[Concept] Max crit / pierce prolif AoF Ice Spear - The Infernal Sniper

Initial skilltree

Any advice on the tree welcome.

This is obviously not for HC.

The main concept is maxing out Ice Spear's crit chance in 2nd form, give it max pierce so that it continues to fly through enemies even in 2nd form, and use AoF + Cold to Fire gem to convert all of its damage to fire.

All enemies the spear passes through become the source of proliferated burn, allowing to kill several packs with just one spear if the damage is sufficient (and with crit it is)

Ice Spear links would be: Ice Spear + Cold to Fire + Pierce + Ele Prolif (+ ICD for 5L)

Divinarius as a weapon to boost AoE.

Ice Spear crit chance:
base crit chance in 2nd form is 49%
365% from skilltree
140% from Voidbringer gloves
90% from Divinarius
total increase: 595%
49% + 7% * 5.95 = 90.65%
close enough, so no power charges needed

Laz + Rainbow + Rathpith will give 45% block and 60% spellblock

I'd use a Pyre ring and save some points going to Avatar of Fire and gives extra burn damage, also it will save you a gem slot that you use for Cold to Fire.

I've never played a proliferation build so I am assuming the AOE nodes increase it's radius and that seems like a waste of 7 points but I could be wrong.

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vaskov17 wrote:

I'd use a Pyre ring and save some points going to Avatar of Fire and gives extra burn damage, also it will save you a gem slot that you use for Cold to Fire.

I've never played a proliferation build so I am assuming the AOE nodes increase it's radius and that seems like a waste of 7 points but I could be wrong.

Yes you are wrong - those nodes increase AoE significantly.

Pyre ring is out because it destroys corpses. Pyre only really works in combination with HoA and attack skills.

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vaskov17 wrote:

I'd use a Pyre ring and save some points going to Avatar of Fire and gives extra burn damage, also it will save you a gem slot that you use for Cold to Fire.

I've never played a proliferation build so I am assuming the AOE nodes increase it's radius and that seems like a waste of 7 points but I could be wrong.

Yes you are wrong - those nodes increase AoE significantly.

Pyre ring is out because it destroys corpses. Pyre only really works in combination with HoA and attack skills.

The Pyre only destroys corpses if they were burning when you hit them. If you hit a non-ignited enemy it should ignite it and if you don't hit again, it would die from the burn without exploding. I always though burn proliferation builds kill with the burn, not necessarily the initial hit.

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vaskov17 wrote:

The Pyre only destroys corpses if they were burning when you hit them. If you hit a non-ignited enemy it should ignite it and if you don't hit again, it would die from the burn without exploding. I always though burn proliferation builds kill with the burn, not necessarily the initial hit.

With a crit (and Ice Spear will have over 90% chance to crit in 2nd form) and all enhanced damage (over 300% increased damage) I should have enough damage to oneshot anything that is not a rare. In that case I believe the enemy is still counts as ignited and its corpse should be destroyed.

It is the other enemies whom you don't hit that die from burn, but no corpse = no burn.

If you want to pair Icespear with burning prolif, why not use Three Dragons? I use that on my Iceshot-Ranger and it works like a charm. You won't have to worry about disintigrating enemies as if you would with Pyre, too. You would save the slot for the Cold to Fire gem and having to take Avatar of Fire as well.

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Hellborn90 wrote:

If you want to pair Icespear with burning prolif, why not use Three Dragons? I use that on my Iceshot-Ranger and it works like a charm. You won't have to worry about disintigrating enemies as if you would with Pyre, too. You would save the slot for the Cold to Fire gem and having to take Avatar of Fire as well.

This. There's a very similar concept with a crit-bow ice arrow build. High cold dmg --> 3 dragons --> ignite/prolif. Might want to check that out for mechanics.

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biomuesli wrote:

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Hellborn90 wrote:

If you want to pair Icespear with burning prolif, why not use Three Dragons? I use that on my Iceshot-Ranger and it works like a charm. You won't have to worry about disintigrating enemies as if you would with Pyre, too. You would save the slot for the Cold to Fire gem and having to take Avatar of Fire as well.

This. There's a very similar concept with a crit-bow ice arrow build. High cold dmg --> 3 dragons --> ignite/prolif. Might want to check that out for mechanics.

3Dragons does not change your damage type. This is the main problem with it.

If you take ice damage nodes, they don't boost burning dmg, and fire/burning nodes don't boost the initial hit.

By converting everything to fire you can just take elemental / fire damage nodes which increase both burning and initial hit, so final damage is much higher.

I already specced one of my chars into this build at lvl 65, now testing it out. So far everything works like planned - Ice Spear crits nearly every time without charges and pierces everything in its path. Managed to reach 500% crit multi, with two crit multi clusters still not taken.

How do you deal with offscreen reflect?

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holocaustus wrote:

How do you deal with offscreen reflect?

You don't deal enough damage for it to be a problem, since you only hit a limited amount of targets per spear and you don't spam them endlessly like other builds.

So far I wasn't able to kill myself with reflect, at most I would loose about 1k ES.

Builds that have problems with reflect do so because they hit a large number of targets at once. This build however gets AoE damage from burn, which is not reflected.

Plus, final build should have around 60-65% spellblock.

I'll probably make a detailed post later on, currently the char is still only lvl 68.

Ideally the Doryani sceptre should be used as it will massively increase the burning damage, but it is expensive, 2-4 ex if I remember correctly, need some time to get it.