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

is this in general a good league starter build?

and with all we know yet is this build good as a 3.9 league starter?

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alvincheng wrote:

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ZiiimZooon wrote:

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alvincheng wrote:

I tried uncheck blood rage in PoB and it doesn't affect my DPS. The only change is the degen. Do blood rage and onslaught stack?

Thinking of replacing blood rage with cold snap, since I have onslaught on my boots.

Blood Rage provides Frenzy Charges :)

I know, that's why I want to replace with cold snap to get frenzy charges. Since unchecking blood rage in PoB did not affect anything, other then the degen.

I'd still use Blood Rage over Cold Snap, so I don't have to stop channeling. The sheer amount of leech even without ES on hit is good enough imo :)

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DrGimpfeN wrote:

is this in general a good league starter build?

and with all we know yet is this build good as a 3.9 league starter?

Is it a top tier league starter if you are pushing ladder and race rewards? Mostly no.

Is it a good league starter for trade league? Definitely.

Is it a good league starter for SSF? No.

Min-maxing this build is expensive, but it is reasonably affordable compared to other builds to make a character that can clear maps well.

Some thoughts on the SSF aspect - although I am still going to do this as a league starter:

There is way too much time spent farming div cards for fertile mind. I've done about 5 hours and only at 10 div cards from High Gardens. I am already way overleveled in the zone, but the max penalty once you hit level 68 is -20% drop rate. I get a div card usually every run, but the div card is more often Emperor's Luck.

Incantation is not feasible to farm before maps - A6 western forest I farmed about 2 hours and did not have a single div card drop. Having done some reading the drop rates of div cards are extremely low and you are most likely going to receive Lantador's Lost Love card when one does. It 'appears' from the map screenshots for 3.9 that burial chambers and spider forest will be approximately T4 and will not be hidden at first. These will be my targets to rush to for farming incantation (will probably farm two just in case I RIP).

It's a pretty sketchy build early on for HCSSF as good ES gear can be limited, the skill tree has no HP scaling (for obvious reasons), and at this time I cannot benefit from any leech nodes due to using icicle mines. I will need to use this skill into maps until I can get a Whispering Ice. At which point I can finally convert to CI and take advantage of ES leech.

Interesting new body armour:



Since it does have int I can't help but wonder if we could utilize it somehow. We do have a ton of mana due to stacking int after all. Probably not worth using over shaped regalia (although it might be hard to get in 3.9) but probably worth at least considering.

Getting to 1 life via chaos inoculation apparently is not considered reserving life. So this will be a ~70 ES ~45 int 2% ES regen chest. I.e., worthless to us.

Well ofc it won't work with CI. You would drop CI and go Low-Life instead for 30% more spell damage with Pain Attunement. You can already do that with Shavs and it works pretty great. But this might potentially be better than Shavs, since you actually get int. Big question is how's the max es compared to shavs. Edit: Checked, a lot depends on gear, but even with 0 investment into life it'll be at least 100 base es higher than shavs.

Also something worth considering would be going Hiero/Guardian. Although now that I look at Hiero we'd have a ton unreserved mana > bigger aoe, which lowers our dps on single target, so that won't work. Guardian still sounds interesting though. Especially for delving because there's potential there for pretty big vaal molten shell. And defenses is something we need to think about anyway, since chances are es/oh watchers is going to be ridiculously expensive. (Expecting 20+ex easily)

As a new player (Blight is my 2nd league only), I must say that this build is incredibly well written, espcially for newbies, and I've read dozens of them.

Many, many thanks Kelvynn !

I'm still going through the build, trying to understand as much as I can, and I have two questions (sorry if it's already been answered in the 55 pages, I haven't read them all) :

- is there any way to see the build's dps ? I only see an average one on PoB for Icestorm, and like 300 dps for cyclone
- how big of a downgrade would it be not to have the watcher's eye ? The ES leech/regen drops quite a lot without it, is there any existing alternative ? I'm asking that because they may become really rare and expensive in 3.9.

Thanks in avance if anyone can answer, and I hope the build won't be nerfed with 3.9 patch ^^

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Grosbool wrote:

- is there any way to see the build's dps ? I only see an average one on PoB for Icestorm, and like 300 dps for cyclone

Path of Building is a stand-alone program that lets you upload and tinker with builds. It can display an average DPS for Icestorm.

I'm still not sure how much I trust that; my effective DPS is calculated to be 27,568.8. which seems really low. I know my gear isn't the best, but it just feels wrong. Part of it might be that I can't get the Icestorm calc to incorporate Bonechill and Aspect of the Spider. More likely, though, is that Icestorm lasts for over 6 seconds, so stacking them in one spot means you have 6xDPS vs stationary bosses.

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Grosbool wrote:

- how big of a downgrade would it be not to have the watcher's eye ? The ES leech/regen drops quite a lot without it, is there any existing alternative ? I'm asking that because they may become really rare and expensive in 3.9.

I do not have a Watcher's Eye and although I really wish I had one, I have not run into any content that I couldn't do. I did my first Shaper fight yesterday with one death, which I'm happy with considering I was learning the fight as it went. I will add I haven't done Uber Elder yet, and I don't know if I'll get to it before the Atlas changes. I also haven't done either Atziri yet, because the elemental and curse reflects just seem like a pain. Don't feel like dealing with it.

But, 3.9 is going to up the difficulty, and I don't know how that impacts the build. From what I've mostly heard from GGG, they mostly said that monster health will be increasing, so maybe our clearspeed goes down a little, but Watcher's Eye doesn't help with clearspeed, except maybe on elemental reflect maps?

The biggest variable to how much you'll need Watcher's Eye is going to be the new bosses; not just the Atlas bosses but the Metamorph ones, too. We don't know how hard they hit, yet.

tl;dr: Not having Watcher's Eye is a downgrade in the same way not having a Ferrari is a downgrade: it'd be nice to have, but you don't need it.

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Grosbool wrote:

Thanks in avance if anyone can answer, and I hope the build won't be nerfed with 3.9 patch ^^

I don't see any reason the build will be directly nerfed in 3.9. They'll likely target minions and I'm sure minions will still be good even after nerfs (I plan on doing minions in 3.9). Minions are meta, Icestorm isn't. And the mechanics this build uses aren't seen on many meta builds, either, other than leech. I think we're safe.

The build might be nerfed by the overall balance patch in 3.9, though. It might take longer to clear maps. On the other hand, as a really tanky build, it might be perfect for killing all the bosses next league.

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Parabola01 wrote:

/nice and long answer ^^

Thanks for the reply Parabola !

I did a bit of research and it seems that PoB cannot calculate DPS for icestorm, and that it's kinda hard to do it even roughly (among reasons because you don't know how many shards will hit mobs).

On the videos posted by Kelvynn, DPS seems pretty good for clearing and more than decent on single target (like the Aul vid), but it's with endgame stuff and it would be easier to have an idea with your own items.

I got your point on the watcher's eye :) However there were some decent BMW/Porsche-class eyes until now that you could afford for a few ex (with "only" one good mod for example). These ones will probably be in the Ferrari class next league (until replacements are found with the new items, if there are any).

Minions will probably still be really, really strong next league so I guess you've made a good choice, but I'm a big fan of melee builds so that's not for me (good thing I started PoE in Legion though...).

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Grosbool wrote:

Thanks for the reply Parabola !

I did a bit of research and it seems that PoB cannot calculate DPS for icestorm, and that it's kinda hard to do it even roughly (among reasons because you don't know how many shards will hit mobs).

On the videos posted by Kelvynn, DPS seems pretty good for clearing and more than decent on single target (like the Aul vid), but it's with endgame stuff and it would be easier to have an idea with your own items.

I got your point on the watcher's eye :) However there were some decent BMW/Porsche-class eyes until now that you could afford for a few ex (with "only" one good mod for example). These ones will probably be in the Ferrari class next league (until replacements are found with the new items, if there are any).

Minions will probably still be really, really strong next league so I guess you've made a good choice, but I'm a big fan of melee builds so that's not for me (good thing I started PoE in Legion though...).

One thing I forgot to mention is that I use a Fortify linked to Cyclone and I've found it to be very useful. You could use a second Whispering Ice and swap to the Fortify setup for bosses... but I'm pretty lazy for this build and just use Fortify all the time. It's not like we have trouble killing trash mobs, anyways.

Point is, Fortify really helps patch up a hole that not having Watcher's Eye leaves. Fortify is mentioned elsewhere in the thread for boss-killing, but I really don't mind it for general play.