[2.4] Herald of Shattering Troubleshooting - Help!

So I've made a build I dubbed the herald of shattering- I use ice spear and it's crit potential to freeze enemies, then when they die and shatter I have herald linked up to take care of anything I might have missed.

The problem I've run into is elemental reflect enemies and maps, and my overall inability to take any hits from bosses, since they usually don't freeze. Below this will be a link to the build, I could use some help crafting a better alternative that still procs herald of ice on mobs, but can viably run T16 maps. Currently, I'm stuck at up to tier 8 maps at most, and some map bosses one shot me so I can't do even all T8 and below maps

I use dual divinarius for increased area of effect and spell crit chance. Carcass jack is there mostly for increased area, and increased area damage. The rest should be self explanatory, but if you want to know then do ask.

www.poeurl.com/PbJ

Spoiler
My Equipment (and socketed gems)


My current level is 76, while this post is up I'll be leveling him more as I can. I'll take any suggestions and ideas into consideration.
Last edited by Rangren on Oct 27, 2016, 1:34:15 AM
Last bumped on Oct 27, 2016, 5:27:03 AM
You will have a dps (and therefore freezing) problem as long as you run ice spear on a 4 link. GMP's less damage doesn't help either.

Personally i would run it in a 5/6 link without lmp/gmp. Wear one or two snakepit rings instead.
In that case you will have to drop some of the other uniques. You are wearing too many uniques right now so that you lack life. You should consider replacing two of the head/glove/boot uniques with rares that have life and resists.

The small life pool is probably your main problem. I don't think putting a bit ES on top of it and call it a hybrid build helps. Invest in life on gear and in the tree instead of ES or make a full ES-CI build.
Sacrificing one dagger for a good shield with life and spell damage or spell crit might help your survivability.

BTW Flash Freeze ain't worth the investment. If you can't get more than 10% spell/elemental damage per point spent, don't go for such a notable.
The thing about ice spear, is that I didn't get it for the damage. Even on GMP, I'm freezing nearly every shot I take because of critical chance- a crit on any elemental damage barring certain support gems will always inflict that damage's status ailment- in this case freeze. I started this build with ice shot in mind, but found ice spear and it's second form to be far better for crowd control.

As for single target damage, I have a second ice spear setup in a 4l using the same base cold damage support gems, but with spell echo instead of GMP. I'll admit that the GMP and single target could be compressed into one setup with the use of two snakepits, I forgot those even existed!

As for saying I'm just slapping ES on top and calling it hybrid, that's not exactly true- but if I take off those ES nodes, dump flash freeze, plus the last power charge inc duration node that doesn't need to be there and get the life node just off shadow with life back on kill, the hunted cluster, and a few small life nodes that only cost one point, I now have this tree:

www.poeurl.com/PgO

If I were to get any higher, I'd grab all the way to phase acro and get a kintsugi ideally for safety. I'd change out one of my divinarius for a shield with res and life, same for the boots and the hands.

Is there anything I left out that you think could help it? With the extra 4l on my head (after getting two snakepits), I could move the herald of ice setup to my vertex, use another enlighten there along with inc aoe and cold penetration. I could do a setup with grace, arctic armor, enlighten, and maybe a vaal grace for extra safety in my hands.
Crit chance is only part of the equation if you want to freeze. Freeze duration depends on the damage you deal in relation to the targets health pool (60 milliseconds for every 1% of the target's maximum life dealt by Cold damage according to the wiki). If you don't make it past the 300 ms freeze duration threshold then the target won't freeze at all.

So in order to freeze tougher opponents you have to deal high damage per hit (as such spell echo ain't doing nothing to improve single target freeze chance). If ice spear is only meant to get the freeze chain going for herald of ice, then the herald has to be 6 linked (in which case you just need one ice spear setup).
If ice spear is your main damage source (and the herald is only support) then you still have to up the damage or else you won't make it past the freezing threshold versus magic/rares/bosses in higher maps.

For a build that uses the herald as main damage source you can have a look at [2.4] Wormageddon (crit Herald of ice) for info on the gem setup.

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