[3.25] Ice Dancing Queen - Icestorm/Cyclone/CI - Viable For Everything

I've purchased quite a few upgrades from the vendors. Since I am no longer in need of respecing, that's where my gold goes.

I look for ES gear that drops, and burn all of my transmute etc orbs looking for good affixes. Very rarely I burn a regal and exalt -- generally only if I think there's a good chance for a major dps upgrade. Note I only do that if I have 2 good affixes already.

I was starved for uncut support gems but act 2 gives you a lot of them, so things got better.

My first four witch minion builds failed miserably, but once I got Raging Spirits and the flame wall auto spawn, things got better. In act 2 I died only a couple of times to a new boss before I figured it out.

Getting gear with +levels to your skill gem is the #1 thing you want to look for.

I'm levelling up a sorceress ice build on the side when I need a break from the witch (yes, it's a bit of a twink) and currently she has 0 deaths and multiple boss kills. Freeze is powerful, and her main dps is the freezing shard staff!

I did rage quit Sunday night, but got back in Monday after I looked at my witch build and realized I had errors in it.

I doubt I will ever return to POE1. Adios Whispering Ice we knew ye well.

Going to give this a try

https://maxroll.gg/poe2/build-guides/fireball-blood-mage-leveling-guide

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RaGe0uS#2336 wrote:

Going to give this a try

https://maxroll.gg/poe2/build-guides/fireball-blood-mage-leveling-guide

In my experience, spark absolutely sucked. What worked far better (for my sorc but this would have applied to the witch also) was to get a gelid staff with +1 or more to cold:

Freezing shard (staff) - arcane tempo
ice nova - frost nexus
frost bomb - fast forward - magnified area
frost bolt - glaciation - scatter shot

that'll get you into act 2. for the passive tree, focus on spell damage etc.

New video: Act 3 Boss Fight

In Act 3 you start to get more powerful skills, so it feels less pathetic. Or maybe they just didn't overtune this boss like they did Act 1 and 2 ones. You have to kill that Viper Nazi bitch to get to this guy, and she's much harder. I died to her 'Arakaali' mechanic 10+ times.

The lack of meaningful skills and especially supports in this game is just crazy. And there are NO MOVEMENT SKILLS! At all! It's a walking simulator. So slow and boring!

My interest in PoE 2 is fading rather quickly. The only reason I'm still playing it is the absence of a new PoE 1 league. I guess GGG's decision to skip it was a smart one.

I played the 3 acts, then started a new character.

2nd playthrough is definitely much easier. One big part was that I was able to get 3socket skill gems and T2 supports right form start. And some gear that was useful.

It feels like the difficulty was set for you having gear equal to what PoE1 drops would give you. But with Ruthless drop rates it is fucked. Or was, not sure how much the rare gear drop rate change affects.

But I have no interest of spending 2/3 of playtime just walking around.

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Kelvynn#6607 wrote:

New video: Act 3 Boss Fight

In Act 3 you start to get more powerful skills, so it feels less pathetic. Or maybe they just didn't overtune this boss like they did Act 1 and 2 ones. You have to kill that Viper Nazi bitch to get to this guy, and she's much harder. I died to her 'Arakaali' mechanic 10+ times.

The lack of meaningful skills and especially supports in this game is just crazy. And there are NO MOVEMENT SKILLS! At all! It's a walking simulator. So slow and boring!

My interest in PoE 2 is fading rather quickly. The only reason I'm still playing it is the absence of a new PoE 1 league. I guess GGG's decision to skip it was a smart one.

I also died to Viper Nazi a few times (and looks that many people stuck here). Then I bumped HP to around 900 and changed cast on freeze + comet to self cast and it was much easier.

I guess the difficulty is tuned based on the assumption that you have to farm good gears before the attempt.

The act boss is way easier.

I died to the Viper boss twice just a little while ago. The third time, she glitched into a corner and didn't use any abilities at all and I just pummeled her with spells until she died. The ring of soldiers didn't even do their thing, either.

And then they released a new patch that straight-up destroyed a bunch of builds, including the one I re-specced into and just got to a usable state, which sent my only character back to dogshit damage.

It was already a terrible game, so I've said goodbye to PoE 2 and logged back into PoE 1. I was still noodling around in OG Settlers up until EA launch day anyhow.

Cast on Ignite has just been eviscerated. LOL. Looks like they are just looking for any powerful mechanics and nerfing them to make sure the game stays slow as fuck.

It's not like the "Cast on X" skills were even all that powerful. They just made playing the bulk of the game much less of a tedious, time-wasting slog. Hell, Cast on Freeze wasn't even great for bosses, since every freeze gives them an ever-increasing resistance to being frozen again. You still had to play to the fight mechanics and do the stupid dodge rolling crap. Getting to them was just unbearable, though.

If I want to waste a bunch of time doing boring repetitive shit with no incremental rewards... well, I still have a few hundred Haunted Mansion maps and no Haunted Hideout yet.

I really like a lot of POE2: the boss fights, meaningful magic gear, the artwork, the spell gem restructuring, the sense of scale in the zones.

I was lucky not to have a build dependent on "Cast on X" unlike my kid who is currently very unhappy. I'm running a SRS Arsonist witch build that's a frankenstein of what has been posted. Bosses are generally not an issue, though I have yet to complete Act 3 after 40+ hours of game play and level 45.

I'm taking what the game gives me and seeing what I can do with it. I'm still having fun.

I'm also levelling up a cold-based sorceress to see how far I can get without dying based on what I now know about the game. Those freezing shard gelid staves are remarkably good...

I've read a rumor that warriors using 2 maces and the default attack can pretty much crush everything in the game, so I might see how true that is later.

You know -- I wonder if POE2 is actually aimed at the more casual player! Sure, you can push like you can in POE1, but there's no real advantage to getting to maps on day 1 from what I can see! You don't need a full set of six-affix rares to get to maps any more...

POE2 = SSF ruthless, but with trading LOL.