2.2 Elementalist Ice nova. Insane clear speed, AoE, and damage. Super cheap

Love the build though leveling was a pain, have to get friends to help for Labyrinth unfortunately. The build really picks up once you've managed to get Shaper of Desolation though, Elemental Conflux is hilariously good.

Just for fun tried out Innervate. You'll lose out on Inc AoE but ridiculously good for clearspeeds as movement speed is what I'm severely lacking.
Last edited by MrTastix on Apr 9, 2016, 1:36:39 AM
Overall quite enjoying the build. Lots of feedback!

A couple items worth mentioning.

You don't lose any ES versus most budget helms and gives you a pretty solid amount of evasion to help avoid any stray hits between freezing (~9% for me). Chaos resist and gem levels added bonuses if you aren't short ele resists.


The cold leech saves having to pot as often with ZO. Having 55% freeze, more cold damage, dual resists, and ~5% worth of phys reduction from armor are all also solid. You're giving up 50~200 ES depending on another belt, but all in I prefer this.


Free level 1 temp chains is helpful for leveling and saving sockets. You lose a lot of stats so I'm looking for a replacement now.


By far my favorite flask in the game right now. Even without any other evasion, blinded enemies will miss about half the time, which between being frozen means you're often recharging while surrounded. A 6 second duration using 7 of 30 charges makes it very easy to sustain for Doryani's 10%.

Given Ice Nova's in our Bitterdream I'm still torn with what I want to use the other links for.

Innervate with Heralds has been working great with Ele Conflux. Super easy to maintain a 7 second Onslaught for 10% increase reservation cost. Blind doesn't seem to work as well with HoI, but it's fantastic for HoT and no cost so always great to add in.

Frost Bomb with CwdT is also another free -20% Cold Resist. Add that to tree's 5%, cold pen's 18%, and Frostbite's 44% you can bypass 87% cold resist.

Right now I'm leaning towards:
3L: LS + Fortify, FA
4L: HoI + Innervate, CoH, Frostbite
4L: Ice Spear + cwdt, ICS, GMP
4L: IC + ID, cwdt and either Frost Bomb or Vaal Discipline
6S: Discipline, Clarity, Chaos Golem, and undecided on the last 1~3 chest sockets.

In general tankiness seems fine for maps, but lab is making me consider respeccing into Occultist for Wicked Ward. Running a second curse gives a lot of flexibility and Profane Bloom might help replacing non-prolif HoI for packs. Granted lab is really it's own thing so might be easier to just make a new life character.
This is some good stuff! I'm especially a fan of CwDT frost bomb, and innervate on HoI. Don't know why I didn't think of those! I'll add those to my own character for this. Though i might need a Lvl 2 Enlighten for my Discipline/Arctic Armour.
Thanks for these suggestions and feedback!
I am a shadow. I was born the youngest daughter of a respected family, raised to fight, weep and bleed for God and the Order. I would have died to keep my mouth shut. Professional integrity, it's called. That lord sang a different tune once I had taken their children.
Last edited by jugglereli on Apr 9, 2016, 7:27:21 PM
Updated build guide for level 91, including adding new ides/improvements/alterations. Thanks everyone for showing interest!
I am a shadow. I was born the youngest daughter of a respected family, raised to fight, weep and bleed for God and the Order. I would have died to keep my mouth shut. Professional integrity, it's called. That lord sang a different tune once I had taken their children.
Awesome updates!

One additional benefit of Bitterdream is you can actually end up with viable weapon swap options.

I'm still trying to figure out what to do with mine, but Dark Seer seemed like the ES per kill could easily help in a pinch.


The ability to swap to Bladefall or Glacial Cascade versus that random ele reflect without having to actually swap gems seemed like a huge QoL improvement. Add in Knockback and you could completely change your play style by hitting X!

Plus if you're using Whirly Blades you can have a functional setup if you want to toggle to Leap Slam or LW to get over any gaps.
Kinda new in this game but im wondering... Wouldnt it be better to change Beacon of Ruin to Liege of the Primordial? Using ice golem we would get +40% ice damage and a lot of crit.
"
tommor wrote:
Kinda new in this game but im wondering... Wouldnt it be better to change Beacon of Ruin to Liege of the Primordial? Using ice golem we would get +40% ice damage and a lot of crit.


You'd get around 5% increased crit which is honestly probably not that necessary given how often you attack and how high Ice Spear's base crit is due to how the skill works.

I think there's something to be said about removing Beacon of Ruin though. It's only really useful when Elemental Conflux isn't up and the radius is 25% less than the Ele Prolif gem, which has a pretty horrible radius as it is.

I was considering taking Liege myself but for the Stone Golem which gives us a nice bit of regen to go with Zealot's Oath. Naturally you wouldn't get the damage portion but as you said, you can always swap to an Ice Golem for that.
Using this build to level up now. Once you get it going with Bitterdream and spell echo, this build is super fun to level. I noticed a couple of folks were having trouble with early deaths. I chose to level and do the labs as life based and plan to respec over using the quest respec points. I have had no problems with deaths this way.
Thanks this build is super fun to play and is really cheap to get going. I love the uniqueness of some
of the gear and gem setups.
I'll add a couple more comments as I get through to the final form I'm looking at post labs.
I might try to make my way over to CI. But we will see.
I don't know what is happening right now. Just a few days before I had an amazing DPS with exactly the same gearing I'm using now and at this moment (only with HoT and HoI) I have 8.3k DPS. I'm using Ice Nova with Spell Echo and Increased AoE in the Bitterdream, the curses and auras are alright too and my offhand have like 66% spell damage plus the 20% elemental damage.

What am I doing wrong? The resistances are fine too (all them 73-75% and chaos 62%) and the ES/Life is kinda low but is what fits in my budget atm (1,6k life and 4k ES with discipline). The problem is I can't do maps or party leveling because I just don't do any damage at all.
"
Freegells wrote:
I don't know what is happening right now. Just a few days before I had an amazing DPS with exactly the same gearing I'm using now and at this moment (only with HoT and HoI) I have 8.3k DPS. I'm using Ice Nova with Spell Echo and Increased AoE in the Bitterdream, the curses and auras are alright too and my offhand have like 66% spell damage plus the 20% elemental damage.

What am I doing wrong? The resistances are fine too (all them 73-75% and chaos 62%) and the ES/Life is kinda low but is what fits in my budget atm (1,6k life and 4k ES with discipline). The problem is I can't do maps or party leveling because I just don't do any damage at all.


Hm! That sounds odd! Do you have most of the damage passives I have plus some flat spell damage/cast speed/extra spell damage on jewelry, etc. I assume you mean that as you were leveling up it got less powerful. If you just randomly logged in and you did a lot less damage then that sounds like a technical problem. If you haven't gotten new gear in a long time, I suggest getting yourself at least new jewelry. You can often get some good pieces for 1-5 chaos that can go a long way even increasing damage. Other than that make sure you have the damage passives I have, It's advisable to get the damage passives before the ES + survivability passives. I hope this helps a little. If you would like to talk to me more personaly, friend me as Isviniq and message me when I'm online :D

"
tommor wrote:
Kinda new in this game but im wondering... Wouldnt it be better to change Beacon of Ruin to Liege of the Primordial? Using ice golem we would get +40% ice damage and a lot of crit.

I don't think that Liege of the Primordial would be better than Beacon of Ruin. I think beacon of ruin is a very powerful node that is useful in a variety of circumstances such as when something is out of your range, or you can't freeze a boss, but you can freeze his minions right next to him, in which case the freeze will be passed on to the boss which is very nice. Also helps a lot for when you don't have elemental conflux as MrTastix pointed out. Plus to be honest, 40% increased damage isn't exactly something to scream about, and I prefer using a chaos/stone golem. However if you wanted to go liege of the primordial and use an ice golem (maybe if you were doing a crit variation) I think it would be better to sacrifice Paragon of Calamity. Because, although it is good, I think Beacon of Ruin is a key part of this build and very powerful.
I am a shadow. I was born the youngest daughter of a respected family, raised to fight, weep and bleed for God and the Order. I would have died to keep my mouth shut. Professional integrity, it's called. That lord sang a different tune once I had taken their children.

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