[3.17] Wallach's Hierophant Freezing Pulse Totems (No Further Updates)

Think this build gets a very very minor buff to Freezing Pulse.

"Freezing Pulse
Now has an added Damage effectiveness of 200% (from 150%)"

Nothing else that I could see has changed. So another league with a viable end game build.

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NoImagination wrote:

After reading the whole thread, I'm left with a few questions:

1. Is elemental penetration or crit chance a better enchant for boots, given that Frost Bomb is often critting?

2. Is it worth getting Mark of the Shaper alongside elder Essence Worm? Perhaps as a step before getting double Worm?

3. What's the consensus on cluster jewels? They'll be harder to roll this league, so something for late-game?

4. Is Thread of Hope worthwhile?

5. Is it worth getting Supreme Decadence from Elegant Hubris in the CI jewel socket (or elsewhere?) four passives seems a lot.

If I like the build I'll probably go all-out, so I'm interested from a min-max perspective. I haven't played the last two leagues.

1. I touch on this a bit in the Boots section, but yes, I favor the elemental penetration boot enchant for this very reason. The loss of some available critical multiplier will only make it slightly more true in 3.11 I think.

2. It's not a bad idea, though the cost of getting an Elder influence Essence Worm may make the opportunity cost of that plan unreasonable. Essence Worms are not terribly expensive rings outside of this specific case; you might be better off just running a solid rare ring until you feel you have the eHP to handle a second Essence Worm.

3. Cluster jewels probably gained a bit of relative worth in 3.11 as the overall value of skill points in the core passive tree has dropped slightly. While it'll probably be a bit harder to get your full cluster sorted, it'll probably still be worth directly jumping into, say, a Cold Conduction medium cluster to get access to Shock fairly early into maps (these non-damaging ailment medium clusters still shouldn't be that hard to get in 3.11 in trade league). It should be part of your longer term plan if you're going to continue to invest, though.

4. For this build, I personally would say no, especially in a high budget setup after Atziri's Reflection. The issue is that we are pretty hungry for jewel sockets; two First Snow threshold jewels, Self-Flagellation, and Watcher's Eye are pretty much locked in, and the one outer socket we have clean 3 point access to needs to go to our cluster chain. That pretty much leaves 1 open socket, which I think favors Brutal Restraint in the Witch area as it won't need a keystone to convert to offer high value.

5. Seems like that would be a 5 point travel, and then a 2 point jump to actually allocate the converted CI keystone, so I'd definitely say no on that front.

"

Cheydinhal wrote:

I'm playing hardcore, is this a viable build pushing end game content?

Ive played this build before but always just to get some currency going, and feel like its squishy going into red maps (but also never put currency in the build so thats why im newbie hehe)

I don't play hardcore myself and generally avoid commenting on it since I lack the personal experience, but were I to try hardcore, I don't think I'd use this build without some significant defensive changes. The game has gotten considerably more dangerous since Conquerors of the Atlas. While I'm perfectly happy with the build in softcore, I still had maybe 30 deaths across Delirium league, and I'm very experienced with this build at this point. I'm sure a lot of that could be mitigated just by more hardcore-reasonable gameplay decisions (I'm sure I'd never run much of the content I did in a hardcore league), you'd still have a lot left to solve, especially given the much smaller trade pool available in hardcore.

Since we have cluster jewel with faster projectiles, wouldnt it be better to take freeze pulse dmg instead of our typical enchant?

Also - anyone figured out how to to go full ES? Is it even vaiable? Using essence worm was annoiyng as hell to be fair.

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fryderyknicze wrote:

Since we have cluster jewel with faster projectiles, wouldnt it be better to take freeze pulse dmg instead of our typical enchant?

Also - anyone figured out how to to go full ES? Is it even vaiable? Using essence worm was annoiyng as hell to be fair.

personally I have not seen anyone do any energy shield totem master in any forum.

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Wallach wrote:

So... I feel like we probably just got buffed overall, even accounting for the critical multiplier change. Nothing's really going to change tree-wise in the end; none of the totem notable wheels were changed in a way that matters (Shamanistic Fury actually got worse for Hierophant I'd say), and Shaman's Dominion (the one that actually matters) didn't get touched at all.

I'll be doing some maintenance updates for 3.11 (including a new pass on the leveling tips section for how I've been leveling lately) but for the most part you can use the exact same setup as in 3.10.

Hi Wallach, I love your work and your streams! Could you help me understand how to take this build to the next level once I acquire a 5L or 6L soul mantle? I always seem to fizzle out at that point which is mostly in the 1st or 2nd week of the league. What is the step-by-step process for next gear upgrades? How do I ramp up getting atziri's mirror so I can actually do hard content?

Something like this.

If you want, you can stick with unique amu. Only real downside of this build is war on Dex. Historical Jewel will fix it.

Delirium was pretty much asshole league for totemos, but now - we can go full rape mode, and I intend to go that way. Will see how it works out.

Rest depends on you. Ive been experimenting hard with my FP in Deli. Got some new ideas for Harvest, will see if it work out as intendent.

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fryderyknicze wrote:

Delirium was pretty much asshole league for totemos, but now - we can go full rape mode, and I intend to go that way. Will see how it works out.

Y full rape mode? I see we can get an additional totem a little bit more pulse damage...and what´s the thing i don´t get?

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Wallach wrote:

3. Cluster jewels probably gained a bit of relative worth in 3.11 as the overall value of skill points in the core passive tree has dropped slightly. While it'll probably be a bit harder to get your full cluster sorted, it'll probably still be worth directly jumping into, say, a Cold Conduction medium cluster to get access to Shock fairly early into maps (these non-damaging ailment medium clusters still shouldn't be that hard to get in 3.11 in trade league). It should be part of your longer term plan if you're going to continue to invest, though.

Thanks, this seems like the biggest change since I last played (Blight), the map stuff is easier to understand.

One more thing: Brutal Restraint - it gives us +dex for each passive in the radius, does it change the notables too? I assume it doesn't, but hard to tell from the wiki.

"

Cykillah wrote:

I see we can get an additional totem a little bit more pulse damage...and what´s the thing i don´t get?

I assume just because there won't be Delirium mobs killing us/our totems this time round, unless we choose them of course.

It looks like a buff, but how much crit multi do we lose on the tree after the patch? I know they said they nerfed Crit Multi everywhere, but I also saw a post saying they hardly touched it on the tree.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but looking at the new tree it looks like we pretty much only lose 25% crit multi from tree. Assassination lost 10% crit multi and the small doom cast/Arcane Potency nodes lost 5% each. Nimbleness, Throatseeker, Annihilation, Shaman's dominion, and Arcane Potency(small node was nerfed 5%) were all untouched along with their small nodes. I think this probably means just flat out more damage with the new effectiveness on freezing pulse. I might be missing something crucial here though so can anyone back me up on this?