[3.20] Ice Shieldmaiden Scion Build

Yea, that seems reasonable.

I think I didn't quite grasp how the totem would play it's part, would we drop the whole reckoning setup for a 4L totem?

"

Vallcrist wrote:

Yea, that seems reasonable.

I think I didn't quite grasp how the totem would play it's part, would we drop the whole reckoning setup for a 4L totem?

Ideally yes. One curse ring allows the build to drop reckoning and one of the curse gems, going back to (Vortex + Bonechill + Hextouch + Single Curse) and freeing up two gem slots - which already should allow some totem game. Two rings drops the second curse gem and the hextouch, freeing up all 4 slots to go all out with totems if desired.

Hey there, I've been scratching my head here trying to figure out if I'm missing something:

Tank build is now okay-ish, damage reached 1.5M DPS and i can kill stuff fairly okay now, however, looking at your videos your humvee build seems way more tankier in some aspects.

All dots currently are instantly melting me, even the fire beams from the plaza boss absolutelly crushes me, same thing for shaper beam, half a second on the beam is enough to pretty much kill me on the spot, lol.

Am I missing some important detail on the buld to handle this types of issue, or is that simply more health needed?

"

Vallcrist wrote:

Hey there, I've been scratching my head here trying to figure out if I'm missing something:

Tank build is now okay-ish, damage reached 1.5M DPS and i can kill stuff fairly okay now, however, looking at your videos your humvee build seems way more tankier in some aspects.

All dots currently are instantly melting me, even the fire beams from the plaza boss absolutelly crushes me, same thing for shaper beam, half a second on the beam is enough to pretty much kill me on the spot, lol.

Am I missing some important detail on the buld to handle this types of issue, or is that simply more health needed?

Taking a quick look at your profile, you're missing one very important thing.

Hitpoints.

Sadly, other than capping resistances, there aren't a lot of ways for this build to mitigate autohit DoTs. If it's not an autohit (the Sirus geysers being the perfect example), then your block will carry you through damn near anything, but otherwise It's about raw HP to give yourself time to react (this is not exclusive to this build btw, several melee builds have this as a weakness that has to be mitigated somehow, whereas Lethe Shade on the opposite side of the tree would carry you through it).

But with a big HP pool and a life flask with "instant heal when on low life" you'll be able to walk over degen pools to position during boss fights and the like. In the video I was sporting ~6.5k health.

Of course, to have the points to get those hitpoints, your gear is going to have to carry what you remove from the tree - you're going to have to get that spell block chest and optimise the pathing a bit better (one example, you have three points allocated to get spell block on the "Arcane Guarding" wheel, but you can get that same block on the "Safeguard" wheel which is readily available, and squeeze enough accuracy on gear to drop the Eagle Eye wheel, and so on).

I've explored going the way of unremovable overleech and Vaal pact, but it's quite costly and I'm not convinced the mitigation from bigger leech numbers is really worth it.

Yea, was thinking that my health pool is a bit low atm, working on improving it. Just the the spell block chest yesterday, need to 6-link it now. :P

Will start reviewing the gear to get higher HP numbers soon

Hello. I took this build for a starter in SSFHC after not really playing PoE for two years, and I was honestly surprised by how decently it performed. The disgusting amount of survivability reminded me of old molten strike jugg. Except I got halfway through the yellow maps with this, which was the farthest I've ever gotten in the atlas. So that's neat.

That being said, I wouldn't recommend the build for an SSF starter. I reached level 88 without finding any of the build-enabling common uniques, so getting perfectly corrupted versions of them wasn't in the cards. Neither did I get a double block shield or a hat with enough accuracy to drop Precision, proper cluster gems, and so on.

This meant progress was slow at times, but possible. Even without a Frostbreath, the damage is nearly okay, but you will struggle against cold-resistant monsters without anything to give an additional curse — the damage drops into nothing, even with the cold penetration from the tree.

Slow progress, until you simultaneously tank a big attack from a boss plus the maven clone's big attack and die in a split second. I would've lived if I had blocked either of them, but I didn't. Hardcore, baby!

Maybe, if I had been obnoxiously careful, I could've made it through all of the yellow maps after finding all the lab portals and getting more efficient use of my skill points. But I didn't, and now the dream is dead.

Notwithstanding all that, I would play the build as a starter again in a league that doesn't completely despise builds that tank stuff. I could deal with everything, but it was a bit much to have to skip Sanctums on top of Legions and and having a rough time in Blight too. I failed a tier two blighted map. Two! I anointed for tower cost and everything!

It was probably my skill issue. Nice build, 9/10, I never want to see cyclone in my life again.


Finally, here's some miscellaneous notes for anyone who's broken inside like me and enjoys SSFHC:

- I used frost blades as the damage skill for 1-3 before getting Ice Crash. It felt really bad.
- In acts, grab a Clarity aura gem for early mana sustain. The mana leech nodes are relatively far away, and you've got resistances, damage, and life to already worry about.
- If you want to drop the Clarity and still use a lot of reservation early, you may want to spend points on extra mana leech. I spent three points to temporarily grab Spirit Void, for example, because I had a period where 0.4% just didn't cut it.
- Instead of spending 11 skill points on stat nodes to travel to the Spell Block nodes (and even more to skill them), you can temporarily take the Versatile Combatant passive. It's just a one-point investment since you're already in that area of the tree and it rounds out your survivability by a decent amount.
- If you want extra resistances and life, you can use these 10 points you saved to travel towards the Marauder side of the tree for those juicy juicy nodes.
- You can swap Ruthless Support for Fortify Support as the fifth skill gem for further survivability in exchange for damage if you're not living the dream of having a corruption implicit on your weapon.

Oh wow, I didn't think HCSSF would be too great an experience with this build. You were mighty unlucky not finding any of the uniques. Stone of Lazhwar, specially, has always dropped for me during the campaign, often more than once; Frostbreath sometimes takes a bit longer.

Maps do open more possibilities to build up. You get syndicate drops to unveil block, you get far more essences (and can easily spec into essences very early in the Atlas) so you can try for the shield, and you start getting Eldritch Currency, which can help cover holes. But yeah, I can imagine it being pretty rough without FB and enough block, and transitioning into maps can be slow. Versatile Combatant is pretty fantastic early on, it'll let you faceroll the campaign.

Thanks for all the tips too. I fully admit HCSSF is not something I can comment on because I've not really done it much (a handful of times on a different, long-lost account), so it's great to hear you enjoyed it. Yeah, Legion and Blight aren't great with her, she shines when there's a big bunch of enemies you don't have to chase. Breach, Abyss, Essences, and Alva are my go-to (except they nerfed Alva so incursion items only drop from the Temple itself now *grumble*).

Hopefully we'll get a better league for tanks next time; even with access to gear, the Sanctum is not great with this build - pushing up the damage lets you stun the guardians and even freeze them fairly consistently, but there's too much plink damage from multiple sources to really work well. I've not done a full Sanctum with her, and I gave up after a while. I now have a Bane Scion to do Sanctums, and she walks all over them with practically no gear LOL.

Hey, coming back here with a small update and some new thoughts about the build.

I was getting quite frustrated with dying a lot with the build, even though it is supposed to be a tank powerhouse. As mentioned before, Health pool was pretty low and that led to me getting destroyed by any form of degen/unblockable DoT effect.

Tried respeccing and getting a lot of regeneration nodes on the tree, that failed horribly, would not recommend.

Then I noticed something weird, even though the tank build is supposed to be a big tanky boy with both armor and evasion, I believe having both at the same time was being counterproductive because apparently dodges proc first and that stops the block from happening at all? So curses weren't being procced, life regen on block also wasn't being proced, flask charges weren't being recovered quickly enough (specially in boss fights), am I crazy or is this how it works indeed?

So I decided to pivot to Humvee mode, dropped grace, got myself a half decent circle of fear and a pretty decent stygian vise, dropped a lot of the reservation nodes because 2 50% auras is way more manageable than 3 50% auras and honestly, life is great now.

I honestly feel that the Humvee is tankier than the Tank in the end, more damage, more leech, more on block effects triggering because you don't dodge as much, etc. And of course triple the DPS makes things die quicker as well, so less time to Die yourself I guess. I even managed to finally get to lvl 94 today, was hard stuck lvl 93 with the tank build because I was dying so freaking much lol.

Anyway, those have been my findings, hopefully this will be helpful to someone :D

Thanks for sharing! That's interesting. Yes, evasion will reduce the amount of hits you get to the face, but the good thing about Evasion is that it's not completely random - it works with the streakbreaker mechanic so you don't get streaks of hits and misses - so it's fairly predictable how much it'll reduce the number of hits to the face.

I don't think I've run into the situation where I'm struggling to get hit enough to sustain flasks and endurance charges, but as I think about it, I typically start life as a Humvee (because the damage only really comes "online" once you get the belt and a significant amount of evasion+armour when compared to Herald of Ice), and switch to tank later when I go tank. And of course, later means you start juicing maps, have good gear and life, and lots of enemies.

I might have a go at leveling tank early to understand this better, I might have missed something important. Thanks a lot.

I'm glad you're finally enjoying it. I've had trouble clearing Simulacrums with the Humvee all the way to 30, but the rest of the pinnacle fights are all smooth, assuming you can dodge the inevitable mechanics such as the Meatballs of Doom :)

I've also gotten a pretty awesome relic with 6% spell block and put Elemental Overload on it, thanks to the tradeable Lycia's Invocations. I've been clearing a LOT of Sanctums with my Bane Scion, and that's helped tremendously. I've also allocated Juggernaut with the Forbidden Pair and eschewed most accuracy for a Heatshiver, so my build this season is looking a bit odd, which is always fun. Next upgrades are expensive so I'm concentrating at the moment on making shields to see if I can grab a better one. The third suffix on my current one is a paltry +19 to Strength. Also grabbed a Watcher's Eye with flat cold damage with Hatred (the mandatory one) and +8 to block with Determination. Nifty mod, though not BiS in the long run (Unnatural Instinct will allocate all that block and more plus extra goodies, so eventually I'll want something better).

The good thing is that, thanks to the relic, I don't need maxed out spell block on the shield, which makes even alt crafting possible, saving a lot of money and opening possibilities.

Uh, interesting stuff.

I'm trying my hand at sanctum now, but it's hard (and i refuse to make a second character! lol), one of those sanctified relics would surely help though.

My last big change was getting a pretty good amulet and replacing the stone of lazwar, which I think is the weirdest part of the build. Everyone that looked into the build asked my "wtf you using that shitty amulet" haha.

Managed to fit a pretty decent amulet that I got for dirt cheap at 2div , but had to sacrifice some points in the tree to get near the spell block cap, and had to annoint whispers of doom. Thinking about double corrupting it to try and get the curse implicit or just accept the fact that will have to spend 20 div on an Impossible Escape for Chaos Innoculation just for the point in whispers of doom lol. Also tried allocating Occultist for that but eh, wasn't worth it.

Heatshiver sounds interesting as well, although not sure how I would fit it losing the close to 18% reservation efficiency atm. Will PoB that as well. :O