[1.3] pabrt's Frost Wall Kinetic Blaster - Budget Friendly!

The build is back!

Erm, its not just working, but as far as I can tell, the build is actually significantly buffed from before awakening. Right now the following things are true;

>Shotgunned projectiles WILL all trigger their effects on striking a single frost wall, so hitting 10 frost walls with a gmp kinetic blast unleashes 50 sets of explosions (same as before)

>Each explosion can trigger an independent coc frost wall (same as before)

>Frost wall deals a crapton more damage than it did before awakening

basically, I clicked on malachai about 3 times, dealt infinite damage to him and crashed my game
I think I need to rework my build or limit my playstyle so I don't crash so easily. I'm thinking maybe fitting in cold snap so it consumes extra power charges, but I'd honestly be happy if GGG "nerfed" the build by putting a hard cap of 10-20 frost walls or something like they did with SRS

the damage on single targets is back to exponential again, thats for sure

Yeah, I've been getting game crashes as well. At least I don't think it's crashing the instance server, as far as I can tell.

Proximity shield severely aggravates it (or any invulnerable target that can be procced on infinitely, or that has enough health to proc too many times.)

I had the same thing on dominus; a few clicks and he instantly exploded, but then i went to 1500+ ping and my game disconnected.

edit: I think the fix (on our end) is not to consume more powercharges, but rather to lower our accuracy/crit rate overall in order to produce less procs. Also, adding cold snap might simply exacerbate the lag by adding another spell to calculate per proc.

Invincible enemies trigger a crash very very quickly (dom, prox shield, malachai), but I've also gotten some on just high hp normal enemies, its creating an exponential amount of frost walls and crashing the client for too many effects on screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN-3e_ULDqE

I mean if I have 95% crit and 67% chance to cast on crit, that means each GMP KB has an expected ~3 frost walls spawned per frost wall it hits. So its kind of O(~3^N) for N attacks, you can see how that quickly crashes a game, you attack 10 times and there might be 50,000+ frostwalls on screen

how did the pre-awakening build deal with this crashing?

Well, cast on crit has an internal cooldown, so the # of frost walls should be the same as pre-awakening.

It must be something on the backend causing this since the skill interaction is the same.

Edit: I think i found what is causing it. Frost wall has significantly longer duration in awakening, so even with no extra nodes/duration it should have ~105.6 (from the numbers on my 15/20 gem) frost walls simultaneously.

I will test this is a second with inc duration support to see if it is even worse. It should increase to 161 concurrent walls which should be... very laggy.

I think the problem is that frost wall is bypassing the cooldown on cast on crit by expending a power charge
Does that sound right?

Thats also an awakening change, it didn't consume power charges before. I heard someone saying something similar about cold snap. I am noticing a near infinite amount of frost walls spawning instantaneously, it couldn't happen if the cooldown exists

If I were GGG, and I wanted to keep shotgunning projectiles on frost walls, Id say:

"

*Skills that expend charges to bypass their cooldown no longer bypass the cooldown on trigger support gems

that one sensible change would fix the build. I'm a bit amused this build went from overpowered to completely dead to absurdly gamebreakingly hilariously broken in a couple patches

I was under the impression that expending a power charge did not bypass the cooldown of supporting trigger gems, but only the cooldown of the skill itself; is this something other people have noticed with cold snap in awakening?

I agree that it seems like more frost walls are spawning at once than before, but it is hard to tell.

One quirk of frost wall and cold snap bypassing their trigger gem cooldowns by expending a charge is that you can actually link multiple copies of the same gem. Going gmp + pierce + kb + coc + frost wall + frost wall has an uncanny way of not just crashing the game, but bugging out my HUD by displaying the power charge buff icon and its duration, with "0" charges

Lol I can't do Malachai, it just crashes on loop.

What do you think of a variant doing a less duration gem in the last slot, with a level 1 / 0% quality frost wall? You really don't need the damage from a 6L or max frost wall to sweep everything instantly, but this would let you dramatically cut down the lag spikes and crashes and make movement much easier. 1.35 second frost walls would last long enough to kill a boss or wipe a mob, but short enough to let you walk right through them