[3.6] The Blizz Sorc - Icestorm/Winter Orb CI Occultist - Viable For Everything

Hurray, December is over and I can play PoE a bit more again! Sorry about not updating the guide, but I really can't play in December. All I did was fill the Atlas, get to lv 94.5 while doing so, kill the Shaper and run into a lv 83 Mastermind while avoiding the spoilers about that fight. That went well... LOL. Plus some Delves and half-decent gear upgrades. In a non-December league, this would be my situation after about 1 week.

Back in the game now, going to catch up on everything, make new videos, update the guide etc.

All hail to WI mastermind :D

Also, I posted some funny stuff about using SR with ocultist, can you clear that for me, please? On paper it just looks better for this build.

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Vultai wrote:

So in 3.5, how's the performance hit with WI? I've read horror stories of even the beefiest GPU's dropping to single digit FPS with WI. I'm on a 1060, and want to enjoy smooth gameplay, so how's it fair now?

I noticed drop to 19(!)fps on 1066 with SpellCascade. So WO+GMP.

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sufferot wrote:

So, I'm just sitting here and thinking - can we still use scorching ray with the occultist?
PoB said that it's doable, at least with my gear, and I will get around 40% more average hit dmg and scorching ray DoT damage on top of that without trading anything (even getting insane mana regen with my gear to keep lvl20 SR constantly up), even the freezes, cause we still chill everyone by chilled ground. ALSO that way I will have one free gem socket, where I can put enlighten for even more free mana, and, possible, clarity for future es for clarity watcher's eye.
PoB link

Spoiler

https://pastebin.com/KP3giVCi

Am I missing something?

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sufferot wrote:

All hail to WI mastermind :D

Also, I posted some funny stuff about using SR with ocultist, can you clear that for me, please? On paper it just looks better for this build.

So yeah, you are missing the fact that changing into scourching ray WILL NOT affect average hit damage whatsoever.
Well, now that i saw your pastebin, you are using cold to fire full conversion... then it's not even a question, of course SR will beat any other option with flying colors... because of fire debuff.
In fact, why do you even have frost bomb, if you use fire conversion? Remove it, and put orb of storms with linked "combustion support" (ideally link combustion as 6link to body armor cwdt setup when you can afford it), it will boost your damage even further.
Also, get rid of bonechill linked to herald of ash.
Oh, just noticed that you have GMP in your chest setup, get rid of that too, absolutely unnecessary. Put combustion there instead.
Instead of "fire resistance node" under the scion, take "fire walker node".
Anyway...
That thread about cold version, so SR isn't usefull here. In fact, even less usefull than ANY other channeling skill. Something like blight will atleast hinder enemies or something.
P.S. Also, i doubt that -24% to enemy fire res can boost your average damage by 40%, unless enemy have absurd fire res, and you have nothing to mitigate it, but yeah, in fire version it would be stupid to use anything other than SR.
Also, can i ask? How changing channeling skill into SR free up the socket?

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Med1umentor wrote:

So yeah, you are missing the fact that changing into scourching ray WILL NOT affect average hit damage whatsoever.
Well, now that i saw your pastebin, you are using cold to fire full conversion... then it's not even a question, of course SR will beat any other option with flying colors... because of fire debuff.

Ugh. I was just playing around with nodes and PoB, cause I really liked old SR elementalist of this build. I just literally moved cold damage "ring" into AoF and took some fire damage nodes instead, an Deep thoughts, and it gave me that results.

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In fact, why do you even have frost bomb, if you use fire conversion? Remove it, and put orb of storms with linked "combustion support" (ideally link combustion as 6link to body armor cwdt setup when you can afford it), it will boost your damage even further.
Also, get rid of bonechill linked to herald of ash.
Oh, just noticed that you have GMP in your chest setup, get rid of that too, absolutely unnecessary. Put combustion there instead.
Instead of "fire resistance node" under the scion, take "fire walker node".
Anyway...
That thread about cold version, so SR isn't usefull here. In fact, even less usefull than ANY other channeling skill. Something like blight will atleast hinder enemies or something.

For reference, I took my pure cold atm Occultist into PoB an just switched gems, that were affecting icestorm, thats all, I didn't did anything for other gems, reason why gem setup still has bonechill there.

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P.S. Also, i doubt that -24% to enemy fire res can boost your average damage by 40%, unless enemy have absurd fire res, and you have nothing to mitigate it, but yeah, in fire version it would be stupid to use anything other than SR.

I was talking about numbers, 13k or so "avg hit" for icestorm in purecold version after the frost bomb debuff vs 21k "avg hit" for icestorm at 8th stage of SR.

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Also, can i ask? How changing channeling skill into SR free up the socket?

bonechill goes away in helmet setup :D

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Idrug1 wrote:

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Vultai wrote:

So in 3.5, how's the performance hit with WI? I've read horror stories of even the beefiest GPU's dropping to single digit FPS with WI. I'm on a 1060, and want to enjoy smooth gameplay, so how's it fair now?

I noticed drop to 19(!)fps on 1066 with SpellCascade. So WO+GMP.

I'm running a 980TI and in the hideout with a nearly 7 second duration, with Spell Cascade, the lowest I can drop my framerate to is 40 fps. This is at a windowed mode resolution of 1920x1400 and the card also driving two additional 1920x1400 monitors, and a 3840x2160 4k monitor (with nothing really happening on them)

This machine is a i7-6700 4GHZ with 32 GB of ram. With the game running on a screen, but just a few hideout effects and pets running around, it uses around 17% of the CPU. Using massive amounts of Ice Storm to saturation, bumps up my CPU usage to 75-80%... so it's possible that the issues with Ice Storm are CPU bound and not Graphics card bound.

Just ran an additional test.. at 5760x1400 resolution and at native 4k resolution (3840x2160) I get the exact same performance as I do running in 1920x1400. Same CPU usage and same framerate. That provides more proof that the game is far more CPU bound than anything else.

That should hopefully give you a baseline.

It's the stacked chilled ground that is the killer, and that's why Spell Cascade tears into machines. Three times the chilled ground procs as any other gem.

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Breken wrote:

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Idrug1 wrote:

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Vultai wrote:

So in 3.5, how's the performance hit with WI? I've read horror stories of even the beefiest GPU's dropping to single digit FPS with WI. I'm on a 1060, and want to enjoy smooth gameplay, so how's it fair now?

I noticed drop to 19(!)fps on 1066 with SpellCascade. So WO+GMP.

I'm running a 980TI and in the hideout with a nearly 7 second duration, with Spell Cascade, the lowest I can drop my framerate to is 40 fps. This is at a windowed mode resolution of 1920x1400 and the card also driving two additional 1920x1400 monitors, and a 3840x2160 4k monitor (with nothing really happening on them)

This machine is a i7-6700 4GHZ with 32 GB of ram. With the game running on a screen, but just a few hideout effects and pets running around, it uses around 17% of the CPU. Using massive amounts of Ice Storm to saturation, bumps up my CPU usage to 75-80%... so it's possible that the issues with Ice Storm are CPU bound and not Graphics card bound.

Just ran an additional test.. at 5760x1400 resolution and at native 4k resolution (3840x2160) I get the exact same performance as I do running in 1920x1400. Same CPU usage and same framerate. That provides more proof that the game is far more CPU bound than anything else.

That should hopefully give you a baseline.

It's the stacked chilled ground that is the killer, and that's why Spell Cascade tears into machines. Three times the chilled ground procs as any other gem.

Hmm.. well i'm on an i5 8400 2.8GHZ so.. yikes.

Almost immortal build. Corrupted red maps with reflect, no leech/no regen, t14-t16 syndicate with 0 problem. 90% of deaths - due to lags and shitty pc xD

One of the bad sides of build - high level incursions and even with winter orb+gmp+spell cascade setup don't give 100% chance to farm them normally.

btw died few times to 9k oneshot from primordial block boss, with all flask+fortify+web stacks.

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mqecco wrote:

Almost immortal build. Corrupted red maps with reflect, no leech/no regen, t14-t16 syndicate with 0 problem. 90% of deaths - due to lags and shitty pc xD

One of the bad sides of build - high level incursions and even with winter orb+gmp+spell cascade setup don't give 100% chance to farm them normally.

btw died few times to 9k oneshot from primordial block boss, with all flask+fortify+web stacks.

how do you tank reflect maps? No lifesteal enchants on boots,no lifesteal on Astramentis, and your watcher's eye isn't there.

For reflect maps


and pantheon ofc