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

Looks like a lot of questions can't be answered easily without seeing how the new Icestorm works. So let's cover some basics first...

1. Start/early leveling: is there some new skill that's great for leveling? My favorite start has been the mines (currently in the leveling guide). After Freezing Pulse was buffed, I tried it again in 3.11, like in the old times. Made a Witch to get the gem, stashed it and made the Scion. But even after the buff, FP felt very underpowered compared to the mines, and I switched back right after Merveil. All bosses are so much easier with the mines than with FP. So I'm going to keep recommending the mines in the leveling guide, but there are many new skills, maybe there is something even better now?

2. Farmville is not getting added to the core game, right? That means you can forget about mirror tier items for everybody and aim at whatever is realistic. The new enchantment mods on armour should help. Explode chests and synthesized boots are out, or is there still another way of getting them with a reasonable budget? Is the Unnerve mod (gloves?) reasonably obtainable?

3. With the boot selection getting back from godly stats to normal, is The Stampede going to be worth using again, for the QoL value?

4. All useful Watcher's Eyes got nerfed by 50%, including ES on hit. Combined with there being only half as many hits, and a very limited number of storms, looks like the value of this jewel is going down big time. Not sure if I'm going to bother getting it this league.

5. Herald of Ice, maybe? Extra added flat damage that's going to work better now, and with bigger single hits we may see more explosions? May be good for clearing.

6. Frost Shield looks interesting. I don't see any numbers how much ES it's going to drain from you, but I assume it's not a lot, possibly the same 4x910 as the amount of life it has. And then it 'buffers' that life to be used against enemy hits. This should be nice against bosses that try to 1-shot you.

7. @LiNGeN: Was the crit version just an exotic high budget thing, or do you think it can be viable with cheap items too?

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ultra_super_hyper wrote:

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LiNGeN wrote:

Spoiler

Allright. I'm going to compare post-patch with pre-patch with my Harvest character Plant_Icestorm_Reap_FPS.

Right now I will run:
1. A Simulacrum
2. A T16 magic Purifier Elder Guardian Promenade with +40% Monster Resistance

Using these sextants:

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3. And finally a T16 Blighted Promenade

* I have respecced into a defensive tanky version with an ES on hit Watcher's Eye.
* I have removed Awakened Elemental Focus, Awakened Controlled Destruction & Hypothermia from the staff and will only use Cyclone, Lvl6 Awakened CwC, Lvl 21 Concentrated Effect (as well as Fortify & Infused Channelling for immortality's sake <:-} )

Tomorrow when the patch is released. I will do the same thing over again to try out all the new mechanics. I have a 2nd Simulacrum, a 2nd identical T16 Resistant Purifier Promenade & another Blighted Promenade ready waiting for that when the time comes.

I will record all the runs.

Thank You for this! Should be super helpful in theorycrafting!

Uploading videos now. Will publish tomorrow when I've done the remaining three post-patch tests.

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Kelvynn wrote:

1. Start/early leveling: is there some new skill that's great for leveling?

I went with FP in Harvest, but I agree, it feels weak. Only after getting the Threshold jewel & Bitterdream did it start kicking off but thats in Act 5 where we could probably buy the staff in Act 6 already.

I am thinking about going with Wands. Lightning Tendrils/Mine until Merveil & then Creeping Frost & Wintertide Brand. After rescuing Tolman in Act 3 Spellslinger with Cold Snap & Power Siphon. The rest is fairly similar skill gem wise. I got the inspiration from Badger's Coldslinger leaguestarter build, it uses a lot of similar gems and is based on cold damage as well as a passive tree path that is not too deviating from ours. Link to leveling section here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdoHPedhC68&t=1585s

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Kelvynn wrote:

2. Farmville is not getting added to the core game, right? That means you can forget about mirror tier items for everybody and aim at whatever is realistic. The new enchantment mods on armour should help. Explode chests and synthesized boots are out, or is there still another way of getting them with a reasonable budget? Is the Unnerve mod (gloves?) reasonably obtainable?

No its not. Synthesized items may or may not get added, but GGG will do it later on according to prior announcement (they obviously aren't sure what to add). I suspect the new labyrinths will stay, weapon & body armour enchantments seems to be coming in Heist so those will probably stay. I guess Winged scarabs/Infused Beachheads will also stay. I think its just the GG gear crafting from Harvest thats gonna get wiped. Getting Unnerve/Culling gloves is possible via alteration spamming the desired affixes and then Awakener Orb merging, but you will have a RNG-fest to get good Int/ES/Resist rolls along with that without Harvest. Both of these affixes have a weighting of 250 and both are going to be untagged mods in Heist (previously Unnerve had a Caster tag). So you would have to spend tons of chaos/alch-scour/alteration-regal spamming on them - but they are fairly possible to craft on their own.

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Kelvynn wrote:

3. With the boot selection getting back from godly stats to normal, is The Stampede going to be worth using again, for the QoL value?

I've still never used them. I'll leave it to Breken or someone else to answer - but since he used it in Harest I assuem its fine. I've seen plenty of other players go with Stampede.

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Kelvynn wrote:

4. All useful Watcher's Eyes got nerfed by 50%, including ES on hit. Combined with there being only half as many hits, and a very limited number of storms, looks like the value of this jewel is going down big time. Not sure if I'm going to bother getting it this league.

Yeah the nerfs are kinda meh because we also got a nerf to the main skill at the same time. However, there are useful offensive mods for Hatred & Zealotry (which also has Max ES Leech mod).

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Kelvynn wrote:

5. Herald of Ice, maybe? Extra added flat damage that's going to work better now, and with bigger single hits we may see more explosions? May be good for clearing.

I would be more interested to try out the explosion effectiveness rather than expect a good damage buff (the flat damage added is quite meh even with 60% of it, compared with reserving your mana elsewhere). I doubt it will be useful unfortunately. I think you have to both get base crit chance for HoI (which has zero crit chance to start with) as well as some investment into crit chance overall for it to chain explosions effectively. I tried it out in Harvest with my crit respecc, took off my explode chest and all, there were some explosions going off but nothing remotely as good as the explode chest.

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Kelvynn wrote:

6. Frost Shield looks interesting. I don't see any numbers how much ES it's going to drain from you, but I assume it's not a lot, possibly the same 4x910 as the amount of life it has. And then it 'buffers' that life to be used against enemy hits. This should be nice against bosses that try to 1-shot you.

The numbers are in the bottom of the gem tooltip, its a fixed amount and in my opinion its quite weak for the endgame content. There's also a cast time of 0.5s I believe. So no instant cast. It does however add Crit chance. We'd have to test it alongside everything else for sure.

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Kelvynn wrote:

7. @LiNGeN: Was the crit version just an exotic high budget thing, or do you think it can be viable with cheap items too?

I think it can be viable, but you need to reach a certain threshold with crit chance for it to really beat EO. You'd have to allocate some crit chance from the passive tree instead & this will unavoidably replace some defensive nodes somewhere.

Without flasks my crit chance came from 4 sources:
1. a lvl 21 Zealotry with 271% increased non-curse aura effect. Its base 40% increased crit chance was multiplied by 3.71 into 148%.
2. Emperor's Wit - 30%
3. Any consecrated ground gives a natural 100%
4. Serpent Stance crit wheel right to the left of EO - 100%

Crit multiplier:
* Serpent Stance - +50%
* Inquisitor ascendancy to enemies affected by any ailment - +30%
* A jewel or two with 1 crit multi mod.

Now, I think there's a more viable crit option by going for Maligaro's Virtuosity & focusing on crit chance only. It certainly is cheaper as investing into crit chance & crit multi takes a lot more. I would go with EO as a starter if channelling still works and then experiment with crit later on after a week or more.

@lingen

I can't wait to see your before and after videos.

I will be levelling a scion in anticipation.

Are the passive trees going to change at all for levelling?

So it looks like we can just go with the good old classic version of the build for the first few days. I don't see any problems with leveling through the campaign. With the league starter items you could hardly have more than 5 storms going on anyway.

One thing I really want to keep is Cyclone+CwC. The value of casting while moving is just too much. I'd hate to go back to self-casting. That means there are still 4 other sockets in the staff to experiment with.

SC is the most likely candidate to be dropped with the new limit. Also, casting Icestorm too frequently looks pointless, since the new storms will just replace the old ones without adding any DPS. So I plan to experiment with various other cold skills in that last socket. Perhaps something may be cast between Icestorms that adds some value. However, that value needs to be greater than using another support gem for Icestorm.

Duration cluster may be another thing to drop, if no additional skill is good enough. In that case we can focus on maximizing Icestorm damage while keeping the duration just long enough to match the channelling frequency (i.e. 1 storm should last as long as it takes to channel 5 times).

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Kelvynn wrote:

So it looks like we can just go with the good old classic version of the build for the first few days. I don't see any problems with leveling through the campaign. With the league starter items you could hardly have more than 5 storms going on anyway.

One thing I really want to keep is Cyclone+CwC. The value of casting while moving is just too much. I'd hate to go back to self-casting. That means there are still 4 other sockets in the staff to experiment with.

SC is the most likely candidate to be dropped with the new limit. Also, casting Icestorm too frequently looks pointless, since the new storms will just replace the old ones without adding any DPS. So I plan to experiment with various other cold skills in that last socket. Perhaps something may be cast between Icestorms that adds some value. However, that value needs to be greater than using another support gem for Icestorm.

Duration cluster may be another thing to drop, if no additional skill is good enough. In that case we can focus on maximizing Icestorm damage while keeping the duration just long enough to match the channelling frequency (i.e. 1 storm should last as long as it takes to channel 5 times).

I think this is going to be the winner.

I've been running Cyclone, CWC, Spell Cascade, Controlled Destruction, Hypothermia, and Conc Effect in recent leagues (non-trivial chance to freeze with my setup provides great cleanup and defense and is actually higher hit against bosses than pen), swapping Cascade for Ele Focus for bossing.

My plan is to swap to Cyclone, CWC, Controlled Destruction, Hypothermia, Cold Pen/ Added Cold (whichever maths out highest with my setup/ available pen), and Inc AoE for clear, swapping to Conc for bossing, or a total staff swap to change Cold Pen/ Added Cold and Inc AoE for Ele Focus and Conc.

With the new overlap values, I'm crossing my fingers that this setup will allow us to clear with reasonable reliability, assuming our hit damage stays high enough to not have to worry about stragglers.

Also thinking that running Herald of Ice will be much more worthwhile now, given the increased effectiveness of added damage and the value of the cleanup, now that we'll be truncating storms as we move (another reason why not running Ele Focus for clear to allow for freeze is valuable).

^ Indeed, bringing back Inc AoE to replace SC might just work the best for map clearing. With the impact area changes, the loss of hits from increased spread may not be an issue anymore.

If we are worried about high end single target damage, would a fire conversion and a flamethrower trap be any good?

the only thing that made this build feel tolerable mapping was spell cascade or awakened cascade.

with both options gone due to 5 storm limit, i cant imagine myselfmplaying this build anymore.

5 storm limit is such a lazy fix, GGG hasnt been putting much effort into their league balances lately. Pretty demoralizing when they nerf your favorite build because they simply dont feel like figuring out a way to balance it.

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AdamSanders wrote:

the only thing that made this build feel tolerable mapping was spell cascade or awakened cascade.

with both options gone due to 5 storm limit, i cant imagine myselfmplaying this build anymore.

5 storm limit is such a lazy fix, GGG hasnt been putting much effort into their league balances lately. Pretty demoralizing when they nerf your favorite build because they simply dont feel like figuring out a way to balance it.

I'm guessing that a single top WI player was consuming 10% of one server's resources when he was going full out stacking 100+ storms...

This was, first and foremost, GGG reducing server load. And your CPU load too.

Regardless, it's a done deal, let's move on and see if we can make it work again.

I agree that Spell Cascade was useful -- I used that all of the time, even with the lower DPS, simply because the increased coverage gave me more leech (including boss fights.) Now, with increased AOE in there instead of SC, maybe it's still acceptable.

The thing I am most curious about is, can we level up with other than mines or freezing pulse? Is there some OP levelling path? ...

Regarding mines, I hate them with a passion (it's the syncopation of MMMMMMM D <move> that annoys me to no end. I just want to do M and move on.) There was a random suggestion (for another build) that you use Smoke Mine, and put the Detonate on the RMB. That both moves you away, gives you defense, and also blows up any other mines you have out. Nice combo perhaps.

I have looked at the additional spells that could be added for clearing instead of SC. Nothing seems to be worth it.

The best damage was Frostbolt with the Frozen Trail jewel. But still too 'meh'. Each bolt does about 1.5x damage of a single Icestorm hit, and they move slower than I spin around with The Stampede (or Quicksilver), so I constantly overtake my own frostbolts. LOL.

Inc AoE instead of SC (and CD instead of CE) works just fine for clearing, even with the pre-patch hit model. Everything dies quickly enough.

So now we just need to see how much that 5 storm limit is going to suck.