Thoughts on Whispering Ice (Icestorm)

The flat damage of the skill is pretty low, but has 11% base crit, which is pretty good. It seems a lot of the potential behind the skill is to "improve" the bolts by consuming chill and freeze. Given the Heart of Ice skill always chills (50% magnitude with my testing) in presence, how then would the low base damage skill like Icestorm with only 4 support sockets "consume" chill/freeze to be damage-viable?

What am I missing?

I'm testing out Icestorm at the moment. I don't have the currency on hand to min/max everything in game yet, but here's my general outline and some observations:


- Make sure to get an ilvl 84 staff for lvl 19 icestorm, can get up to +3 additional levels from runes/corrupt, +3 from amulet, +1 cold from tree, and +1 from cold mastery support. It's obviously expensive, but a level 30 Icestorm has pretty respectable flat damage already.

- The staff has built in scaling for Int stacking. This naturally synergizes with mana stacking, so we can get additional flat through Archmage.

- The Lich ascendency (which I'm trying out at the moment) has a branch that gives % dmg as chaos based on mana. Blood Mage can go the crit/leech route with Atziri's Acuity and a lot of crit investment, something I've found to work really well with Fireball/CoC Comet and Burden of Shadows.

- Sorc seems interesting as well. I'm curious whether the chills are consumed independently or not, as would increase consistency of improved bolts or not.

- Alpha's Howl feels really good. Bigger presence radius seems to increase the number of improved bolts for Ice Storm and improves the defensive capabilities of Heart of Ice. The spirit also allows us to run CoC or additional defensive options alongside Archmage


I'm level 84 and res capped with about 1.5k hp, 7k ES, and 2k mana. Level 26 Icestorm. I'm running Archmage, Blasphemy (Temp Chains), and Arctic Armour while mapping. I swap to Archmage and CoC (Comet) for bosses. Damage isn't enormous yet, but my gear isn't amazing, and survivability is a bigger problem at the moment for me in t15s. I'm sure my setup is far from the optimal way to run the item, but I definitely see the potential for Icestorm both as a clear skill and an engine for triggered comet single target.

As I recall in POE1, skills notwithstanding, cast speed made a big impact on how many bolts came down.
In my observation, cast speed seems to only affect the initial cast, but the bolts themselves are unaffected - which makes for a far far less dense spread of bolts.
Thoughts?

I haven't played with it in PoE1, but so far in this game I've had the same experience with cast speed. The best way I've found to improve the bolt density is with unleash. Right now I'm using the following links:

- Arcane Tempo, because we need to recast all the time due to small AoE
- Conc Effect, for more density and damage
- Unleash, lets us place "clouds" of several Icestorm with a single cast
- Cold mastery, for more flat
- Pinpoint critical (boss only) to proc CoC comet


It's worth noting I tried other supports instead of unleash to serve a similar purpose, namely spell echo and spell cascade, but neither of them felt as good with the standard 3 limit Icestorm and the amount of damage I have. I could see tweaking the gems based on these and other variables though, so YMMV.

The playstyle with unleash is generally placing 3 storms right away, and then "moving" two of them after you accrue a seal, allowing one of the storms from the initial cast to linger and clean up mobs as needed.

Adding to Limit hasn't been something I've tried yet because It doesn't feel like I have the cast speed to take advantage of it.


EDIT: I've just tried annointing Kite Runner as well, and projectile speed doesn't appear to affect the bolts.