Cold Chronomancer Megathread. Fully updated.

My godness changing build is so hard.

First of all, Thanks Monik for your chaos farm advice ! It is incredible to make currency with a slowmancer !

Then the bad news, I tried to spec into the last version of your build with CI and nova (I can only aford 3 slot skill gems) and ... I went from frost balls at 20k damage to nova at 3k damage.

I need 4 nova to break the wall ...

I don't understand if the build is only viable with 4-5 slot skill gems or if I missed something.

I'm too exhausted to keep trying tonight xD

One thing for sure. You cooked hard to find thoose awesome builds cause without the finest cooking it is apparently so garbage xD

I look forward finding why it doesn't work at all so far with where i am.

I mean I only have 1kES and 2.7K mana but why is my nova only at 3K damage ...


At least now i'm immune to chaos damage which help even further to farm chaos trial safer even if I hit way less than before xD

"

Kenshi2263#8330 wrote:

@chobi0ne#5028

Are you able to share your items/gems setup via maxroll?
I'm curious to see what it looks like

Here: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/ilq1o0v9
I'll also copy the explanation notes from it here.

The idea of this build is to combine very strong and easy laidback 1-button clearing with even stronger bossing.

Clearing explanation:
This part comes from my initial CoF Frost Wall build: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/fw13f401

Spam Frostbolt to freeze everything and trigger Cast on Freeze with Frost Wall (Spell Cascade). This quickly fills the area with Frost Wall.

Snakepit causes all your Frostbolt projectiles to fork and explode Frost Wall immediately. This alone deals massive damage and should clear 99% of the current end-game content, including 8/8 breaches, deliriums and so on. However, it doesn't stop here.

All the damage we dealt so far crits and triggers Cast on Critical with Comet - this will clear all the fat rares which didn't die by now.

Several Sapphire jewels with +2% Mana on Kill are required to provide mana sustain.

In some rare occasions you can help yourself with manual Frost Wall and Frost Bomb, especially if you are running a map with increased ailment threshold on monsters and increased elemental resistances.

For defenses you have high ES (up to 8.2k in my case), high Mana pool and several "oh sh&*" buttons: Temporal Rift, Time Freeze and Blink (optional). Besides that you have passive protection coming from very powerful slows: Apex of the Moment, Zone of Control, Master of Hexes, Blasphemy with Temporal Chains. In fact, this is what makes you nearly unkillable as long as you move around.


Bossing explanation:
This part is heavily inspired by Cold Slowmancer build made by Monik390.

We utilize second weapon set with some minions and special passives which increase our spell and offering duration. This is needed only for two abilities: Soul Offering and Time Freeze.

Soul Offering is pretty self explanatory: you just swap to your 2nd weapon set, sacrifice minions, get extra damage for ~16 seconds.

Then you cast Time Freeze on the boss to freeze it for ~16 seconds.

Then you swap to your first weapon set, cast Frost Bomb and Frost Wall. If the boss is large size, then Frost Wall will explode on it and deal damage immediately. All this will trigger Cast on Critical Comet multiple times, which will drain all your mana pool (4.1k in my case) immediately. So you have to use Temporal Rift to recover your mana and repeat your rotation. With enough damage you will kill max difficulty Xesht during first Time Freeze. If not - then you have 2nd Time Freeze and also your strongest burst window once you manage to actually freeze the boss.

As for regular map bosses - all of them usually die even before you Temporal Rift. Usually you don't even need to Time Freeze them, so for regular mapping you can even opt-out from Time Freeze for Quicksand Hourglass.


Some Notes:
There are some known tips and tricks, caveats, bugs and issues, which I will mention here:
- You can use Prism of Belief with +1-3 to Frostbolt (for clearing) or Comet (for uber bossing). This jewel works, but requires you to change location or relog in order to take effect.
- +1 Level from Corruption seems to be bugged and currently doesn't seem to work at all. Don't waste your currency trying to get Lv20 Gem with +1 Lv Corruption.
- Spells triggered from meta skills will also consume charges of the same self-cast spell. In my build it's Frost Wall, so sometimes we have 0 charges at our disposal due to this. However, usually when it happens, we don't really need to manually self-cast Frost Wall anyway.
- Archmage breakpoint for +9% damage starts at Level 21. So make sure to get Lv 20 gem and use Lightning Mastery, it's worth it. When GGG will fix +1 Lv from Corruption it will be easier/cheaper to acquire it.
- I hate natural ES recovery mechanic and prefer to "refill" it myself with Life Flasks, so I have Eternal Youth. You can drop it if you like, in this case maybe you can drop Dynamism (or anoint it on your amulet).
- I probably have quite some overkill ES. If you feel like making it a bit lower - you can opt-out from ES passives and get more damage (crit) passives instead.

"

chobi0ne#5028 wrote:

Here: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/ilq1o0v9

The idea of this build is to combine very strong and easy laidback 1-button clearing with even stronger bossing.

UPD: I made some improvements and optimizations today, after I made that maxroll guide. I managed to fit in another jewel slot and got better secondary scepter (+4 minion skills). Also I made few max difficulty Twisted Domain runs (breachstone stuff) for testing purposes. Recorded some of them too for showcase footage.
Tested more stuff and ideas on Breachlord to maximize damage. Monik's play with double curse seems to be the safest option, it gives us more time to damage the boss and we can fit in Conductivity for extra damage, which allows us to nuke the boss during long CC.
Of course it's doable with single curse too. I killed him twice, once with Blasphemy + Temp Chains and once with Blasphemy + Conductivity (although it didn't make sense to run it with Blasphemy, better would be standalone). However, both of those kills weren't in single Time Freeze and required me to chain Time Freeze -> Freeze -> Time Freeze again -> Finish him without CC. It was fast enough to not bother about any mechanics, but still.
I'll test a bit more stuff and update the guide after some sleep.

"

Casia#1093 wrote:

Cast on crit.

"

Gains 1 Energy per Power of enemies you
Critically Hit with Skills, modified by the percentage of the enemy's Ailment Threshold the Critical Hit will deal

anyone actually know what this means?
how exactly is the power gain modified by the ailment threshold?

and, back to the frost bomb versus eye of winter % issue. so it seems how HARD you crit, matters in energy gain.
eye winter hitting alot, but for very small amounts=terrible crit energy gen.
frost bomb hitting for a ton, seems to generate massive amounts. seemingly more then it should in fact..
I am not sure, if icicle, and reducing frostwalls HP, will increase the energy gained, due to lower ailment threshold.
I seem to be getting less energy per eye of winter, which makes me think it might. the high +levels on my walls, gave them more hp, thus higher threshold in relation to eye of winters damage.

Exactly.

Meanwhile, back to snakepit+frostbolt. Lost 450 mana and some ES, but whatever.

Wanted to check how much aoe frostbolt explosion would have with my current tree. It seems to explode entire cascade of walls most of the time. Works w/o Icicle. Snakepit provides enough cast speed for frostbolt being ok, so I went back to my main wand instead of cast speed one.

Thing is, I trained myself with nova+wall well. Now I'm just exploding walls with frostbolt instead of nova, and it does better job despite the feeling of being slightly slower or having less control bc nova explodes immediately while frostbolt is flying for some time. Still, clearspeed with the frostbolt+wall is just ridiculous in comparison to nova with my inc aoe.

Prefiring frostbolts and cast walls on top of them is just faster than wall->nova by a mile.

Crack it, this is da way. Again xD

Anyway, out of currency now. Did some other pinnacles, ritual is expensive af. Expo is bs to find, each logbook is over 40ex w/o guarantee to find the boss. And I'm done with Simulacrum btw. Probably will record max difficulty later.

Current goal is to finish the atlas passive tree, and I'm sure I can do it with what I have, so won't bother with upgrades for now.

accelerated frostbolt is a bit too fast to collide with the pre-build frostwall, so I removed the acceleration on frostbolt.

Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/RmHr02WpaCM

Yeah. Basically, it's steamrolling again. Wall+Nova is nowhere near close to something like this.

Chobi0ne's setup with + CoF/Wall is quite desirable. Still, that missing spirit sounds expensive to me atm xD

Unfortunately, Snakepit is an enabler for Frostbolt.
30% cast speed (top roll + quality) is hard to ignore too. Opened room for a stronger wand, no damage problems so far regardless of the Delirious %.

Anyway, swapping rings for pinnacle bosses is an affordable waste of time.

So happy to read that ! I didn’t like nova at all xD didn’t understood something and it did not work.

Regarding skill gems you’re back to the previous frost ball build ? But with the CI tree defensive version and back to snake pit ?

"

Casia#1093 wrote:

Cast on crit is the other major scaling option for cold spells.

granted, they/we are using that AND archmage..

But cold spells naturally have high crit rates. 11-15%

CoC will then scale with crit chance, energy gain, and crit damage.

With each of these effectively being a more multiplier on base damage. albeit crit chance is capped at 100% chance.
it'd stake 700% increase crit chance to get frost bombs 13% crit to 100%.

Energy gain is also capped at 100% max energy gain. ..the math on that is complicated..
1 energy per power. 10 wall shards is probably 10 energy.
1 white enemy 1 power.. 20 for a unique.
300 energy for comet
in theory would need 1500% energy gain to cast comet on EVERY crit on a boss.

crit damage then adds into itself, but multiplies into everything else.

Thank you Casia for your insight in crit being a good pathing considering the base crit chance of cold spells, that's quite helpful.

Alright, I'm starting to work on OP. Should finish by Sunday evening.

- Slowmancer will be the main focus of the guide. It is viable for the highest end content, so yeah.
- Casia's current build would go for low budget/SSF/Starter for now.
- Casia's support as the fork for party play.
- Chobi0ne's as the fork too. Frostbolt focused build.
- Ruz's as a boss carry.
- All other builds will be removed. Seeders has their own thread, HammerToDaFace's build a bit irrelevant as for now.

I'll yoink some of your explanation stuff as major contributors to this thread. I hope you are fine with it =)

After I'm done with the atlas tree (basically, close all content), I'll make a fresh start through the campaign to optimize lvling. I linked Cold Fireball guide for that, but let's see if giga aoe frost bomb + wall can do things too.

Edit: Most of us expect giga nerf wave, so I won't be too hard about the guide for now. Let's see how we can survive it.

"

DeathMaillet#9146 wrote:

So happy to read that ! I didn’t like nova at all xD didn’t understood something and it did not work.

Regarding skill gems you’re back to the previous frost ball build ? But with the CI tree defensive version and back to snake pit ?

Nova is still an alternative bc Snakepit can be very expensive. I guess, we can just focus on Frost Bomb before that. A lot slower, but guaranteed result.

Yes, skill gems for Frostball are the same.

Thanks you all guys for sharing your builds!
I'm currently playing something between Casia's and Chobi0ne's builds, with frostbomb and archmage but no CoC.
I have some trouble with mana, playing mind over matter and Eldridge Battery, with the 50%reduced mana. Moreover, Archmage makes Temporal rift cost mana, so if I'm in a bad spot, damage might have sucked through my mana pool and I can't use it anymore.
I can only imagine that with frostball spamming, CoF and CoC, the mana drain is crazy. What is the trick to sustain mana? Just sapphire jewels with mana on kill? Something else?

Kiss,