Cold Chronomancer Megathread.

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monik390#5560 wrote:

Also, my current staff is



Heavy Frost doesn't specify elements, it says All hit Ignore Elemental Resistances, so, in my case that Extra Damage works well.

god damn is that a staff.

Also great catch on heavy frost ignoring the others.

I was considering talking more on that. heavy frost counters frost bomb cold exposure, and fire exposure, which we can get pretty easy too actually. support gem for that.
And it counters hypothermia.

a build using temp chains, or enfeeble. of course only has exposure.

Temp chains "effects on cursed enemies expire 25% slower" does apply to freeze. While, "skill effect duration" does not.

CoF + Cold Snap isn't for me. I would swap Cold Snap out for Meteor

It leaves too many mobs alive. Too many things to click to manually snap.

I get better effectiveness from occasional CoF + Meteor and having my main freeze and damage reliance being Frost Wall + Frost Bomb.

So I'm back on Frost Wall + Frost Bomb. Ice Shards sometimes feels better than Frost Bolt so I've been switching between those two to do more testing.

My absolute biggest issues is choosing between EB and ES. Similar to monik, I am running into massive survivability issues in Cruel. It's become frustrating on some bosses where I HAVE to go no-hit on them.

But on the flip side my mana issues are brutal without EB.

There's got to be a better way.

Also I went back to footsteps. The reset on health has been so helpful when I get ALMOST one-shot but survive with a sliver of health.

double post (due to timeout)

triple post (due to timeout)

How to use COMET with no action ? Always when i try to use it, me characters stop moves and goes to the sky... it's really anoying

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Setsuga#6684 wrote:

How to use COMET with no action ? Always when i try to use it, me characters stop moves and goes to the sky... it's really anoying

It has a very long cast time. That's why I only use it on bosses, and only when they are frozen. It is a 3-second cast. You don't have to do that when it is used with cast on freeze. That's part of what made it so good.

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TrainwreckX#1101 wrote:

CoF + Cold Snap isn't for me. I would swap Cold Snap out for Meteor

It leaves too many mobs alive. Too many things to click to manually snap.

I feel like it depends a lot on gear and the content you're trying to clear.

For example, I'm in Act 3 Cruel right now, level 62. I recorded two videos:
Clearing: https://youtu.be/N6mBWtPpGPE
Boss: https://youtu.be/qo1hmvh3ZnE

I didn't replace any gems on purpose for the boss, it's the same for both videos.
You are right, sometimes it leaves some mobs behind, but they are singular and I just let them chase me so they die with next pack.
I think these "leftovers" will be gone with better gear and more support gems. But at the same time the mobs will become stronger at higher content, so I'm not sure how this will scale up in the endgame. I didn't do any maps yet, so maybe it won't work there.

UPD: Just upgraded my staff. Here's video with better weapon.
https://youtu.be/ZxbiwLIvdHk

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Casia#1093 wrote:

Also, great catch on heavy frost ignoring the others.

I was considering talking more on that.

Basically - there are two ways of scaling the damage:

1. Cold Pen + Reducing enemy Res via Curse/Exposure.

+ It is very powerful. The strongest option on a higher investment.
+ Increase your damage output from all skills.
+ More reliable damage.
- Needs investment in both passives and skill gems.
- Focused to 1 element. Extra damage from other elements loose hard against a high-res target. More limited choice of the weapon.

2. Heavy Frost.

+ Very cheap.
+ Doesn't require skill gem investment (Hypothermia, Strip Away support) and exposure passive nodes.
+ Benefits from extra damage from other elements (like Climate Change). More options for the weapon choice.
- Conditional. Have to Freeze the target first.
- It's weaker overall in terms of the endgame scaling.

So, with Heavy Frost I went with Critical Strike passives (and they make Critical Support gems work better), and made Frost Bomb fully damaging ability w/o Strip Away.

I'm still considering making a secondary weapon/passive, set more focused on freeze build-up, so I can just nuke the Frozen enemy with a more damaging passive tree (like removing the Shattering cluster and going for more crit or flat damage).
This should work well because we can choose which skills to use on weapon sets.

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TrainwreckX#1101 wrote:

CoF + Cold Snap isn't for me. I would swap Cold Snap out for Meteor

It leaves too many mobs alive. Too many things to click to manually snap.

I get better effectiveness from occasional CoF + Meteor and having my main freeze and damage reliance being Frost Wall + Frost Bomb.

So I'm back on Frost Wall + Frost Bomb. Ice Shards sometimes feels better than Frost Bolt so I've been switching between those two to do more testing.

My absolute biggest issues is choosing between EB and ES. Similar to monik, I am running into massive survivability issues in Cruel. It's become frustrating on some bosses where I HAVE to go no-hit on them.

But on the flip side my mana issues are brutal without EB.

There's got to be a better way.

Also I went back to footsteps. The reset on health has been so helpful when I get ALMOST one-shot but survive with a sliver of health.

Honestly, I'm also very reluctant to use Cold Snap on CoF, however, I haven't tested it yet (have to save some gold for respec).

The thing here is - in Acts, it's fine to go all out for the damage (because you have unlimited tries to complete whatever), so EB was a thing for me. However, I had mana issues during the campaign only because of CoF - Comet. Before that, I was fine somehow.

On the other side - Mapping. You fail if you die. No 6 portals to finish. So, being squishy with EB isn't an option.

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chobi0ne#5028 wrote:

I feel like it depends a lot on gear and the content you're trying to clear.

For example, I'm in Act 3 Cruel right now, level 62. I recorded two videos:
Clearing: https://youtu.be/N6mBWtPpGPE
Boss: https://youtu.be/qo1hmvh3ZnE

I didn't replace any gems on purpose for the boss, it's the same for both videos.
You are right, sometimes it leaves some mobs behind, but they are singular and I just let them chase me so they die with next pack.
I think these "leftovers" will be gone with better gear and more support gems. But at the same time the mobs will become stronger at higher content, so I'm not sure how this will scale up in the endgame. I didn't do any maps yet, so maybe it won't work there.

Agreed on that. Gear (weapon) matters a lot.

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Casia#1093 wrote:

yeah, I decided a while ago, I preferred to keep targets frozen, and just manually cast cold snap, when I knew it would kill them.

cast on freeze coldsnap. I absolutely do not want to cold snap bosses,when I could instead keep them frozen for 10s+

there is any way to know how long frozen lasts? (checked char stats , and frozen skills but is all about how long chill last

Just upgraded my staff from this:


to this:


Got about +2k damage per use on Comet and +1k on Cold Snap.

Here's clearing video with new weapon: https://youtu.be/ZxbiwLIvdHk