[3.28 New!] Specialized Herald of Ice + Frostmage Abberath's Hooves Assassin

Hello sane Exiles~ This is Still Sane On Eating Peach( ＞◡❛)! Today I’m bringing a freshly cooked map clearing build!


Introduction
This is a specialized Herald of Ice + Frostmage Abberath's Hooves build. The core mechanics revolve around two parts: Herald of Ice and Frostmage support. The character clears maps by running around — you run into monster packs, triggering the small-area damage from Abberath's Hooves to kill enemies, which then procs Herald of Ice’s large-scale chain explosions. For elite monsters, you use the Frostmage-supported Blade Vortex to finish them off.


Core Stats
- Budget: ~30 Divine (a month after league start)
- EHP: 450k
- Herald of Ice Explosion Damage:124k
- Abberath's Hooves Damage:127k
- Blade Vortex Damage:5.2m
- PoB: https://maxroll.gg/poe/pob/epie9b03
- Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__WycOnbKzk&t=32s



Herald of Ice
Specialized Herald of Ice means heavily investing in damage, area of effect, and critical strike chance:

The Diamond Shrine on the Screams of the Desiccated belt allows Herald of Ice to achieve guaranteed 100% critical. These crits enable freezing monsters, which is the prerequisite for chain explosions.

With 124k+ damage, Herald of Ice can one-shot normal and magic monsters. With 2.4m AOE, it can clear an entire pack and still reach mid-to-long range packs to continue exploding.

As long as it kill one monster, Herald of Ice can wipe out the surrounding monsters. This makes Herald of Ice an excellent explosion mapping setup.


Stacking damage of Herald of Ice
Herald of Ice has a major issue: it has no Spell tag. This means many damage multipliers like “Added Cold Damage to Spells”, “Increased Spell Damage”, and “Increased Spell Critical Strike Chance” do not apply. Therefore, scaling Herald of Ice’s damage is relatively difficult with fewer available options.

The first major damage upgrade is placing Herald of Ice in ******Crest of Desire******. This grants up to +8 skill levels (roughly doubling base damage), 45–50% quality (significantly increased explosion radius), and double the socketed skill damage. It’s an extremely powerful choice.

Of course, this means Herald of Ice can only imbues one level 1 support gem and cannot use any other support gems, such as the new support Scornful Herald.

To make Herald of Ice freeze monsters for chain explosions, you can either stack high Freeze Chance or rely on critical strikes to freeze. The latter is clearly better because critical strike multiplier is a major source of damage. Since Crown of Thirst leaves no room for support gems, we naturally turn to the Diamond Shrine on the Screams of the Desiccated belt to achieve 100% crits (Fishing rod + Runegraft of the Angler is also possible but much more expensive).

Crown of Thirst + Diamond Shrine belt is one approach. Another is to give Herald of Ice a 6-link and stack supports for high damage and full crit chance. However, because Herald of Ice lacks the Spell tag, reaching 100% crit is quite difficult and will likely require going the power charge set for global crit chance. This also means more mana reservation on Herald of Ice, so you may have to drop one mana reservation skill (Petrified Blood / Tempest Shield / Arctic Armor). You would also need another 6-link for your main skill.

Using the unique small cluster jewel Lone Messenger can also give Herald of Ice double damage. The downsides, can only use one herald skill, no auras are acceptable — we are not very in needs of multi herald buff, we use Herald of Ice for its damage, not buff. Since Herald of Ice has no Spell tag, no auras would strengthen it anyway.

Because of Crest of Desire, penetration and resistance reduction for Herald of Ice can only come from curses, ascendancy and tree. We use the bloodline ascendancy Tul of the Blizzard to ignore enemy cold resistance. It may not be the best, but it’s very convenient.


Frostmage
Level 4 Frostmage gains 28% of your reserved mana into added cold damage. By reserving most of your mana, you gain a massive amount of flat cold damage.

Using Frostmage comes with two costs:
1. Most of your mana is reserved, so you cannot use it for MoM + Arcane Cloak for both defense and offence. Mana’s purpose only becomes supporting Frostmage.
2. Every time you cast a skill supported by Frostmage (including channel a channeling skill), the skill’s ******base mana cost****** increases by 5% of your reserved mana. This creates huge mana cost issues that usually require countermeasures.

There are currently three solutions:
1. Put it on skills that don’t consume mana, such as Abberath's Hooves boots. Abberath's Hooves gains the flat cold damage from Frostmage and doesn’t consume mana while running.
2. Make the supported skill’s mana cost manageable, usually by using Unleash support + high mana. Our main skill Blade Vortex is supported by Unleash, greatly reducing cast frequency. As long as mana recovers enough between casts, Blade Vortex can fully doable with Frostmage.
3. Make skills cost no mana. Using Lavianga’s Spring mana flask+ Khatal’s Geyser is an option, or combined with passive tree and gear for 100% reduced mana cost, can achieve zero mana consumption on skills.

We use methods 1 and 2 to support Abberath's Hooves and Blade Vortex with Frostmage. These methods also work with Archmage, but since we use Herald of Ice with cold damage, we chose Frostmage instead.


Ascendancy Choice
Although Assassin is the classic crit-based ascendancy, our crits actually come from the Diamond Shrine belt (^u^).

We choose Assassin mainly for the Mist Walker node — it grants massive Elusive based movement speed (average 42%), along with solid damage avoidance and take no extra damage from crit.

Other ascendancies might offer higher damage, but without the quicksliver flask, the Abberath's Hooves only provides 15% movement speed, making mapping feel like a slow walk, which contradicts the goal of fast mapping.


Defense Building
This build has exceptionally strong survivability, reaching 450k EHP. The defensive layers include:

- 78%/80% permanent block chance (Oppressor shield + Tempest Shield + tree investment)
- 5k life 1.4k es & Petrified Blood
- Average 36% chance to avoid damage (15% from Oppressor + 21% Elusive)
- take no extra damage from critical strike (Mist Walker)
- 3 Endurance Charges, 75% Chaos Resistance, 40% suppress spell damage
- The Dark Seer and Punishment curse to reduce enemy damage
- 35% less damage taken when facing 2+ rare or unique enemies— pushes effective health to 710k when this meet.

In T16 Breach + Beyond map, the character handles combat comfortably. While the mapping speed may not be the absolute fastest, the heavy investment into survivability makes mapping very safe. This allows us to confidently run into packs of rare monsters and melt them with Blade Vortex.

Because resources were allocated to defense, damage output is not top-tier given the budget. The slowest part is currently killing rare and unique monsters, Blade Vortex now only hits 5.2m damage. If we sacrifice some survivability for more damage, the overall feel may will be noticeably better.

How does the build feel? Oh tell me please~ i REALLY want your input!! (ゝ∀･)