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

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Pacificator77 wrote:

But here's some topics that could be added:

- Gem setup once you get Hextouch (Hydropshere/Ele Weak as NoImagination ?)
- Which enchant for boots: mana regen, cold pen or else ?
- Best enchant for belt ?
- use of cinderswallowurn flask
- Fingerless gloves
- "Nearby enemies..." mod for the helmet
- best regular jewels (e.g. with crit and cast speed)

Boots can still be crafted, and decent gloves too I think, so perhaps we could write something that Wallach could integrate to the guide (be the change you want to see!)

- Potentially, there are still upgrades on pandemonius

- Belt corruptions

- Tree for double cluster jewels?

I also learnt recently that you can theoretically corrupt essence worms. You take a base unset ring, fossil craft it to be worth more to vendors, then chance orb until you hit essence worm (it takes thousands). Then you corrupt that, and half the time that you'd hit an implicit, it replaces 'worth more to vendors' instead of 'has one socket'.

Bad news I think people. Grimro is league starting with FP totems, which means there'll be so much more demand for the gear, meaning prices are likely to be high for a while?

I like Grimro, not bitching at all, but when a popular streamer plays a build, lots of others do too!

Bit Offtopic: Could a Exsanguinate totem build work? the life cost shouldn't really matter

It happened last season too, I forget who it was, and he made his own variation. Grimro probably bigger though.

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NoImagination wrote:

Given all the other nerfs, we might end up being one of the most powerful builds in the game, so I wouldn't be totally amazed if there's another nerf.

Guess it wasn't just us that thought it was one of the better builds now. I think we were 0.4% of builds at the start of the season (FP + Ancestral Bond) and ended at > 1%.

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IcedInferno007 wrote:

Bad news I think people. Grimro is league starting with FP totems, which means there'll be so much more demand for the gear, meaning prices are likely to be high for a while?

I like Grimro, not bitching at all, but when a popular streamer plays a build, lots of others do too!

Bigger problem is potential rippers in 3.15 depending on what people find to create anything game breaking.

Coward's Chains:
No longer grants 20-25% increased Damage.
Now causes you to count as on Full Life while you are Cursed with Vulnerability.
Now grants +15-20 to all Attributes (previously +10-15).

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Etamin77 wrote:

Hey Wallach! First of all a massive thanks and kudos to the amazing build guide. Played this in Ritual and it is was by far is one of the most enjoyable builds I've jumped into - this was actually my first 100 just due to the sheer enjoyment of being able to min max the build constantly in the late game.

I'm looking at league starting this for Ultimatum so I've been tinkering with POB since the gem reveals and was hoping to get your thoughts on potentially swapping out Cold Penetration Support for the new Life Tap Support. The 4 second buff should easily always be up given that totems are normally just under 200 mana to cast anyway, so it's easy to just read this skill as a 29% more damage and 10% increased damage gem at max lvl and qual.

I've noticed on non-boss mobs Life tap pulls way ahead in terms of raw damage which would make early mapping a lot easier before we start to find good dps upgrades on gear.
When accounting for increased Boss ele res, Life Tap is then roughly on par with standard Cold Pen, and Awakened Cold Pen pulls ahead a teeny tiny bit at min-maxed levels (works out around 1%-3% depending on how much other cold pen you have). There's always the chance this margin could be a little lower too depending on how much higher the %more and %increased values are on a 21/23 Life Tap support.

Now for the QOL stuff. I almost never run a mana flask, so I always find it super annoying if I get chunked by a few big hits and MOM eats all my mana. Waiting for the regen before I can throw down a few more totems if needed can be a pain, so I'm wondering if being able to pop a life flask in order to keeping throwing down totems would help alleviate this to an extent. It also means it frees up quite a bit of mana expenditure if you want to say throw some totems down AND then use the mana you have just regenerated after being depleted by MOM to flame dash away or throw out a frost bomb/stormbrand etc.

Keen for your thoughts in case there's something glaringly obvious I've missed here where this won't work or won't be worth it. But otherwise I reckon I'm gonna give it a go and see how it feels compared to the standard gemlinks.

Hm, I personally don't think I'd run Lifetap. Sure, it will do more damage against most non-boss targets, but that's not really where I think this build needs more damage. Maybe if it were easier or less costly to just gem swap this back for bosses, but the colors don't match so it would require a white socket and it changes the cost dynamic entirely in what I feel is a pretty negative way. Lifetap is a 200% mana multiplier compared to Cold Penetration's 140%, and converts the skill entirely to life cost, so this will be a ~250-ish life per totem summon. That's pretty painful relative to our natural regen so you'd almost have to consider Agnostic or some other investment into your life recovery, where the opportunity cost is going to get messy. That said, it's not the craziest thing in the world either - you're not going to have to reinvent the wheel to try to make it work - so feel free to give it a shot. Worst thing that happens is you switch back to something you know works.

As for the mana, that issue sounds like your mana pool may be a little too shallow. I'd be interested to see the life to mana ratio on the character you were encountering this on enough to have issue. You can always consider running a hybrid flask over a pure life flask, but it may just be an issue that your mana recovery needs to come up slightly.

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IcedInferno007 wrote:

Bad news I think people. Grimro is league starting with FP totems, which means there'll be so much more demand for the gear, meaning prices are likely to be high for a while?

I like Grimro, not bitching at all, but when a popular streamer plays a build, lots of others do too!

Honestly, Im a bit disheartened.
For the first time after years of playing SSF, I decided to go trade this league again and specifically searched for a build a bit more off meta. Now that Grimro is starting with this and releasing a video today about it, I fear as an average player with limited time, I wont be able to afford most of the gear to tackle endgame with FP totems.

Don't get me wrong, I'll still be playing this build and everyone is free to play whatever he wants, but it's a little frustrating how reliant the average player is on the big streamers and their influence on the economy.

I guess there is only hoping that the majority of his followers will be repelled from the idea of playing totems.

Thanks to Wallach for an awesome and detailed guide.

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ben_hure wrote:

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IcedInferno007 wrote:

Bad news I think people. Grimro is league starting with FP totems, which means there'll be so much more demand for the gear, meaning prices are likely to be high for a while?

I like Grimro, not bitching at all, but when a popular streamer plays a build, lots of others do too!

Honestly, Im a bit disheartened.
For the first time after years of playing SSF, I decided to go trade this league again and specifically searched for a build a bit more off meta. Now that Grimro is starting with this and releasing a video today about it, I fear as an average player with limited time, I wont be able to afford most of the gear to tackle endgame with FP totems.

Don't get me wrong, I'll still be playing this build and everyone is free to play whatever he wants, but it's a little frustrating how reliant the average player is on the big streamers and their influence on the economy.

I guess there is only hoping that the majority of his followers will be repelled from the idea of playing totems.

Thanks to Wallach for an awesome and detailed guide.

I really wouldn't worry about it. The core uniques for this build simply aren't rare enough to stay expensive. They'll probably be more expensive around league start, but I don't imagine it will stay that way.

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Pacificator77 wrote:

But here's some topics that could be added:


- Gem setup once you get Hextouch (Hydropshere/Ele Weak as NoImagination ?)
- Which enchant for boots: mana regen, cold pen or else ?
- Best enchant for belt ?
- use of cinderswallowurn flask
- Fingerless gloves
- "Nearby enemies..." mod for the helmet
- best regular jewels (e.g. with crit and cast speed)

Here my current updated PoB for 3.14 if someone want to check my take on it: https://pastebin.com/crcJHF2h

Hextouch:
Hydrosphere + Elemental Weakness + Frostbite + Awakened Hextouch lv5 for sure.
You can even do it without awakened if you get a curse corruption on amulet and then enchant the amulet for another +1 curse. We can easily get up to 4 curses now. Hydrosphere is just such a nice skill to use, specially for Hextouch.

Amulet:
I'm gonna be still running Marylene as my BiS amulet, super cheap, easy to corrupt. It's pretty much a buff.

Belt Enchant:
Medium belt enchant: AoE with Arcane Surge is ok, Elemental Ailments while Exposed by you is ok (but probably doesn't work with frost bomb?) and Blinded enemies have 30% reduced crit chance.
Best belt enchant (but not really worth much tbh): Hits against Unnerved Enemies have 50% inc spell crit chance.

Boots Enchant:
Best boots enchant is definitely penetration, nothing beat it. Mana Regen is decent but we don't really need it.

Flask:
Cinderswallow flask is the second best DPS flask in the game if you want more damage. I always use it since it can roll crit chance and I use Marylene, so I need as much crit as I can get. If you can't get fire damage on your spell, you can use Flame Wall for that.
Otherwise you can use Wise Oak or Atziri's Promise, etc. It really depend on your own build situation.

Gloves:
Gloves implicit don't really matter much, it's more important to get better mods on the gloves, like unnerve, cull, dex. Getting those on a good base is just gonna be insanely hard this league.

Gloves Enchant:
Spite for sure, it's the only "useful" one. Reflection or Grave can tank some hit for you but it can also kill you due to some mechanics like chain, or specific skills that monsters use.

Helmet:
Added flat damage or Reduced resistance to nearby enemies on helmet are decent mods for sure, but the build lack stats and we struggle to find them anywhere else. Our only options to get what we lack is: Tree, Helmet, Gloves, Boots. The tree and gloves are already used for specific stuff so we're left with only Helmet and Boots to max out our Resistances and get more Life/Mana, etc. It's hard to justify going for damage on helmet when we already instantly kill most bosses without them to begin with. Also, it's gonna be extremely hard to craft those this league. I would rather have tri-res with life and mana on helmet, this would allow me to do some changes to the tree or somewhere else then. Boots are where we usually get most of our res, with some life and MS on top. The increased Effectiveness of Non-Damaging Ailments is cherry on top.

Helmet Enchant:
It's hard to get more projectile speed without sacrificing something else (like a wand mod). Cast Speed is probably the best mod for DPS (depend on range), but you could also get Lightning Golem 150% Effectiveness, which is 15% cast speed and attack speed in one. Curse effectiveness can be decent too, if you can't get a FP enchant.

Jewel:
It's hard to fit more Jewel or Abyss Jewel on our tree, we already need 4 of them no matter what: First Snow x2, Self-Flagellation, Watcher's Eyes. Clear Mind could be removed I guess, but it's mostly trading damage for more life/res at that point. The rest of the jewel socket are for Clusters. You could drop Small Cluster, but they are so much efficient to use to get extra life or chaos resistance with extra stats on top. I don't see why I would ever replace them with normal Jewel or Abyss Jewel.

Cluster Jewel
I personally just use one Medium Cluster for Cold Conduction (it's too powerful) and one Small Cluster and save the rest of the points to grab more good nodes on the tree.

Magic Ring/Viridi:
I use Assassin's Mark on hit on the magic ring for QoL, Mark are just cancer to self cast. With four curses, I would probably self cast either Enfeeble or Temp Chain on bosses, I don't really know yet. At the price of Atziri's Reflection, it's hard to justify going for it. Viridi's is pretty much the same damage for less cost overall. If someone were to Min-Max everything, Viridi might still end up on top in term of damage because an additional weapon is just so massive. Atziri's Reflection is like an unique item that you use if you want to look cool at that point and might as well add an influence on it or get the new Reliquary one.

Tree:
At that point, removing something just feel bad to me. Scion life wheel + other stuff is worse than going for Shadow side. If I were to go for a second cluster, I would have to drop so much life AND/OR damage, completely negating it. Pretty much the same for a large cluster jewel, not only I find the mods on them pretty bad, but they are mostly worse than what I can actually get in the tree for free.

Ascendancy:
Nothing really changed in 3.14 for us. Hierophant is best for sure, with so much QoL like totem placement speed. Scion is still decent, but lack compared to Hierophant. No other Ascendancy look decent for FP Totem other than maybe Deadeyes (For Ice Spear swap) but then the tree is kind of terrible.

Trigger:
Still gonna go with two trigger craft after the nerf. The reason is simple, getting an amazing 6-mod wand/sceptre is close to impossible unless you want to pay something like a mirror for each. Amazing 5-mod wand/sceptre are usually in the 50ex range and are not really dependant on Harvest to be crafted, so in this league it should be around the same price too.
Trigger got nerfed from 4 seconds to 8 seconds. We can't have Frost Bomb and Cold Snap permanently on the ground anymore, but it doesn't really matter. Frost Bomb got a duration of 5 seconds for it Exposure, but stay on the ground for 2 seconds, so we end up with a 1 seconds downtime in most case, unless we get some increased Duration. As for Cold Snap, it's also a 5 seconds duration so we have a 3 seconds downtime. It hurt our DPS on boss a tiny bit but for mapping in general it doesn't really matter as we can still sustain permanent Frenzy Charges.