[3.15] Eye of Winter ES/LL Self-Cast Occultist

Hey there!

This is a guide that stemmed from another post. The other was a life based caster and I ended up getting a lot of questions about my current build so I figured it was best to create a new post to talk about this variant of the build.

PoB Link:

https://pastebin.com/660Xt8bV

VIDEOS:

A9 Sirus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXeMw_tHwt8

A9 Veritania: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgEQ8AmLmyM

A9 Al-Hezmin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TCIVDgH3KY

A9 Baran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp4MdC3rxYI

A9 Drax: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6KfVjHCdI0

T15 Burial Chamber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koSRKRefp2k


Pros:

- Very good clear speed as EoW has great AoE and has great synergy with Snakepit ring.
- Very good boss damage as overlapping EoW and Hydrosphere does tremendous single target damage.

Cons:

- Certainly NOT a HC Viable build, it is rather squishy especially if you cannot freeze/chill reliably.
- Not a league starter build as it is rather expensive.

GEM LINKS:

6-Link: Anomalous Eye of Winter - Awakened Unleash - Awakened Added Cold Damage - Divergent Power Charge on Critical - Increased Critical Damage - Anomalous Increased Critical Strikes

Unleash is your best friend with this build. EoW naturally casts rather slow, so it gives you time to cast, move to avoid damage, then Unleash a bunch of EoW again with your next cast. You will see further Unleash scaling in the gear section below. I went with Anomalous EoW because the 20% Projectile Speed feels nice. I tested the build with a lot more Proj Speed but it hampers damage against single targets. I found that 20% was the sweet spot for me. Feel free to play around with more Proj Speed if you'd like.

4-Link: Hydrosphere - Awakened Hextouch - Elemental Weakness - Awakened Increased Area of Effect

Hydrosphere is amazing paired with EoW and Snakepit Ring. It is used in this build to apply our 2nd curse, apply Cold Exposure, and most importantly to help bounce around projectiles that miss bosses with the +1 chain from Snakepit.

4-Link: Flame Dash - Faster Casting - Divergent Arcane Surge (lvl 7) - Portal/Second Wind

Movement ability with Arcane Surge. The 4th socket is up to you. I use Portal because I hate using scrolls.

4-Link: Clarity - Summon Skitterbots - Enlighten - Bonechill

Skitterbots with Bonechill dramatically increase your damage. The chilling aura gives fantastic damage with Bonechill and the Shocking bot adds another 15% on top of it all.

3-Link Wand: Cast When Damage Taken (lvl 1) - Immortal Call (lvl 1) - Herald of Ice

Not a lot to say about this. Defense and Offense, the end.

3-Link Shield: Hatred - Zealotry - Discipline

Your biggest auras for this build. Tons of damage and of course extra ES from Discipline. Inside a Prism Guardian while also specced into the "Influence" nodes on the tree reserve 96% of your life to put you into Low Life.

GEAR:



Just a few notes about gear and why certain pieces were chosen.

Crown of the Inward Eye gives us Transfigurations and some really good ES. This allows us to anoint our Amulet with Nimbleness.

Doedre's Malevolence powers up our Unleash even more. The negative Cast Speed really does not matter as EoW already casts slow to begin with. It is barely felt. The added Chaos damage is also HUGE. EoW has a 40% Damage Effectiveness to it, but that is PER SHARD. So all of that bonus damage really stacks up with the dozens of shards you hit with.

Snakepit Ring is perfect for EoW. It boosts clear speed amazingly with the +1 Chain and also really ramps up single target damage by bouncing projectiles off of your Hydrosphere so even more shards hit the boss.

Your other ring should be a ring that applies Frostbite on Hit.

JEWELS:



Thread of Hope to hit 8 different Notable Passives.

Energy From Within for even more ES.

The Large Cluster Jewel most importantly gives us Seal Mender to pump up Unleash even more. The other 2 notables are the best choices of what remains.

Medium Cluster Jewel Curses. Gives us Culling Strike and some extra damage with a short blind to help offense and defense.

Small Cluster Jewel is Energy From Naught just for more ES.

FLASKS:



Overflowing Chalice is used to help regain charges faster. With the flask changes and them not being as powerful as usual, I just let them autocast when full to basically set and forget them. The only time I ever 'piano' the flasks manually is when I am up against a boss for that little bit extra juice.

BANDITS & PANTHEON:

Alira for Bandits. Resists, Mana Regen, and Crit Multi...yes please.

For Pantheons I went with Lunaris and Shakari. I would say that Lunaris is certainly the best choice but you could choose to swap out Shakari for something like Abberath or Yugul (Curse Reduction) instead if you'd like.

VERSION HISTORY:

- Updated PoB with Militant Faith Timeless Jewel
- Updated PoB with a handful of level 21 gems
- Updated guide and PoB to include Increased Critical Strikes instead of Cold Penetration Gem and new flask set up.
- Watcher's Eye added to PoB
- Added Wise Oak Flask
- Updated PoB with Power Charge on Helmet, Divergent Power Charge on Crit Gem, and Nimbleness Annoitment on Amulet
- Removed 'Light Eater' from the passive tree. We are already leech capped.
- Updated PoB to the newest version which shows calculations including Unleash...finally. Nearly 1 million DPS PER SHARD!
- Removed Wise Oak and added a Silver flask. More zoomies.
- Changed the skill tree. It is just better overall pathing than the original.
- Updated for level 97 and a new belt.

Thanks for posting the guide.

Hope the doedre's are as good as you make them out to be, because I just forked out big money for +2 duration / +1 frenzy ones. ;)

Also have you tried out sniper's mark?
Does the projectile split make sense for us?
Just saw it on someone else' PoB and am curious how it works.

"

blastinMot wrote:

Thanks for posting the guide.

Hope the doedre's are as good as you make them out to be, because I just forked out big money for +2 duration / +1 frenzy ones. ;)

Also have you tried out sniper's mark?
Does the projectile split make sense for us?
Just saw it on someone else' PoB and am curious how it works.

I've been throwing around a few ideas in my brain about Sniper's Mark. The thing is every time I start trying to figure out if I wanna go with 3 curses somehow, or replace Elemental Weakness...I take a break from theorycrafting, run a map, and one shot a t16 boss and say to myself 'why bother' lol

Thanks for separating this into another post. Replying to bump this guide as it's superior to the original post and deserves eyeballs on it.

Nice to see another EoW build, albeit being quite the expensive build! Good luck with it, though.

"

DarkenX wrote:

Nice to see another EoW build, albeit being quite the expensive build! Good luck with it, though.

I'm aiming to get to this build, but it was working quite fine as life-based with Cerberus Limb, Light of Lunaris, and Tabula through yellow maps. Once I hit 6L on my Shav's I'll be switching though.

"

oregoncrete wrote:

"

DarkenX wrote:

Nice to see another EoW build, albeit being quite the expensive build! Good luck with it, though.

I'm aiming to get to this build, but it was working quite fine as life-based with Cerberus Limb, Light of Lunaris, and Tabula through yellow maps. Once I hit 6L on my Shav's I'll be switching though.

While it's nice to hear of a slightly cheaper setup working, what about Jewels? Those things aren't exactly cheap, either.

"

DarkenX wrote:

"

oregoncrete wrote:

"

DarkenX wrote:

Nice to see another EoW build, albeit being quite the expensive build! Good luck with it, though.

I'm aiming to get to this build, but it was working quite fine as life-based with Cerberus Limb, Light of Lunaris, and Tabula through yellow maps. Once I hit 6L on my Shav's I'll be switching though.

While it's nice to hear of a slightly cheaper setup working, what about Jewels? Those things aren't exactly cheap, either.

While a bit expensive, Thread of Hope is really the only jewel you 'NEED' just because it gives you access to so many passive skills for this build. You can save up and get the rest of the jewels later.

jeah nice! thanks for summing this up.

Appreciate this had been looking through the other post and trying to decide if it was worth going but since you made this post I'm sold!