[3.17] Wallach's Hierophant Freezing Pulse Totems (No Further Updates)
" If you've got almost 700 Chaos Orbs, you should have plenty of currency to do some trading for upgrades in those rare slots. Mind you, prices in Harvest league are extremely inflated because the league is ending in a couple days, so really at this point it's more about understanding what kind of pieces you should be looking for (assuming you try to use this build again in the future). Crafting these pieces using Harvest was fairly easy, but I feel like we're out of time to really go over how to use Harvest crafting, since these crafting mechanics will not be returning to the game in Heist league. To that end you should prioritize learning the core crafting systems (learned crafting recipes and Veiled affixes from the Betrayal league Syndicate members) and how to utilize the trade site to search for listed items from other players. As far as evaluating each piece, my gear section does list a general guideline for the kind of affixes that each slot should be shooting for. For example, your boot slot is generally a heavily defensive piece, so your priorities here are life, multiple resistances, mana, and good movement speed. Secondary affixes like "increased effect of non-damaging ailments" (Redeemer influence) can also be strong when you are using a Cold Conduction cluster jewel notable for improved effect of your Shock. So when searching for boots on the trade site, you should start with some kind of baseline of affixes, like ~60 maximum life, ~30 of a couple different resistances, and maybe ~25 movement speed and start sifting through the results to see what prices look like. Shifting around the search parameters can help you find better deals (sometimes for example someone will list a much better deal for boots that have cold & lightning resistance, compared to what might come up when you search cold & fire resistances). The weapon slots are pretty important to learn how to evaluate. My general recommendation is to look for Incursion base weapons, which are items with special affixes that only drop in the Temple of Atzoatl (or through other league mechanics like Metamorph or Delirium which have the ability to award Incursion items as well). "Topotante's" for example is a strong Incursion prefix appearing on wands and scepters that pairs ~75-79% increased cold damage along with ~12-29 added cold damage to spells in a single prefix. This makes it a pretty strong starting point for a good weapon. Just searching for "Increased cold Damage" with a min value of 75 on the trade site will return a lot of wands - if you hover over the affix shown on the item in the results, you can see which ones have that Topotante's prefix, and it won't be hard to get one that also has something like increased cast speed or critical strike multiplier for fairly cheap. Especially keep an eye out for such a wand that still has an open suffix, which would allow you to craft another good suffix onto the weapon (so searching for ~75 increased cold damage as well as ~13 increased cast speed min values, then looking for a weapon that has an open suffix you could craft critical strike multiplier onto). Puhuarte's is another such Incursion specific affix, which appears on glove bases. This one can come with "30-50% increased damage with hits against chilled enemies" and 46-48% cold resistance in a single suffix. Much like with boots, we generally treat gloves as a defensive slot; when looking for items on trade, especially at league start I will often just search for the "increased damage with hits against chilled enemies" affix and browse what results come up. Besides the Puhuarte's suffix, we're mainly looking for the same affixes as on boots - life, resistances, mana, maybe Dexterity. Regarding the Shaper shield, I personally don't favor running a shield prior to investing in an Atziri's Reflection anymore. Generally the only time I consider it worthwhile for us is when it is a Shaper influenced base that has the "+1 to maximum number of summoned totems" affixes alongside at least a couple other strong affixes (such as "+1 to all Cold Spell Skill Gems"). If you really want to try crafting one of these, you need a Shaper influenced shield - preferably a pure Intelligence base with a decent Spell Damage implicit - that is item level 70 or higher. You can either search for such a base item specifically through the trade site (shield base, spell damage as an implicit, item level 70 minimum) or run maps with Shaper influence (which can be forced onto maps via Shaper Scarabs) and hope such a base drops for you from the enemies in those maps. From there you'd generally just reduce the item to a magic base (Scouring Orb -> Transmutation Orb) then start using Alteration Orbs until you hit the +1 to maximum totems affix. Once you find that, slap the item with an Augmentation Orb if it doesn't have two affixes, hit it with a Regal Orb to turn it into a Rare item, then craft another affix of your choice onto it with the crafting bench. All that said, were I in your position, I'd simply look for two wands and replace both of your weapon slots with solid wands as it will be cheaper and much simpler (and generally more effective overall given equal opportunity cost). Check the descriptions in the gear section for each slot to see what kind of affixes you should be looking for on each slot. The official trade site is a powerful tool so the more time you spend learning how to use it, the easier it will be to figure out how to best apply your currency for upgrades. As far as your question about Cold Snap, this should be listed under the gems section. Cold Snap is linked to Cast When Damage Taken so that it automatically fires at the enemy that hit you and triggered it. Bonechill is linked to Cold Snap so that any enemy that is affected by the chilling ground Cold Snap places also takes increased cold damage from any source, so they will take more damage from your Freezing Pulse totem hits. However, the Cold Snap itself is not going to deal any damage itself, because we take the Ancestral Bond keystone. That prevents us from dealing any damage ourselves in exchange for being able to place an additional totem. That means increasing the actual gem level of Cold Snap doesn't have much value - we only really want the spell to trigger so it places the chilling ground, which will then debuff the enemies via the Bonechill support. To that end, we just leave Cast When Damage Taken at level 1 for this link, which ensures it will trigger at a very low amount of damage taken and results in the trigger being much more frequent. Since Cast When Damage Taken has a limit to what level gems it can support based on its own gem level, we just need to keep Cold Snap to a low enough level that it can still be supported; that means your Cold Snap gem should be level 7 or lower so that a level 1 Cast When Damage Taken can still trigger it. The Bonechill Support can (and should) be raised to maximum level as Cast When Damage Taken only checks the level of the active skill gem it is triggering, and not any of the linked supports. | |
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Thanks for your reply, sadly I found all the stuff you said quite demoralizing.
First, because I thought this build was something it wasn't, or the whole Templar so far, I'm basically playing a subpar mage when I hope a class based on STR and INT should be more definitively tanky. I seriously doubt I will play this build on Heist since I've seriously doubt I'll investing time on POE anyway. Going beside the story Act was like drowning in random systems after random systems. Is already incredibly random getting a III level room let alone the one and I should hope the random Architect should drop the right piece of item with the right suffixes, even buying my Armor took me a week since nobody answered my PM because in an economy dependent game you need to see people face to face to buy something ... This game isn't made for me unless somewhere there is a build that can go around using only items that need not be rolled casually. I came here to get a fix of old school Diablo-like monster-killing not trying to figure affixes, suffixes, bonus and how should I get in INT or DES to the decimal measure since you need to play a fully optimized build to ever go past the story mode. This game is too much tryhard for my tastes and unnecessarily complicated. I'm sorry for wasting everyone's time. |
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Hey Wallach! Glad to see this build is still going strong. :) I might come back to it in Heist...
Here's a question for you or someone else in this thread. Do you guys think Freezing Pulse in this build could be replaced by reworked Glacial Cascade? I know we don't have any numbers yet, but was wondering if you personally see this as a viable option. It looked pretty awesome in the teaser video... |
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"From a perspective of a 1,5 year player I can say I agree with some of your gripes and don't agree with some, but you're definitely right on 1 thing - this game is not very intuitive. There are people who reach a state of "good geared" on SSF (no-trade mode) but it requires excessive grinding. Normal gameplay loop from my perspective is grind currency -> buy stuff. Trying to drop an item I need or craft an item I need is usually a moot point or an economic loss in comparison to buying things. With buying things if you're a semi-casual player (like I am, it takes me 3 months to finish my league goals while pro players do the same in 2 weeks or less) it often ends up with buying discounted pieces of medium-tier gear when the pro players exchange their medium-tier to top-tier and no longer need old gear. Since there's no "soulbound" concept like in diablo where gear you use is not tradeable to anyone else. But that means the availability of gear follows the trends in the playerbase rather than being tied to in-game mechanics. League lasts 3 months. First few weeks everything is expensive. After a month or so it starts dropping in price, but also availability of gear goes down as people start to quit (since you cannot buy from offline people). This league I'd say was especially bad with availability of mid-tier gear. Nobody was selling. Since people could take their mid-tier item and try to tweak it with harvest instead of crafting upgrade from scratch, most of the gear for sale was either super expensive top tier gear or very basic items. I felt forced to use "trading of harvest services" (i.e. people crafting on your gear) even though I dislike that mechanic because you have to give your items to the crafter first just because I could not fall back to my usual strategy of "just buy a ready made upgrade". "Tankyness" is another problem you mention that I think is problematic in this game. First of all, armor or evasion on gear is very deceptive i.e. gives you less impact on the character than you'd assume coming from other games. Only energy shield is different in a way it could be build into being a "life pool replacement". A lot of what makes character "tanky" is tied to mechanics that are either obscure, expensive, or not fitting into every build. I played in the past a totem build (Wallach's holy flame totem build not the freezing pulse one) and best "defense" was "spawn totems in front of you and stay out of harm's way". I tried incorporating various types of defense like mind over matter and block with glancing blows, but despite what people say that it makes character tanky, I still didn't feel tanky enough. It's not easy for an inexperienced player to make a tanky character. But yes, harvest made me study 3rd party websites and tables of affixes and making every item felt like solving a puzzle. And I'm even playing a build atm I've already played 2-3 times in the past (mostly because I can understand what makes that build work while with other builds it's easy to get lost). "There's already a glacial cascade totem guide on the forums so probably best ask people who already tried the build how it goes? https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2890469 | |
" Sorry, but when I talk about Diablo, I talk about Diablo 1. I haven't played any other instance of that game. And you didn't need high-level, perfectly tuned gears to finish it as far as I remember. I admit I was misinformed in how single players this game can be by the friends who suggested it to me but unless they remake the whole trading mechanism in a way that doesn't force me to visit the headquarters of someone to buy something or even be online to acquire something... there is no saving grace to POE. I'm not a big multiplayer fan but even the cheap, mediocre MMRPG I played in the past had a better trading system than didn't force you to quit a map midplay or lose any chance to sell something. Last edited by ArionAthreides on Sep 13, 2020, 1:51:35 PM
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" True... I just really liked this one. :D To be honest, Glacial Cascade kinda looks meh in that one, but maybe after the rework it will look much better. Thanks for the suggestion! |
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" Based on what you've said, you might want to check out Diablo 3. That game no longer has trading, and the loot system is designed and balanced entirely around self-found gear. | |
" I'll rather stab my eyes with a fork. And beside that, I don't have a smartphone. Last edited by ArionAthreides on Sep 13, 2020, 6:04:36 PM
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" I just imported that build into PoB, and honestly it looks like a mess. First off is his use of Blood Magic (from the unique shield, so no Mortal Conviction), Supreme Ego (50% more reserved), and Wrath. From his 6K life pool (no MoM due to BM), he reserves 75% of it with just wrath leaving him with 1482 life, and 580 energy shield. I don't know how anyone could play PoE with such a low life pool, I would never play such a build and would NOT consider it a good build. Last edited by Vath on Sep 13, 2020, 8:54:24 PM
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"Items that give blood magic also give mortal conviction since it was put in the game, that includes the tukohama shield and the malachai mask. But yeah, you can play with mana too I think something like this build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sGCG3JxqI4 |
