I LOVE CRIT - Flexible 100k+ dps Freezing Pulse Facetanker

FIRST OF ALL: You can follow this guide with basically any spell in the game, if you don't like Freezing Pulse, use something else. You might not reach 100k dps, but it will still be good dps for said spell. For example, around 30-35k using Arc depending on the supports.
For example, here is me clearing a Gorge map with Lightning Warp :D


So, The current leagues are drawing to a close. I've thought about showing off my most successful character out of the 7 I made (1 of each class because of the challenge).

Does a 6 digit dps number sound enticing? Keep reading.


Pros/cons

Pros
> Sick DPS*
> Instant Leech.
> Stun immunity.
> 2-3x auto-applied curses.
> A high life + mana buffer combined with Cloak of Defiance giving good survivability against big hits.
> lvl 22+ Arctic Armor giving good survivability against many small phys/fire hits.
> Great flexibility in maps. Can run all maps and mods.
> Can use any spell in the game to good effect. (although I would stay away from ones with only 4% base crit chance)

*I can reach 100k+ with my current gear, but only with Empower instead of Life Leech. 50k is easily reachable even with shitty gear.

Cons
No evasion and negligible amounts of armor.
No good protection against Damage over Time effects.
Shock/freeze/chill effects on you will last longer than if you go pure life based.
Zero life regeneration. Gotta leech or use flasks.

Passive Tree

Full Skill Tree

Bandit Rewards:
Normal: Oak - +40 Life. (skill point is fine too)
Cruel: Skill Point (4% cast speed from Alira is fine too)
Merciless: Alira - Power Charge. (no contest)

Current Gear



Upgrade potential

I've gotten fairly good gear during my time playing. For example the 6L Cloak which I acquired recently after wasting 2287 fusings, giving up, and ending up buying one anyways. :(
There are always room for upgrades, however.
The belt and rings are the most glaring weak spots. Especially the belt. The perfect belt is pretty simple: Life, Flask life recovery rate, Strength, two resistance rolls.
The rings could use some love too. Both are self found, with incredibly good mana rolls + resistance. Either crafting better life rolls on there, or preferably just buying better ones.
Perfect Rings: Life, Mana, (ES) + Mana Regeneration, 1-2x Resistances, Cast Speed, (Strength)
The wands could use way better spell damage rolls, but apart from that, are near perfect as far as rares go. However, a Void Battery or two would be great. I should probably have bought 2 of those instead of wasting almost all my currency on the 6th link, but hindsight is 20/20.

Gem setup

The whole build has alot of moving parts, which you can change based on the mods on the map you're about to do, or just because you feel like switching it up. I will list the standard setup, and then proceed and explain some common gem swaps.

Freezing Pulse + Greater Multiple Projectiles + Life Leech + Spell Echo + Increased Critical Damage + Added Chaos Damage/Added Lightning Damage/Faster Casting/Increased Critical Strikes
(ICD is the worst dps-wise, but if you're already oneshotting when you're critting, it does make sense to want to crit more often instead of just dealing even more overkill damage).
Quality is very important on Freezing Pulse!

Cast When Damage Taken + Enduring Cry + Immortal Call + Warlord's Mark
This is pretty standard in alot of builds nowadays. The auto-triggered Immortal Call really shines when you're getting hit by alot of semi-hard hits at once. for example a pack of rhoas/blackguards/frogs/goatmen/banners charging/leaping at you at the same time.
Warlord's Mark lets you cut Life Leech from Freezing Pulse during normal play. You only need to leech when you actually take damage, right? Well, I've gone back to using Warlord's Mark AND Life Leech anyways, because I managed to corrupt Temp Chains on my Voidbringer, which is nice too, since as you reach higher levels and gain more and more dps, survivability becomes even more important and the dps gain matters even less. If you don't want to use Warlord's Mark, replace it with Increased Duration.

Reduced Mana - Herald of Thunder + Curse on Hit + Assassin's Mark
This is what lets you gain power charges without "wasting" a gem slot in the main skill link.
Without high levels and quality on Assassin's Mark your power charge generation might be too low to utilize this effectively.

Reduced Mana - Discipline - Clarity - Herald of Ice
Gotta get dat mana regen, and Herald of Ice for more damage!

Lightning Warp - Reduced Duration - Faster Casting
Standard movement skill. Becomes crazy fast with good cast speed on your wands, even with nearly nothing in the passive tree.

Arctic Armor - Empower - Vaal Storm Call
Arctic Armor has to go somewhere, of course. And preferably with Empower.
With Voidbringer, it would be nice to utilize its +1 to elemental gems with Arctic Armor, but sadly, the 4L is taken with this setup.

An option would be to cut an aura from the aura 4L, move 2 of the 3 auras to the 3L and have Arctic Armor take it's place. You would lose quite a bit of mana doing this though. A third option would be to get so much mana regen that Discipline becomes unnecessary. Perhaps you could spend points on this instead of on Sovereignity.

With Arctic Armor in Voidbringer, it is possible to get it up to lvl 27. This requires significant investment, however. Lvl 21 Arctic Armor Gem + lvl 4 Empower, in a Voidbringer corrupted with +1 to gem level.

You can swap around alot of gems depending on the map mods/playstyle. Life Leech can either come from the Life Leech gem, the Warlord's Mark curse, or both. Life Leech can be switched out for Empower if you want. Warlord's Mark can be taken out for Increased Duration.

Another example is Arc. Arc is great to swap to in a variety of scenarios.
+75% cold res is the most obvious example. But also if I'm running lower maps, where my dps doesn't matter all that much, Arc is nice because I don't have to aim at all and stuff dies about as fast even with the lower paper dps. It is also nice if I'm facing a boss that I want to kite, like 1st stage Palace Dominus or Academy boss with multiple projectiles (Melee range vs that? No thank you).
Temporal Chains maps is another example where I tend to swap to Arc. Moving around becomes more of a bother, and Arc lets you stay in the same position for a longer time, since the range doesn't dictate your damage output.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2628127
- Check out my thread. #1 pdps synth explosion foil (600pdps + HCBE), and more.
IGN:
@Egren_EthicsConsultant
@Path_Of_Exile
Last edited by Egren on Nov 19, 2014, 11:23:36 AM
Do you think spell echo actually helps in clear speed at your DPS levels? On my tendrils build I got 100k without echo and 130k with echo, but because crits are only rolled once per cast, echo feels much worse in practice. Also are you able to survive reflect mobs with empower?
All my builds /view-thread/1430399

T14 'real' clearspeed challenge /1642265
Look Great...Lighting warp op lol.
Im Looking for a Ice Spear Scion Build right now....do you think can be viable?
Im Very doing skill tree so can you help me with a "Ice Spear For Scion"?
You bring up a great point. I've considered cutting Spell Echo for Faster Casting or Increased Critical Strikes at times, and it might very well be correct.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2628127
- Check out my thread. #1 pdps synth explosion foil (600pdps + HCBE), and more.
IGN:
@Egren_EthicsConsultant
@Path_Of_Exile
"
Raluska wrote:
Look Great...Lighting warp op lol.
Im Looking for a Ice Spear Scion Build right now....do you think can be viable?
Im Very doing skill tree so can you help me with a "Ice Spear For Scion"?


Sure! Ice Spear should work really well with a near identical skill tree.

The only thing is that you want way less critical strike chance since Ice Spear already has a massive amount.

Ice Spear's Base crit chance is 7%.

The second form gains 600% increased crit chance.

7 + 6*7 = 49% second form crit chance without anything else increasing it.

On top of this you have 7 power charges. these each give you an additional 50% of the base crit chance. 7 * 0.5 = 350% increased crit chance from power charges

this brings you to 73.5% crit chance with only maxed power charges.

Assuming 100% increased crit chance on both wands, you'll gain an additional 14%, putting you at 87.5% crit chance.

At this point you're only missing roughly 100% increased crit chance to reach the crit chance cap, which is 95%, which is super duper easy to get in the skill tree.

As such, you want to value crit multiplier way higher than crit chance. For Ice Spear, Facebreaker with its 60% crit multiplier actually seems like the best choice to me, as the crit chance from Maligaro's Virtuosity or Voidbringer will not do much for you.

Based on my original tree, I would do something like this


EDIT: Also, you might get away with not picking Unwavering Stance when using Ice Spear, since your preferred range is not melee range like with Freezing Pulse. If you want to shave points off, I'd probably cut Unwavering Stance and the stuff from the Templar tree.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2628127
- Check out my thread. #1 pdps synth explosion foil (600pdps + HCBE), and more.
IGN:
@Egren_EthicsConsultant
@Path_Of_Exile
Last edited by Egren on Nov 19, 2014, 12:11:29 PM
"
Egren wrote:

Cast When Damage Taken + Enduring Cry + Immortal Call + Warlord's Mark
This is pretty standard in alot of builds nowadays. The auto-triggered Immortal Call really shines when you're getting hit by alot of semi-hard hits at once. for example a pack of rhoas/blackguards/frogs/goatmen/banners charging/leaping at you at the same time.

Unfortunately that is exactly the situation cwdt-ic ain't working as intended. Damage is calculated at the start of an attack, not at impact. If for example vaal starts its smash, drinking a granite has no effect as the attack already started. Same with charging packs: If they all start their attack before the first one hits, all hits will be unaffected by the ec-ic that is triggered on first impact.

Personally i have replaced cwdt on my cold witch because of that (and the fact that ec and ic are too often out of sync). I went for block as defense and use the free sockets to drag along a trap-cold snap i use when opening boxes.

It doesn't hurt keeping cwdt as long as one has the spare sockets and is aware of the limited protection.
"
Bada_Bing wrote:

Damage is calculated at the start of an attack, not at impact. If for example vaal starts its smash, drinking a granite has no effect as the attack already started. Same with charging packs: If they all start their attack before the first one hits, all hits will be unaffected by the ec-ic that is triggered on first impact.

It doesn't hurt keeping cwdt as long as one has the spare sockets and is aware of the limited protection.


In my experience (leveling to 95 twice) CWDT gives a significant amount of protection against chargers, leapers, devourers, and basically everything since I play a melee spellcaster (summon raging spirit). Once you have leech and stun immunity CWDT may not be necessary, but without that I think it is.

I'm also not convinced of what you said about the rhoas. Unless you can find a dev quote, I feel that the conventionally accepted knowledge that CWDT triggered by the first rhoa will protect you from subsequent rhoas should be assumed true.
All my builds /view-thread/1430399

T14 'real' clearspeed challenge /1642265
Last edited by MatrixFactor on Nov 20, 2014, 6:57:34 PM
"
MatrixFactor wrote:
"
Bada_Bing wrote:

Damage is calculated at the start of an attack, not at impact. If for example vaal starts its smash, drinking a granite has no effect as the attack already started. Same with charging packs: If they all start their attack before the first one hits, all hits will be unaffected by the ec-ic that is triggered on first impact.

It doesn't hurt keeping cwdt as long as one has the spare sockets and is aware of the limited protection.


In my experience (leveling to 95 twice) CWDT gives a significant amount of protection against chargers, leapers, devourers, and basically everything since I play a melee spellcaster (summon raging spirit). Once you have leech and stun immunity CWDT may not be necessary, but without that I think it is.

I'm also not convinced of what you said about the rhoas. Unless you can find a dev quote, I feel that the conventionally accepted knowledge that CWDT triggered by the first rhoa will protect you from subsequent rhoas should be assumed true.


Client-server Action Synchronisation

the relevant part:
"
Chris wrote:

0ms: You click the monster. Your character starts running towards it on the client.
100ms: Your click arrives at the server. The character there starts running towards the monster also. At this stage your local character is already 5% of the way there.
2000ms: Your character arrives at the monster on the client. It's not there yet on the server. You don't even know if it'll ever arrive for sure (it might get interrupted by an attack still). Your client starts to animate the sword swing:
2100ms: Your character arrives at the monster on the server. The server immediately performs the combat calculation in advance of the contact point and sends the tentative result back to the client.
2200ms: You receive the notification from the server about what type of damage you will deal and roughly how much. Thankfully it arrived before the contact point of the animation! This is not always the case.
2300ms: You hit the contact point on the client. Because you have the damage information in advance, you can draw a pleasing blood splatter, fire effect and so on. This hit has not even occurred yet on the server.
2400ms: You hit the contact point on the server. The damage is locked in and actually applied to the monster. It dies. Experience and item drops are calculated and sent to the client.
2500ms: Your client receives an experience update and the information of what items to show falling to the ground.


That means that the min/max damage of an attack is calculated before contact at the start of the attack. On impact only the value between min/max is chosen so any mitigating effects that might have happened between the two points aren't affecting the damage.

EDIT:
Not saying that cwdt is of little help, just that it doesn't perform as expected in some tight situations.
Last edited by Bada_Bing on Nov 21, 2014, 4:22:59 AM
What you quoted is the prediction algorithm the client uses in order to do some stuff locally, and the steps they take to make synchronization with the server faster.

When a rhoa starts charging you the server makes a tentative calculation. (first bolded part)

If the prediction is wrong (say you moved out of the way, or you cast IC, drank a flask, weapon swapped to a shield, got cursed with vulnerability or shocked) it would be stupid for the server to ignore that and continue acting on the prediction it made. That's why the calculation seems to be verified before it's locked in (second bolded part).

This would be easy to test in pvp. Player A is the target with CWDT-EC-IC. Player's B & C will attack A.
Player C starts a shield charge at player A. After the charge starts player B hits player A with a melee attack enough to trigger cwdt. Ideally A doesn't have block/dodge and B, C have resolute technique and purely physical damage. If the shield charge does damage I'm wrong.
All my builds /view-thread/1430399

T14 'real' clearspeed challenge /1642265
Last edited by MatrixFactor on Nov 21, 2014, 2:25:02 PM
I feel like there is no way you are hitting 100k DPS with this build... Could you post a vid of you running it?

Report Forum Post

Report Account:

Report Type

Additional Info