Arctic Armour

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Warres wrote:

Ello there peeps,

Someone mentioned a synergy with incinerate earlier, and this skill seems to work real nicely.

Took this skill to my witch right of the bat, am running Vitality,Purity and Determination from my manapool, keaving me with around 70 mana.

All spells i use are linked with bloodmagic (Incinerate,Moltenshell,Enduringcry,Enfeeble,and Flammability)

So basicaly had the "leftover" mana with no use, desited to include clarity with bloodmagic in toolkint and wham, atm i have only lvl 14 clarity and level 13 Arctic shield, -> when not mowin i dont use mana at all...

My build was allready focused on mitigating damage with high armor and maxin endurance charges, this skill works nicely in synergy with high armor / endurance charges since all physical/fire hits (Voidbears) you are taking are allready quite small, resulting in most of physical damage dealing mobs ending dealing flat 0 damage to you :)

here is a link to the build i am using.... Feel free to comment suggest...

Spoiler

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMAAdwCcQSzBS0MfQz3EH8RLRLhGS4aOBv6HRQfAiQlJd8n7SkuLdI2xTbYNuk62DwtPfxHfk3YUFBUSVXGVw1YY1nzXz9gS2EhZU1mnmebdO14DXq4eu98uIP3hNmE74dljHaMz46-j0aQVZHOksGcLZ8-ogCi6qQZpwinhKluq8Wsqq6Tr2y18rc-uJO77b6KwBrE9sWKxp7GrsbYz2XQ0NSP2CTZYd-w4urjaudS6dXsOOxV7w7wH_Fs8932SPrS

I was thinking this could work well in combination with skills that are supported by BM, with Templar and Witch likely being more able to take full advantage rather than Shadow.

I stopped leveling my gem at 3 and checked to see how good it was even after not leveling it and found that it was still quite powerful at level 3 when I was at a level where it could have been level 5.

Overall the effect is really quite powerful and I am sure we will be seeing a number of builds soon specifically tailored for it. This is the kind of skill you can build a character around imho.

With Cyclone I was sure it had to get buffed and sure enough it was; my money is on Arctic Armour getting a nerf if any changes are made.

Unlike Cyclone which needed to be scaled up a bit I think Arctic Armour needs to be scaled down just a tad; make it slightly less effective and burn slightly less mana - this will make it useful for more people without being OP for the few builds that I expect will be tailored for it.

So after thinking about the skill for awhile I have come to see that it is not as bad as I originally said it was. The problem with the skill is that it really does not work for any current character in the game. You have to design a character from scratch to specifically use this gem. This is a good thing to add skills that spark entirely new builds just sucks that I had already made characters that I planned to use it on. It is a pretty big boost to the mana nodes on the skill tree and mana in general in a game dominated by blood magic. Just going to be a really niche skill as mana heavy melee builds tend to not work very well. I'm working on something that just may work though, well see.

Since I didn't want to look through all 13 pages of replies I have no idea if somebody else also came up with this:

It is the perfect support for Incinerate skill:
- move into position and turn it on
- protects you while stnding still for Incinerate in two ways:
a) phys dmg reduction vs. melee mobs
b) fire dmg reduction vs. reflect
- turn off to move to next position

An Incinerate + Arctic Armour Shadow with Iron Reflexes and Inner Force might turn out to be a very strong build:

- High armour reduces incoming phys dmg which then is further reduced by flat dmg reduction, making Incinerate safe to use.
- basically removes the threat of elemental reflect

I need to go and try this build!

well i have been trying out this skill on my lvl 48 witch and to be honest, im not finding it too usefull. The mana cost are way too high for its effect.

In general I feel that this skill has some serious design faults:

The ice path it leaves is not that impressive, i never had any problem to outrun a chasing mob so a weak slow in a small area wont do any real difference, also the increased mama cost when you run makes counter productive, its expensive to run so you should stay still but the ice path only works if you are running.

The damage block has the same problems, it is too weak if you dont have armor to decrease the incoming damage (all dangerous hits do about 300 or more damage to my character, so a 11 points decrease is nothing), and if you HAVE the armor it becomes almost pointless, you already are strong enough to kill the mobs before they can kill you, you dont need 1 min to kill a room full of mobs. And to make it worse, mobs who get their damage killed by this skill (like those flamethrower snakes) can be easily avoided by run and hit tactics.


Because of that, I feel this skill is on the "extras" category, if you have the regeneration to keep it going it will help you tank, but if you have that amount of unused mana rege you probably should look at your build and see why you are wasting so much

Looks like a perfect skill to keep EK users from one-shotting themselves?

p.s.

would be nice if it also chilled when hit by melee =)

Ha, I forgot I had this:

I never found out if that 20% physical to fire is as an addition or as a replacement; if the latter then it would work well with this skill since after resistance that portion would surely be reduced to 0, so essentially you are eliminating 20% of physical damage and then reducing what is left by the Arctic Armour amount - if the rest of your gear is straight armour pieces then I could see a melee witch in the works. Too bad it is only a level 18 item.

"

Fillmore wrote:

Ha, I forgot I had this:

I never found out if that 20% physical to fire is as an addition or as a replacement; if the latter then it would work well with this skill since after resistance that portion would surely be reduced to 0, so essentially you are eliminating 20% of physical damage and then reducing what is left by the Arctic Armour amount - if the rest of your gear is straight armour pieces then I could see a melee witch in the works. Too bad it is only a level 18 item.

Let's say an enemy is going to hit you with 300 physical damage and your AA gem gives -100phys/fire, and you have no other armor or fire resist.

Before AA: 300 phys
After AA: 300 phys -> 200 phys

With Cloak: 300 phys -> 240 phys, 60 fire
With Cloak, After AA: 300 phys -> 240 phys, 60 fire -> 140 phys

After the reduction takes place, mitigation happens. So in the cases where you're left with physical and fire damage incoming, apply your armor and fire resist appropriately.

The important thing to note here is that your armor is much more effective against weaker hits, so reducing the incoming hit is a huge armor buff. Overall the skill works best on pure evasion since you can dodge the boss hits with regularity and not get killed by swarms while you have AA on.

"

topeight wrote:

Worthless gem. What kind of melee character isnt BM. Yet another tool for ranged and nothing for melee. =( When is that melee buff coming.

Next week. 2 Support gems for Melee is a part of the buff.

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pneuma wrote:

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Fillmore wrote:

Ha, I forgot I had this:

I never found out if that 20% physical to fire is as an addition or as a replacement; if the latter then it would work well with this skill since after resistance that portion would surely be reduced to 0, so essentially you are eliminating 20% of physical damage and then reducing what is left by the Arctic Armour amount - if the rest of your gear is straight armour pieces then I could see a melee witch in the works. Too bad it is only a level 18 item.

Let's say an enemy is going to hit you with 300 physical damage and your AA gem gives -100phys/fire, and you have no other armor or fire resist.

Before AA: 300 phys
After AA: 300 phys -> 200 phys

With Cloak: 300 phys -> 240 phys, 60 fire
With Cloak, After AA: 300 phys -> 240 phys, 60 fire -> 140 phys

After the reduction takes place, mitigation happens. So in the cases where you're left with physical and fire damage incoming, apply your armor and fire resist appropriately.

The important thing to note here is that your armor is much more effective against weaker hits, so reducing the incoming hit is a huge armor buff. Overall the skill works best on pure evasion since you can dodge the boss hits with regularity and not get killed by swarms while you have AA on.

the reduction happens afterwards doesn't it?
yes it's here:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Like all other modifiers to the amount of damage taken, this is applied after mitigation from armour/resists.

so that means that a 2k physical hit (pretty big) with 0 armor will do:
2000, 20% of that taken as fire damage: that means 1600physical and 400fire. 400fire with 75% resist =100damage.

after arctic armor: 1600physical and 100 fire becomes 1500 physical and 0 fire. pretty good imo^^ (equivalent to 5 endurance charges mitigraation)

"

pneuma wrote:

Spoiler

"

Fillmore wrote:

Ha, I forgot I had this:

I never found out if that 20% physical to fire is as an addition or as a replacement; if the latter then it would work well with this skill since after resistance that portion would surely be reduced to 0, so essentially you are eliminating 20% of physical damage and then reducing what is left by the Arctic Armour amount - if the rest of your gear is straight armour pieces then I could see a melee witch in the works. Too bad it is only a level 18 item.

Let's say an enemy is going to hit you with 300 physical damage and your AA gem gives -100phys/fire, and you have no other armor or fire resist.

Before AA: 300 phys
After AA: 300 phys -> 200 phys

With Cloak: 300 phys -> 240 phys, 60 fire
With Cloak, After AA: 300 phys -> 240 phys, 60 fire -> 140 phys

After the reduction takes place, mitigation happens. So in the cases where you're left with physical and fire damage incoming, apply your armor and fire resist appropriately.

The important thing to note here is that your armor is much more effective against weaker hits, so reducing the incoming hit is a huge armor buff. Overall the skill works best on pure evasion since you can dodge the boss hits with regularity and not get killed by swarms while you have AA on.

You have it backwards - Mark says on page 4 of this thread that mitigation happens before reduction; so the fire and physical are mitigated and then reduced, not reduced then mitigated (your numbers show this correctly it is just your words after that have it wrong).

The wiki only shows AA reductions up to level 11 but it looks like the way it scales it should be at least 240 by level 20, which means that with 75% overall fire resist and the Cloak of Flame it would eliminate 20% of a physical hit of up to 4800 right off the top (4800 physical -> 960 fire + 3840 physical; of which 960 fire would become 240 from resist and then reduced to 0; after the cloak you would be left with 3840 physical reduced by any armour and then 240 subtracted from what is left). I have never used armour as a defense but I would think that would make it better than any chest piece of even higher level.

EDIT - lol beaten to the punch; using my numbers and assuming no armour at all you end up with net 25% reduction just by having the Cloak and 75% fire resist. I know the chest is a major source of armour but maybe with a nice shield and some nodes you could still get armour value high enough to be effective against the 80% of physical left after the conversion.