Glacial Hammer Dual Wield Doryani's Catalyst/Prismatic Eclipse, IR+Block build idea, need feedback

I've had this build concept kicking around in my head for a while and I'm looking for some feedback on it.

Basically the idea is to dual wield a high pdps sceptre with +ice damage and +elemental damage, and a Prismatic Eclipse in the off-hand.

The goal is to capitalize on the global 75% weapon damage buff, plus build on the higher than normal starting block chance it gives you. Because Glacial Hammer will force you to attack with the sceptre, the sword's damage doesn't matter.

A summary of my proposed passive tree bonuses:
Passive Bonus Summary
+223 to Strength
+293 to Dexterity
+104 to Intelligence
+392 to maximum Mana
+633.5 to maximum Life
Evasion Rating: 278
+5 Maximum Endurance Charge
65% increased Melee Physical Damage
2.5% of Life Regenerated per Second
202% increased maximum Life
+2 to Melee Weapon and Unarmed range
40% increased maximum Mana
64% increased Physical Damage with One Handed Melee Weapons
30% increased Armour
20% increased Attack Speed
9% increased Attack Speed with One Handed Melee Weapons
56% increased Evasion Rating and Armour
28% additional Chance to Block while Dual Wielding
60% increased Mana Regeneration Rate
Ignore all Movement Penalties from Armour
124% increased Physical Weapon Damage while Dual Wielding
Converts all Evasion Rating to Armour. Dexterity provides no bonus to Evasion Rating
30% increased Cold Damage with Weapons
+22% to all Elemental Resistances
20% increased Accuracy Rating
+18% to Lightning Resistance
+18% to Cold Resistance
20% increased Mana Recovery from Flasks
14% increased Attack Speed while Dual Wielding
+18% to Fire Resistance
10% additional Chance to Block while Dual Wielding or holding a Shield
4% increased Movement Speed
Cannot Evade enemy Attacks
Cannot be Stunned
0.2% of maximum Life Regenerated per second per Endurance Charge
Enemies Cannot Leech Life From You
Your hits can't be Evaded
Never deal Critical Strikes
+20.8% Energy Shield
+44.6% increased Melee Physical Damage
+586 Accuracy Rating
58.6% increased Evasion Rating

Here's my actual proposed passive tree:

As for items, I feel like Bringer of Rain would be pretty boss for this build, letting us max out block chance and All of those resists from the tree should help mitigate not having resists from the head or armour slot.

Aside from that, this build will likely need a bit of +int from gear to meet the requirements for a high end sceptre. Other than that, no other gear suggestions come to mind. I'll accept suggestions here.

What I'm mainly looking for feedback on is whether the damage potential of this build is good enough to sustain freezing, and what this build would need to sustain the cost of Glacial Hammer. I'm hoping to draw on peoples' Glaical Hammer experience here since there seems to be a dearth of information on it in general.

Thanks for reading! Looking forward to feedback.
Quod efficax non stultum
Last edited by elindred on Apr 24, 2014, 4:54:59 PM
Get your hands on this:



Perfect for your build
So many strikes within one breath.
But only one strike needed, for certain death.
"
fiqst wrote:
Get your hands on this:



Perfect for your build
Great, thanks for that. I'll definitely include that in the build. With that the dps should definitely be high enough to generate a decent freeze duration.

The elemental proliferation mod seems like a red herring, at least in the context of this build, since there are only three other links to benefit from it.

Still looking for comments regarding the sustainability of Glacial Hammer, as well as on the passive tree.
Quod efficax non stultum
"
elindred wrote:



The elemental proliferation mod seems like a red herring, at least in the context of this build, since there are only three other links to benefit from it.



I've been experimenting with the doryani. The lvl 20 elemental proliferation works well as a cwdt setup.

EP - cwdt 1 - cold snap 8 - cold penetration 20

31% chance to freeze and EP makes sure the whole screen freezes. The cold pen makes the duration approx 0.5 secs. The more you raise cwdt and cold snap the duration gets longer but procs less often. I'm still working out the best ratio.

EP - cwdt 1 - detonate dead - chance to ignite

I'm currently testing the feasibility of this combo. If I can cause the whole screen to be on fire then it'll be worth it.


So many strikes within one breath.
But only one strike needed, for certain death.
"
fiqst wrote:
"
elindred wrote:



The elemental proliferation mod seems like a red herring, at least in the context of this build, since there are only three other links to benefit from it.



I've been experimenting with the doryani. The lvl 20 elemental proliferation works well as a cwdt setup.

EP - cwdt 1 - cold snap 8 - cold penetration 20

31% chance to freeze and EP makes sure the whole screen freezes. The cold pen makes the duration approx 0.5 secs. The more you raise cwdt and cold snap the duration gets longer but procs less often. I'm still working out the best ratio.


That's really interesting. I hadn't thought of that. Have you tried cwdt-arc/shock nova/lightning pen? Those shock stacks would help with freezing off of the Glacial Hammer damage as well.
Quod efficax non stultum
I'm thinking of doing a Doryani's + Ungil's Gauche dual wield build. It would be for the upcoming Molten Strike, although it could also work well with IB.

The idea behind Ungil's is that when used with a Mace ability it becomes a shield that gives access to dual wield nodes, just like Eclipse. The difference is it gives better block (it's essentially a 35% block shield) and it also gives 90% global crit chance, which I really need for this build. Dual wielding also gives me access to Twin Terrors for 125% crit chance on top of the easy block nodes (Dervish OP!).

Here is my theorycrafted tree for that build. It's a crit build so ofc has quite a few differences with yours. It's meant for 100% conversion to fire (AoF) to maximize ele modifiers effectiveness but should work well too for partial conversion skills like GH or LS. BoR is clearly a strong choice here but I'm thinking of using Three Dragons to shock all the things with my fire damage, in which case I will ofc have to do without, but that's not relevant to GH (freeze to burn is not a very good deal IMHO).

I have no experience to speak of regarding Glacial Hammer, and actually came here also in search of such info because it seems nobody did a write up in quite some time. All I heard is that while fairly efficient at freezing things, it is less than stellar in terms of damage, and people end up going for other skills instead (LS,IB). It should do its job well for HC safe-mode play but I'm not sure it is that exciting, not without crit to take the damage to the next level anyway.

I'm proud I made the build that got hotfix nerfed by 80% in under a week :
Kamikaze Clones /1204796 (LL Mirror Arrow Instability Prolif)
CWDT:

I've tried arc but I didn't take the time to level the gems so the setup was ineffective. The chance to shock is only 10% and the duration was only half a second, not enough to take advantage of the shocked status.

The best combo turned out to be detonate dead and chance to ignite. The screen lit up with enemies on fire and the damage was decent but cwdt gimped the damage too much to be viable end game.

The best way is to use detonate dead manually linked with chance to ignite and increased aoe. I reserve 90% mana so I didn't test this but I believe that this sceptre is the bis for detonate dead builds.



I did some testing on a piety run with glacial hammer on the doryani and the eclipse.
The gem setup on a tabula was RRRRGB
GH(15) - melee phys(18/20) - blood magic(16/20) - splash(20/20) - cold pen(14) - prolif(7)
The tooltip read 8769dps

When i hit white and blue mobs, they would freeze and anyone in the zone would freeze as well for approx 3-4 seconds. On yellow mobs, it was more like 1-2 seconds. I could not freeze piety at all.

The freezing of normal mobs was great and worked well. Unfortunately, if you hit the frozen mob you orginally froze and shatter it, every mob gets instantly unfrozen, so the chance to permafreeze everything is diminished.

When i replaced prismatic with a soul taker and had no mana concerns, i replaced BM with WED and splash with multi.
Tool tip read 22944 dps and mobs were frozen for 1 second longer and still could not freeze piety.

BoR and soul taker.
GH - multi - prolif - cold pen
23181 dps



I also tested infernal blow.
RRRRRR IB(15) - multi(19/20) - BM(16/20) - fire pen(5) - melee phys(18/20) - WED(8)
tooltip was an impressive 18341dps

The explosions causes massive damage to surround enemies, killing one white mob blow up 60%hp of the surrounding mobs and i was able to chain explosions from one-hitting everything.

With a soul taker, i swapped blood magic with melee splash.
tooltip read 20624, and everything i touched melted. The splash made all enemies drop to below 50% health and the IB explosion finished them off.

BoR and soul taker
IB - multi - splash - added fire
27358 dps


my conclusion is glacial hammer is great for freezing your enemies but once you kill them and shatter them (takes less then a second), the freeze breaks so its impossible to permafreeze, there is not enough damage or my gems weren't levelled enough to freeze piety at all.

Infernal blow, on the other hand, is very powerful. It puts the inherent +90-110% elemental damage of the doryani to good use and is effectively an extra 60% of the enemy's hp as extra damage.


I had a lot of fun testing this out, i hope it helps with your build.
So many strikes within one breath.
But only one strike needed, for certain death.
I currently have a different version of this build atm. Mace on main hand and 3R prismatic on offhand. DPS wise, 3G is better.

My build is a proliferation build with a LOT of damage nodes. I don't go out of my way to get every dual wield block and I have like 47% block. From your passive tree, you have 10% more than me, bringing that up to 57% and will be 72% with a BoR. You can also corrupt/buy a block prismatic, further increasing that to the cap. I didn't though because at 47%, I felt that leech was better. Block is better for you if you plan on fully investing into it.

I'm also using an abyssus because I need a chest,all attributes,and that sexy damage, so you can say I have "less" defenses but freezing everything is just as defensive. Keep in mind that glacial hammer is also very prone to desync (probably 2nd to cyclone multistrike). I might try out BoR when I get one though.

I've also considered saving up for a doryani, but with the amount of damage nodes I have, I'm not sure the damage will be better than a high pdps mace. The free proliferation and leech does seem nice though missing prolif quality.

5L GH
melee physical damage
weapon elemental damage
life leech
cold penetration(5L)

4L GH
melee splash
elemental proliferation
increased aoe

The amount of damage I do lets me freeze almost anything if the innate freeze chance procs. Trash mobs die fast anyways so I don't need any damage on my aoe. Tooltip dps is low due to having low attack speed but damage per hit damage is high which is key to freezing. It also helps with not running out of mana. Keep in mind this is also a supportish kind of build. High amounts of cold damage is needed to freeze high resist/life mobs so it's really a side effect. At the moment, I can freeze lunaris piety for like under a second, but that should change once I get cold penetration.

Regarding your passive tree, I don't recommend getting Ice Bite(30% cold) because it doesn't scale as good as physical damage nodes and it costs 2 points essentially making it 2x 15% nodes at half effectiveness due to 50% conversion. That is like an increase of 7.5% per node while physical nodes get the full effect before/after conversion.



A HIGH pDPS mace is better than an elemental scepter since everything scales off it. Flat physical damage is also better than flat cold damage unless you have less physical damage nodes than elemental/cold.

These are great for glacial hammer, combined with Hated I deal only around 10% physical damage, meaning its really easy to freeze enemies. Only problem is you NEED cold pen, and capped resist enemies like act bosses take ages to kill.

When I get the currency together, I might try that until+vaal scepter combo. Damage might be a little lower than a good mace, but the crit boost will help freezing on single-target mode and the elemental leech will be very helpful.

My links are:
Aoe: GH, cold pen, proliferation, multistrike, melee splash.

St: GH, cold pen, melee physical, faster attacks.

When I get the links, of course melee physical is going to aoe. As for st, probably going to be weapon elemental damage and one more thing.
IGN: Ikimashouka, Tsukiyattekudasai, DontCallMeMrFroyo
scepter+ Glacial hammer= u got to go crit mate. u use a crit based weapon and u wanna use a attack that causes frezze.. GO crit
IGN jauertemplar
Jauershadow

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