist/Inquisitor):

-overall loss of ES - 2000 (from 18.407 down to 16.478) better than pure Occultist variant
-average Shaper hit for single target is higher for this variant (old tree Occultist 44.837 vs. new tree Elementalist/Inquisitor 52.717, no Frenzy Charges taken in consideration for both variants due to dropping Blood Rage)
- we are no longer immune to stun so Soul of the Brine King pantheon is a must
- no longer fully immune to Freeze and Chill but because of Inquisitor Ascendancy we are immune to all ailments as long as we are on Consecrated Ground - almost 100% uptime ? i am not sure about up time of Consecrated Ground
- 100% immune to reflect due to Elementalist Ascendancy
- we have 2 golems (chaos and flame)
- Intelligence higher than pure Occultist variant

So this version seems a bit better than pure Occultist at this moment!



Also made a simulation on the same char (OccWItrayed lv 100) but now as Ascendant(Inquisitor/Occultist):

- overall loss of ES - 2000 (from 18.407 down to 16.478) better than pure Occultist variant same as Elementalist/Inquisitor
-average Shaper hit for single target is also higher for this variant (old tree Occultist 44.837 vs. new tree Occultist/Inquisitor 48.393, no Frenzy Charges taken in consideration for both variants due to dropping Blood Rage)
- 100% immune to stun due to Occultist Ascendancy
- no longer fully immune to Freeze and Chill but because of Inquisitor Ascendancy we are immune to all ailments as long as we are on Consecrated Ground - almost 100% uptime ? i am not sure about up time of Consecrated Ground
- we can have 2 curses (Enffeble/Frostbite , Enfeeble/Temp Chains)
- Intelligence higher than pure Occultist variant
- some additional permanent Energy shield regen (1.5%) from Occultist Ascendancy

This variant also seems a bit better than pure Occultist version!

Conclusion : All 3 variants (100% Cold damage) are OK in my opinion is only a personal option if you choose one or another with pure Occultist being it seems the weakest of all 3 but not by a big margin.

don't the changes kill this version of the build at least as league starter? straight up nerf to all ES and no longer free es from ascendancy to compensate for no shield. also, much harder es crafting? besides, the ascendancy doesn't give that much after the nerfs.. looking at trickster/Scion perhaps even inquisitor?

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lilianmarius wrote:

Also made a simulation on the same char (OccWItrayed lv 100) but now as Ascendant(Elementalist/Occultist):

- overall loss of ES - 2000 (from 18.407 down to 16.478) better than pure Occultist variant same as Elementalist/Inquisitor
-average Shaper hit for single target is also higher for this variant (old tree Occultist 44.837 vs. new tree Occultist/Inquisitor 48.393, no Frenzy Charges taken in consideration for both variants due to dropping Blood Rage)
- 100% immune to stun due to Occultist Ascendancy
- no longer fully immune to Freeze and Chill but because of Inquisitor Ascendancy we are immune to all ailments as long as we are on Consecrated Ground - almost 100% uptime ? i am not sure about up time of Consecrated Ground
- we can have 2 curses (Enffeble/Frostbite , Enfeeble/Temp Chains)
- Intelligence higher than pure Occultist variant
- some additional permanent Energy shield regen (1.5%) from Occultist Ascendancy

This looks better from your summary, particularly if we're using the flask from a couple of pages back that lets us use life flasks for ES, as it creates consecrated ground. It's 10% more damage and ~12% less ES. Of course, ES loss is bigger than that due to no dense fossils, but ~14k ES or whatever is more than enough.

Edit: POB trees are up, could you add what you've done please?

There's a new 3 point Intelligence Noteable: Utmost Intellect. 70 Int and 8% Increased int.

Neat!

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Gryphenprey wrote:

There's a new 3 point Intelligence Noteable: Utmost Intellect. 70 Int and 8% Increased int.

Neat!

Ah, good spot. I'm not convinced we'll be worse off than in Incursion, and infact probably better than then. I'd have a go at a tree, but I'm too unfamiliar with some of the changes in the past six months, e.g. Vaal Pact stuff.

https://clips.twitch.tv/DependableAmazonianSlothOptimizePrime

For Winter Orb discussion. Doesn't seem to be harmed much, so our main problem is reduced ES, and some ascendancy nerfs. With 7% int from the tree, the new flask, and presumably the new jewels, seems likely we're better off than in incursion league.

I have no idea what I'm doing with this version, including the ascendancy class and vaal pact, but as no-one else is around to post a suggested tree yet, here's my 10-minute-first-attempt for elementalist/inquisitor in PoB:

http://poeurl.com/coZB

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NoImagination wrote:

I have no idea what I'm doing with this version, including the ascendancy class and vaal pact, but as no-one else is around to post a suggested tree yet, here's my 10-minute-first-attempt for elementalist/inquisitor in PoB:

http://poeurl.com/coZB

Not sure how to use that (link doesn't do anything useful.) Include a pastebin link instead?