[3.9] Cold Conversion Divine Ire Trickster - Freeze, Tank, 4mil+ Shaper DPS

Intro

This build was supposed to be a one of the countless Shroud of Eternity snooze-fest chaos blasters - but then I realized Shrouds were 30+ exa this league. Then it was supposed to follow the 'can't touch this guide' that I dug up on these forums, but then I realized that was for 3.6 and hasn't been updated since. Then I went ahead and made my own thing, this is the result


Pros and Cons

Pros:
-Tanky and strong bossing with tons of evasion, %damage reduction, 7k+ EHP, and 4mil+ Shaper DPS
-Decent clear speed - while not the fastest clear possible, you are far from slow
-Can run literally any map mod except for Ele Reflect with ease

Cons:
-A bit expensive to get off the ground (at the time of writing this, 6L,5B Perfect Form doesn't exist on poe.trade)
-Channeling makes things a tiny bit clunky while mapping
-You are pseudo-melee, you CAN deal ranged damage, but you do a lot more if you can stand close.


POB link and passive tree discussion points

https://pastebin.com/P4vp9AU1


This jewel slot gives access to Lightning Walker, Breath of Rime, Heart of Ice, and Wicked Ward without having to path to any of them, this is a huge boost of both offense and defense. You need a Large sized Thread of Hope to enable this.


A medium Thread of Hope gives access to Divine Judgement, Divine Wrath, Divine Fury, Singular Focus, and the 2 block nodes on the bottom that add a significant amount of resists. If you can manage without the bottom nodes, they aren't required, they are just a stat-dense area to add a good chunk of defense and fix our resists.

While the Mana reservation aspect of the Influence wheel is mandatory early on to turn on our 3 aura + herald setup, we don't actually need Influence itself until we are ready to ramp up our damage. And boy does it ramp up the damage. With 3 auras, Influence + it's preceding Aura Effect node are some of the best DPS nodes available on the tree, even above most of the crit multi nodes.


Gear

My current character, and an example of what you want for easy T16s:



Core Uniques





These 2 items together give you the base of your damage + life leech for sustain, while rares are technically better in both slots, they're VERY hard to find and extremely expensive while both of these are relatively cheap with the Cerberus Limb costing a few chaos for even well-rolled ones and Light of Lunaris being a few dozen at worst (I think it was about 1 exalt at the beginning of the league). Use any rare shield that can turn on life leech for Cerberus Limb until you can afford a Light of Lunaris if you are trying to spin into this initially.



This is huge as it provides us with Phase Acrobatics as well as a ton of Evasion, it provides most of our damage mitigation by itself. Use a Tabula until you can find a 5b linked body armor at least, but this will generally be a pain to get a hold of and is the biggest problem in getting the build off the ground.


This helmet is just straight-up stupid. Initially, I was using Eber's Unification as is suggested in many builds, and you definitely can use that, but this helm is part of the formula that allows for triple auras + herald + Precision action that makes this build so damn good. Of particular note is the 90% mana multiplier. This is the missing piece for most people that enables all the aura stacking that really pushes this build up into the next-level of damage that brings it all together.


Top rolls are nice, but unnecessary, just buy the cheapest ones you can get a hold of later, you can always upgrade and sell yours back later - don't forget to apply 20x Turbulent Catalysts when you find one you like for that juicy 96% conversion to cold



Amulet



While Pandemonius is nice, it isn't actually core. It allows you to run Herald of Ice instead of Flesh and Stone, but a well-rolled +1 lightning, +1 int gems amulet will be better and push you back to Flesh and Stone, and there are MUCH cheaper amulets that can provide good life and damage out there. The biggest redeeming factor of Pandemonius is honestly the Cold Pen, without it, it wouldn't even be a consideration.

Annointment

I went for Constitution to kick me up over that 5k HP mark, if you were going with a rare, you could pick up anything that gives more damage, or if you really want to be spicy, you can slot Charisma in the annointment slot and run a Herald instead of Precision.



Gloves



Anything that provides life and resists is pretty much good enough to go here, depending on where you're at with your build, this is also the optimal place to stack dex on your gear.


Belt



Stygian Vise wins here, mostly because it gets to hold a jewel that ALSO provides resistances and helps tie the whole build together. Any rare that fills your needs will do though.


Boots



Atziri's Step is both very cheap and provides a ton of evasion + spell dodge + life + movement speed, they're very hard to beat. Ultimately, I'd like to get some Elusive/Tailwind boots, but again, these are just a good slot for life/resist/move speed.



Flasks



I am currently running no uniques, but there are plenty of great options. Atziri's Promise chief among them provides a huge amount of damage + life leech. Taste of Hate is another relatively cheap unique option that provides both solid offense and defense.



Jewels

Anything that has +10 elemental resists is generally important. This can be a good place to fix stats, gain more max life, and increase DPS stats where available.

The reason I don't run Phys to Lightning is because I have my conversion covered by my Watcher's Eye. You will generally want another DPS stat in the form of added phys as lightning, arcane surge on crit, or enemies on consecrated ground take more damage, some of the Hatred mods are nice as well, but I really prefer the 2 currently on my watchers eye if you can find them.

I also run 2 thread of hopes, but can't take them out right now. You want a medium one on the left side of the tree and a large one on the top side of the tree.



Gems

Divine Ire

Energy Leech and Infused Channeling are pretty non-negotiable as soon as you can slot them on. Conc effect is a lot better than it looks. While it reduces the AoE of the charge-up effect, you have max limit of only being able to hit 5 guys while charging anyway, so it rarely has an impact there. It also has no effect on the width of the beam upon release, while gaining the full benefit of the + damage, so that's pretty non-negotiable as well once you actually look at the whole picture. I am using Awakened Cold Pen and Controlled Destruction. I found hypothermia to have more damage than regular cold pen though, so feel free to test. If you don't have a lightning conversion watchers eye, you'll need to fit Phys-to-Lightning somewhere in the build, that makes a much better 6th slot than Controlled Destruction unless you already have an alternative way to cover the conversion concern.

Auras/Heralds in the helm

The meat and potatoes of this build and why I wrote a guide. With Devouring Diadem (with the 90% multiplier corruption) + Sovereignty + Influence, you get to run Hatred + Wrath + Zealotry + your favorite Herald and you STILL have mana left over to run level 1 precision in another open slot. As far as the Heralds go, I was using Ash for the sweet phys as extra ele + burn, but a friend pointed out that I get nearly as much damage from Herald of Ice and slightly better clear due to the shatter effects, you could run whichever herald you prefer, they all have merits, but I feel Ice ends up being the best at the end of the day.


Storm Brand + CoH + Frostbite. Frostbite is the curse of choice due to how it stacks with Breath of Rime. With 20% quality on Frostbite, you end up with a total of +40% freeze duration. Stacking that up with our massive crits and huge amount of cold pen, most map bosses stop moving ~1 second into the fight and virtually all trash is trivialized. While this doesn't help with the toughest bosses in the game, it trivializes everything else, so I figured it was a worthy trade-off. Assassins Mark or Ele Weak will both give higher damage overall, so they are valid choices as well. The inclusion of Innervate here is just to help with a bit extra damage. Storm Brand does a good job of killing trash and adds during boss fights, so you end up with a good bit of uptime on Innervate while playing, and I didn't see a better use of the gem slot otherwise.


CWDT setup turns on Tempest Shield for us, which bumps us over 40% block chance. I prefer Steelskin to Immortal Call, especially on an evasive character, but I wouldn't fault you for choosing otherwise. Ice Bomb is much like Innervate in the sense that it just adds a good bit of damage often enough to be worth including over other options that are available, this could easily be an inc duration or any other gem if so desired.


Precision and Arctic Armor are both basically free. Flame Dash offers good mobility over obstacles and helps a lot with movement during boss fights/metamorphs.


Fortify provides us with a fairly significant additional 20% damage reduction on hits and is up almost all the time with a small amount of effort. Shield Charge is our primary movement method.


Leveling

I chose to level as Arc starting at 12 as you are generally getting caster nodes anyway and Arc is a solid and easy-to-use leveling skill. At level 38 there is an easy setup that I would argue any leveling character should use if able: cyclone + cast when channeling + volatile dead + desecrate. Any 4 link will give you insane clear speed through the rest of the story. 5th link would be spell cascade, 6th is concentrated effect. Or you can just swap to Divine Ire as soon as possible, users preference.


Ascendancy

Ghost Dance - Escape Artist - Harness the Void - Swift Killer
The typical setup for channeling Tricksters, I started Ghost Dance + Escape Artist to fill in defensive gaps I had while leveling, Harness the Void is an easy +40% more modifier once you start converting damage types, take this as soon as you can, and preferably before swapping to Divine Ire, Swift Killer is great, but not as good as any of the earlier 3 and should generally be left for Uber lab.


Bandits

Start with Alira, when your gear is settled, you can swap to Eramir - I would take even more points if I could, there are just so many good things to get in the passive tree



This is my first guide and is currently a work in progress, and suggestions on formatting or whatever will be much appreciated.
Last edited by JermStudDog on Jan 22, 2020, 2:25:19 PM
Last bumped on Mar 8, 2020, 7:27:40 AM
Thanks for the build. It was exactly what I was looking for, a self-cast Divine Ire build without EE. I have the entire setup going minus the ammy. It was notably squishy to me until I got chest, but that has helped tremendously along with the patch to allow freezing of metas. You might want to specify that people need the 90% mana multiplier corruption on the helmet to get the aura setup fully running. I'm stupid and didn't realize that at first.
Hey, cool guide! I want to ask if there's any other good Body Armor for this build.

Thanks!
"
Bobalu wrote:
Thanks for the build. It was exactly what I was looking for, a self-cast Divine Ire build without EE. I have the entire setup going minus the ammy. It was notably squishy to me until I got chest, but that has helped tremendously along with the patch to allow freezing of metas. You might want to specify that people need the 90% mana multiplier corruption on the helmet to get the aura setup fully running. I'm stupid and didn't realize that at first.


I added the 90% multiplier conversation to the gem discussion as well, I had previously edited the helm part of the guide to include that, it's something I forgot to mention, so thanks for pointing it out~


"
Gmorali wrote:
Hey, cool guide! I want to ask if there's any other good Body Armor for this build.

Thanks!


I was thinking about this yesterday, there are a couple viable alternatives, none of them are great.

Tabula Rasa is obviously a great starter item for most builds, and that's no exception here. You get an immediate 6l for ~10c and can use that as a foundation to build up the rest of your gear while you get going, but ultimately it lacks any sort of defense and you want to replace it with something better eventually.

Shroud of the Lightless is another option:


You can, somewhat easily, get a pseduo 6l while gaining some life and mana, but ultimately, this lacks any sort of compelling reason to stick with it - though it fits the role of being a better body than tabula while still being budget friendly.

Kintsugi is another body I had considered, but that has all the same problems that The Perfect Form has (mostly that it's a pain to get a 5B). Though I think Kintsugi has some nice aspects to it and may actually be better than The Perfect Form once you get the build really rolling. Finally, you can try something like Cloak of Defiance, or The Queen's Hunger. Both offer some decent defensive options, but I still don't think they're really competitive with The Perfect Form for optimal body armor.

Then there is the elephant in the room - The Eternity Shroud is hands-down the best body armor to be wearing for any Divine Ire build IMO, but that thing started the league at 30ex and is currently floating around 15ex. If I could afford that body armor, I wouldn't have written this guide in the first place ;)
Last edited by JermStudDog on Jan 11, 2020, 1:29:12 PM
Build looking really interesting, mind asking me if you have any videos to showcase the build? that would be great to watch.
How viable this build with only 6-7 ex budget? That means no pando/no 5 blue perfect form i guess.
So I'm looking in the PoB, and there is a lot of stuff in there, particular in the configuration, that seems off to me. Those things being:

Onslaught (you only have onslaught if you've killed something from your abyss jewel in the belt, that won't be up most of the time on boss fights, especially not on one like Sirus or even Shaper. Could be solved with a silver flask at the expense of some defense by replacing another one),
Tailwind (where is this coming from? Using Atziri's Step means you can't get this unless you're a deadeye),
Innervate (this is only activated when you kill a shocked enemy with the supported skill (storm brand), and has the same issue as your onslaught for boss fights such as Sirus and Shaper),
Maimed (this doesn't have any effect on your damage, but it was still checked when you have no source of maim),
Ignited (you have no fire damage anywhere, also no effect but still checked), Enemy is moving (only really has an effect on bleed builds, but still checked)
And most importantly you have Shocked checked. Shocked in PoB always calculates at a full 50% shock, which is essentially impossible to achieve on an end-game boss unless you're basically 1-shotting them anyway.

With all these things checked, however, the average hit from your Divine Ire is only 2.8m for a full 20 stack release, and even if you add in a 1-second channel required to reach 20 stacks against a single target (assuming every tick of the channel AoE against a boss grants an additional stack, and also including the two speed increasing buffs of Onslaught and Tailwind that you wouldn't/can't actually have with your setup that would mean the channel would take even longer), you sit at about 3.2m shaper dps. Where is the 4m+ number coming from?

If you check off the things that either wouldn't realistically be active or that you simply don't have during a Shaper or Sirus fight, the number is closer to probably 2-2.1m, not including the channeling damage which would be about 20% slower without onslaught and tailwind. That's a lot of extra time to get slapped by a boss while channeling an ability that already has a fairly lengthy and dangerous channel time to get maximum damage out of it.

Not to completely destroy your build, but it's pretty misleading to people who might be looking to get into this thinking it's going to do way more damage than it actually will, especially against the endgame bosses. Divine Ire is easily one of my favorite abilities in the game, but I've had a hell of a time with it this league due to the sheer number of 1-shots and that standing still for more than about 3/4 of a second can often be a death sentence if you're not essentially able to completely kill the enemy in that amount of time (looking at you, metamorphs)

Would love to hear back from you, though. The build definitely looks interesting as I've been thinking about giving the ability a 3rd try this league.
"
Punch2Face wrote:
So I'm looking in the PoB, and there is a lot of stuff in there, particular in the configuration, that seems off to me. Those things being:

Onslaught (you only have onslaught if you've killed something from your abyss jewel in the belt, that won't be up most of the time on boss fights, especially not on one like Sirus or even Shaper. Could be solved with a silver flask at the expense of some defense by replacing another one),
Tailwind (where is this coming from? Using Atziri's Step means you can't get this unless you're a deadeye),
Innervate (this is only activated when you kill a shocked enemy with the supported skill (storm brand), and has the same issue as your onslaught for boss fights such as Sirus and Shaper),
Maimed (this doesn't have any effect on your damage, but it was still checked when you have no source of maim),
Ignited (you have no fire damage anywhere, also no effect but still checked), Enemy is moving (only really has an effect on bleed builds, but still checked)
And most importantly you have Shocked checked. Shocked in PoB always calculates at a full 50% shock, which is essentially impossible to achieve on an end-game boss unless you're basically 1-shotting them anyway.

With all these things checked, however, the average hit from your Divine Ire is only 2.8m for a full 20 stack release, and even if you add in a 1-second channel required to reach 20 stacks against a single target (assuming every tick of the channel AoE against a boss grants an additional stack, and also including the two speed increasing buffs of Onslaught and Tailwind that you wouldn't/can't actually have with your setup that would mean the channel would take even longer), you sit at about 3.2m shaper dps. Where is the 4m+ number coming from?

If you check off the things that either wouldn't realistically be active or that you simply don't have during a Shaper or Sirus fight, the number is closer to probably 2-2.1m, not including the channeling damage which would be about 20% slower without onslaught and tailwind. That's a lot of extra time to get slapped by a boss while channeling an ability that already has a fairly lengthy and dangerous channel time to get maximum damage out of it.

Not to completely destroy your build, but it's pretty misleading to people who might be looking to get into this thinking it's going to do way more damage than it actually will, especially against the endgame bosses. Divine Ire is easily one of my favorite abilities in the game, but I've had a hell of a time with it this league due to the sheer number of 1-shots and that standing still for more than about 3/4 of a second can often be a death sentence if you're not essentially able to completely kill the enemy in that amount of time (looking at you, metamorphs)

Would love to hear back from you, though. The build definitely looks interesting as I've been thinking about giving the ability a 3rd try this league.


He's also got "Full On Energy Shield" and "Leeching Energy Shield" checked, which is impossible. It's causing double dipping on Energy Leech Support and further inflating the numbers along with the shock, tailwind and onslaught which the build does not have.

Incredibly disingenuous PoB. Be wary exiles.
Last edited by Unburied_One on Jan 13, 2020, 9:30:21 PM
Problem with PoB is it doesn't currently support the Thread of Hope jewels, you can get around that by manually adding each passive point yourself to get a better idea on the expected damage.

I am playing this build myself and at level 60 currently (without hatred aura), but using diadem, weapon and shield I can 3 shot the metamorphs and freeze them.

Standard bosses are either one tapped or frozen for 1-2 seconds, enough time to kill them.

I do see resists being a major issue though, even with Alira its extremely hard and expensive to cap them all, nigh on impossible to cap them for ele weakness curse maps.
Last edited by MadMossy on Jan 14, 2020, 6:24:35 PM
Sorry, been away from the game for a few days, I will put together a T16 video tonight and get it posted in this thread.

The PoB is kinda all over the place, I don't remember ever having Tailwind or Full on Energy Shield checked at least, though I have fiddled with the Shocked check box I believe I currently have it turned off. All that said, The Endgame Boss damage is not insane, 2.2 is probably reasonable in a real-world situation. But T16 bosses/metamorphs and Conquerors are all snooze-fest easy.

The 4 mil+ realistically came from looking at getting things like Tailwind and Elusive on my boots, which I don't currently have, and I have been investing less time in this character and PoE in general. There is still a ton of room for improvements given where my character currently stands, breaking 4 mil should be rather easy and maybe I'll put in the time this week to get the upgrades and do exactly that.

My current character could use new boots, amulet, and possibly weapon/shield (maybe a staff?) as well as knocking out a couple of extra levels. I have just been busy with other things going on IRL and honestly playing other games in my free time, sorry about that.
Last edited by JermStudDog on Jan 22, 2020, 2:49:13 PM

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