[1.3.x] Kungfooe's [Bloodlines] IronWill Glacial Cascade -- 7.7k Life + 10%+ Regen

Good to see someone else representing Iron Will Glacial Cascade! Firstly, I have to agree that Doon Cuebiyari is hard to give up in this build. The damage scaling is great, and there's not a lot of cast speed on the left of the tree with all the strength so 18% from one item is great!

Kungfooe my Cascader has a twist that you might find interesting to look over if you are building another in future. I have less strength and life (5700hp, 625str) but I have 6 endurance, 5 power and 3 frenzy charges and herald of thunder double curse on hit. It has a lot of automation, cursing and charge generation just happens as you fight. Tooltip is 13.5k when charges are up. Pretty good fun but best for solo or small parties because a lot of effects are powered on kill. I found Glacial is pretty safe to use with some crit, especially if you use added chaos damage in your 5L. Herald of Thunder and Conc Effect alone is enough to shock, I've found. I used a 5L chest for Glacial, I like a Vaal skill in Doon. I use Vaal Flameblast+Ignite+Prolif currently, it's awesome! Great alteratives are Vaal Molten Shell + Conc + Life Leech or Vaal Storm Call + Conc + Pen! All are efficient 3-links that scale great from spell damage and area. My page is here if you are interested.

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MisterBernn wrote:

Good to see someone else representing Iron Will Glacial Cascade! Firstly, I have to agree that Doon Cuebiyari is hard to give up in this build. The damage scaling is great, and there's not a lot of cast speed on the left of the tree with all the strength so 18% from one item is great!

Kungfooe my Cascader has a twist that you might find interesting to look over if you are building another in future. I have less strength and life (5700hp, 625str) but I have 6 endurance, 5 power and 3 frenzy charges and herald of thunder double curse on hit. It has a lot of automation, cursing and charge generation just happens as you fight. Tooltip is 13.5k when charges are up. Pretty good fun but best for solo or small parties because a lot of effects are powered on kill. I found Glacial is pretty safe to use with some crit, especially if you use added chaos damage in your 5L. Herald of Thunder and Conc Effect alone is enough to shock, I've found. I used a 5L chest for Glacial, I like a Vaal skill in Doon. I use Vaal Flameblast+Ignite+Prolif currently, it's awesome! Great alteratives are Vaal Molten Shell + Conc + Life Leech or Vaal Storm Call + Conc + Pen! All are efficient 3-links that scale great from spell damage and area. My page is here if you are interested.

Thanks for the post and your comments. I was looking over your build and I liked the idea of trying tu use all three different kinds of charges. However, had a couple questions and comments. Wouldn't a high spell damage wand or scepter be better than Doon, since 625 strength from Doon only give about 78% increased spell damage gained from your weapon? Would a Divinarius would work better as you'll gain spell damage, crit chance, and AoE?

I also watched your Gorge run video and even though you have 13.5k tooltip DPS on a 5L, it seemed to only clear about as well as my 4L (I'm planning on creating and uploading a video this evening with an example map run), even though I have less than half of your tooltip DPS (6.4k) and a level 18 GC. However, you do seem to be able to kill bosses a little bit quicker than I do, so I think you're build is stronger there.

I was wondering what your defensive mechanic is against reflect, and mobs in general. Do you just leech through it with Warlord's Mark and use flask management? Additionally, why go with Warlord's Mark over a different curse (e.g., ele weakness, frostbite)? Is it for sustaining mana, survivability, or another issue?

Demonstration videos added :D

Thanks for the reply. You're probably right about an alternative weapon! I made a cascader at the end of the Beyond league with Divinarius and I was determined to build some things differently this time. I was also determined to make a build with automation of the maintenance skills but also two combat skills so it wouldn't be too "one buttony"! Originally when I was planning what gems would go where, I was planning to have Discharge-AoE-Conc in the Doon! It was great fun as a burst skill but I quickly learned that I couldn't afford to throw my endurance charges away without having Immortal Call up. I also ran Vaal Fireball-GMP-Conc in there for a while, that was also fun but I decided that it didn't really work wildly differently to cascade itself. In the end I went for Vaal Flameblast-Prolif-Echo, as long as you check for reflect it's the best complement imo, it just makes a screen of mobs just go away.

For reflect, my plan is just to use Saffell's Frame with Purity of Ice and leech life from Warlord's Mark. My links are Cascade-Echo-IW-Added Chaos-Conc so my damage is 38% Cold, 28% Chaos, 19% Phys and 15% Lightning. I get 82% Cold res and 79% Lightning and the basic 17% spell block too. It's enough to make reflect almost no issue. If I'm doing an ele reflect map I generally take a Sapphire flask along for the big packs, but most of the time I can ignore reflect. Where I've been caught out by a reflect mob appearing in a pack, the worst I've done to myself is about 25% damage from phys reflect when I didn't have endurance charges up, and about 40% from ele reflect. Because cascade is a series of hits, the reflect is smeared over about a second and in most situations I trust myself to react to it and pot.

Watching your vid I am a bit jealous of your HP! I have an Iron Will Freeze Pulser on Bloodlines with about 7.3k HP and I love how much it lets you relax versus most opponents. My cascader couldn't be so chill versus lady stormflay, she would probably chunk me for 40-50% a time with vulnerability. I like your Frost Wall setup as well! I've used it in the past, I think with an Ice Spear caster but it didn't occur to me when making this guy. I have self cast Enfeeble connected to my CwDT Immortal Call that I am never using, I could experiment with putting that in. I suppose with my power charges Cold Snap is an option too. It's a great thing in PoE that you can experiment with this kind of stuff even when you've had a character for ages!

Edit: I should mention that with my setup, I have the weird situation that Low and No Regen map mods are OK because I leech life and mana all the time, but unlike a lot of builds I have trouble with curse immune.

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MisterBernn wrote:

Thanks for the reply. You're probably right about an alternative weapon! I made a cascader at the end of the Beyond league with Divinarius and I was determined to build some things differently this time. I was also determined to make a build with automation of the maintenance skills but also two combat skills so it wouldn't be too "one buttony"! Originally when I was planning what gems would go where, I was planning to have Discharge-AoE-Conc in the Doon! It was great fun as a burst skill but I quickly learned that I couldn't afford to throw my endurance charges away without having Immortal Call up. I also ran Vaal Fireball-GMP-Conc in there for a while, that was also fun but I decided that it didn't really work wildly differently to cascade itself. In the end I went for Vaal Flameblast-Prolif-Echo, as long as you check for reflect it's the best complement imo, it just makes a screen of mobs just go away.

Now with many skills seeing to address both an AoE component as well as single target (e.g., Lightning Tendrils, Static Strike), I've not worried as much about a single target skill. Rather, I've found that by focusing those gem slots on utility gems, I typically can make my build stronger as a whole, and boost my overall DPS (though killing a boss might take a little bit longer). Additionally, I found that when I was trying to use two different skills, even ones with the same elemental type (e.g., Lightning Tendrils and Ball Lightning), I would end up with two mediocre skills I was using instead of one strong one. It seems like that may have been what was happening when you were using Discharge and spending all of your charges--charges that helped your build's survivability, as well as damage boosts for Glacial Cascade.

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MisterBernn wrote:

For reflect, my plan is just to use Saffell's Frame with Purity of Ice and leech life from Warlord's Mark. My links are Cascade-Echo-IW-Added Chaos-Conc so my damage is 38% Cold, 28% Chaos, 19% Phys and 15% Lightning. I get 82% Cold res and 79% Lightning and the basic 17% spell block too. It's enough to make reflect almost no issue. If I'm doing an ele reflect map I generally take a Sapphire flask along for the big packs, but most of the time I can ignore reflect. Where I've been caught out by a reflect mob appearing in a pack, the worst I've done to myself is about 25% damage from phys reflect when I didn't have endurance charges up, and about 40% from ele reflect. Because cascade is a series of hits, the reflect is smeared over about a second and in most situations I trust myself to react to it and pot.

Spell block and leech is definitely a nice combo for dealing with reflect. I actually debated about getting some block chance and using a Rathpith so I could block some of the reflect. However, in testing it out I found that it didn't matter much when I had so much regen. If I chunked myself in hitting reflect, even if I crit a pack, I would back up and reposition before casting again. In that time, much (if not all) of my health would have returned to full. So I decided spell block wasn't necessary and went for a high armor and life shield that I crafted cast speed onto. I think an ideal shield would have either all res or chaos (once elemental resistances are overcapped) res with strength and crafted cast speed.

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MisterBernn wrote:

Watching your vid I am a bit jealous of your HP! I have an Iron Will Freeze Pulser on Bloodlines with about 7.3k HP and I love how much it lets you relax versus most opponents. My cascader couldn't be so chill versus lady stormflay, she would probably chunk me for 40-50% a time with vulnerability. I like your Frost Wall setup as well! I've used it in the past, I think with an Ice Spear caster but it didn't occur to me when making this guy. I have self cast Enfeeble connected to my CwDT Immortal Call that I am never using, I could experiment with putting that in. I suppose with my power charges Cold Snap is an option too. It's a great thing in PoE that you can experiment with this kind of stuff even when you've had a character for ages!

Yes, the life pool is unbelievably nice. It makes the character really difficult to kill, and able to survive a fair amount of burst damage that would kill other characters (check out the strongbox opening at the end of the 71 Strand video). Additionally, the higher your life pool, the stronger the percentage of life regenerated becomes.

Cast when Damage Taken with Frost Wall is the real unsung hero of this build. Whenever I make a character that does not need to be right in the face of the enemy, I always run this in my CwDT setup (CwDT - Enduring Cry - Frost Wall - Enfeeble). This has been to help keep enemies from piling up around me quickly, but it also does double duty in this build in that it keeps the enemies at an ideal distance for Glacial Cascade--it places them so GC can hit them twice instead of just once when an enemy is right next to you.

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MisterBernn wrote:

Edit: I should mention that with my setup, I have the weird situation that Low and No Regen map mods are OK because I leech life and mana all the time, but unlike a lot of builds I have trouble with curse immune.

Half and no regen is the weakness of this current build. It could probably be worked around, but I just avoid it because it slows the clear speed down by a lot when I've tried to work around it in the past (e.g., use hybrid pots, Warlord's curse, wait for mana/life to regen in between battles). Additionally, half or no regen destroys one of the major defensive mechanics of this build--out regen the enemies damage.

hey kungfooe !

Thank you so much for adding not only one, but two videos !:D i am really impressed. Tanking this strand boss is really nice - on my torment character with little to no defenses, this guy hurts alot, but you just facetank him like its nothing .. wow.

that ice nova damage seemed to hurt alot though. would you say elemental damage is something to be aware of for your build? or did it hit you so hard because of ele weakness mapmod (are you overcapped?). The rolls were pretty scary, magic monsters, chest level, ice nova - I hope you dont play like that in a hardcore league xD

The clearspeed is really decent, its not superfast, but it doesnt take you forever to clear a map. Superfast builds tend to be very tiring, because you usually need to be careful not to die, and youre killing faster than you can check loot. Your build however seems to be pretty relaxing, even in dangerous situations. A question on the side: Does your tankiness make you play sloppy at times ? It seems like other than in certain situations with high spike damage, you dont take a lot of damage at all - i watched your healthpool during the mapruns, and it just rarely ever goes down more than 20% - thats what I expect from a true HC build!

the only thing that I think can be improved is damage versus high resistant/high HP monsters (rares, bosses). The damage is OK as it is, but that shouldnt keep you from experimenting more. The free slots in your chest piece (if you can skip the culling skill) could make up for another potential 4 to 5link dedicated to high single target damage. The only thing that comes to my mind at the moment would be a cold snap - cold pen - conc effect - iron will - spell echo setup. yes, it has a cooldown, but you'd only use it on rares and bosses, so i guess it could be worth trying. other than that, increasing the crit chance would increase the overall damage on GC

thank you again for the videos, i am fully convinced now and i'm gonna give this build a try! I hope there are more videos to come ! :D cheers

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cmphx wrote:

hey kungfooe !

Thank you so much for adding not only one, but two videos !:D i am really impressed. Tanking this strand boss is really nice - on my torment character with little to no defenses, this guy hurts alot, but you just facetank him like its nothing .. wow.

that ice nova damage seemed to hurt alot though. would you say elemental damage is something to be aware of for your build? or did it hit you so hard because of ele weakness mapmod (are you overcapped?). The rolls were pretty scary, magic monsters, chest level, ice nova - I hope you dont play like that in a hardcore league xD

No problem. There are two things worth noting here I think. One is that the build is at least semi-resistant to high physical damage hits, especially once the endurance charges are up and running. That coupled with a high health pool helps makes high-physical hits not all that scary. I think I might make a video or two where I tank some Maze Vaal smashes and Dominus smashes to help illustrate this.

With regards to the damage from the strongbox, what I think was the case here was that it was burst of damage. All of the skeletons spawned and the character was hit by their spells in a very short period of time. Just as it is with any build, burst damage is the factor that is scary. Elemental damage is probably a little scarier than physical because I can only reduce the elemental damage by 75%, meaning I'll take 25% ele damage no matter what. If they were a lot of small physical hits (like what happened earlier to the strongbox in the 71 Strand video), the armor and endurance charges pretty much reduced them to nothing. Pair that with regen and my life doesn't really move much at all. In contrast, no matter if it's a single, large ele damage hit or a single, small elemental damage hit, I'm still going to take 25% of it not matter what.

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cmphx wrote:

The clearspeed is really decent, its not superfast, but it doesnt take you forever to clear a map. Superfast builds tend to be very tiring, because you usually need to be careful not to die, and youre killing faster than you can check loot. Your build however seems to be pretty relaxing, even in dangerous situations. A question on the side: Does your tankiness make you play sloppy at times ? It seems like other than in certain situations with high spike damage, you dont take a lot of damage at all - i watched your healthpool during the map runs, and it just rarely ever goes down more than 20% - thats what I expect from a true HC build!

Actually, it's what ended up killing me in Bloodlines.

The Story: I was in a 74 Maze with GMP and monster damage mods. I had done maps like this before without too much difficulty. The problem that I got into was that there were birds and chaos bomb throwers. I kept tanking hits, slowly watching my health pool dwindle down thinking "it'll be fine. I'll start regening back up again soon, just like all the other times before." Except it didn't happen. After about 10-12 seconds of this I was down to about 10% of my life and went to warp away but before I could do that, I got hit with several crits which just ripped me quickly. It was an easily avoidable death, but I was thinking "this character is tough, I can keep taking it."

Basically, I got too comfortable with how tanky the build was, and repeatedly kept making bad decisions, ultimately leading to the character's death. Easily preventable, and something I'll be paying much closer attention to in the future when I reroll it. :D

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cmphx wrote:

the only thing that I think can be improved is damage versus high resistant/high HP monsters (rares, bosses). The damage is OK as it is, but that shouldnt keep you from experimenting more. The free slots in your chest piece (if you can skip the culling skill) could make up for another potential 4 to 5link dedicated to high single target damage. The only thing that comes to my mind at the moment would be a cold snap - cold pen - conc effect - iron will - spell echo setup. yes, it has a cooldown, but you'd only use it on rares and bosses, so i guess it could be worth trying. other than that, increasing the crit chance would increase the overall damage on GC

That's definitely a good idea, and something I'll have to look at trying out. I didn't have the chest socketed and linked at the beginning of making this character, so I just ended up using the sockets for a culling skill. Because I'm scaling through Spell Damage (and Doon), I'm not tied to using a cold spell. What suggestions would you have for a high-damage single target skill? I'm thinking two of the links would be Iron Will and Trap, but don't know about the others.

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cmphx wrote:

thank you again for the videos, i am fully convinced now and i'm gonna give this build a try! I hope there are more videos to come ! :D cheers

Glad you enjoyed the videos and you're interested in making this character. I'll make and upload some other videos later on. Any special requests for maps or bosses?

New demonstration video added.

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kungfooe wrote:

Actually, it's what ended up killing me in Bloodlines.

The Story: I was in a 74 Maze with GMP and monster damage mods. I had done maps like this before without too much difficulty. The problem that I got into was that there were birds and chaos bomb throwers. I kept tanking hits, slowly watching my health pool dwindle down thinking "it'll be fine. I'll start regening back up again soon, just like all the other times before." Except it didn't happen. After about 10-12 seconds of this I was down to about 10% of my life and went to warp away but before I could do that, I got hit with several crits which just ripped me quickly. It was an easily avoidable death, but I was thinking "this character is tough, I can keep taking it."

Basically, I got too comfortable with how tanky the build was, and repeatedly kept making bad decisions, ultimately leading to the character's death. Easily preventable, and something I'll be paying much closer attention to in the future when I reroll it. :D

man, that sucks ! just by watching your videos, I was thinking that you'll be really not caring about everything after a while, because it just feels like you dont take any damage ever; I'm not a very experienced player (only played actively for about half a year) so realizing I'm in a bad situation and I should be careful isn't always easy for me :D but I hope I can make it to level 85.

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kungfooe wrote:

That's definitely a good idea, and something I'll have to look at trying out. I didn't have the chest socketed and linked at the beginning of making this character, so I just ended up using the sockets for a culling skill. Because I'm scaling through Spell Damage (and Doon), I'm not tied to using a cold spell. What suggestions would you have for a high-damage single target skill? I'm thinking two of the links would be Iron Will and Trap, but don't know about the others.

Trap is actually a good idea! Basicly you need a spell with very high base damage. Cold snap has that, or arctic breath if you use it with LMP and you manage to shotgun things. fire spells also come with great base damage, e.g. flameblast. Or the combo vaal glacial hammer + vaal spark (the sparks are reflected by the vaal glacial hammer frost wall) with proper links, and the vaal glacial hammer performed with a 2nd slot vagans sceptre. Firestorm with increased duration could work, you cast it once, it goes off, you go back to using glacial cascade again - there are plenty of options on paper, but i think in the end it will break down to 2-3 options, maybe you can do some testing. maybe even a second glacial cascade, optimized for single target (conc effect, added chaos or something) could work.

Another thing that i wanted to discuss here: Do you think Apep's wand is an option to consider too ? It gives spell damage, alot of cast speed and added chaos damage to your GC, but comes with higher mana cost. If you were able to handle the mana cost, do you think it could work? The chaos damage would get amplified by the iron will alot.

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kungfooe wrote:

Glad you enjoyed the videos and you're interested in making this character. I'll make and upload some other videos later on. Any special requests for maps or bosses?

oh youre taking requests! Thats nice :D
So, merciless dominus, maze vaal tanking. Atziri clear, if you're able to, i think you mentioned earlier you tried to, especially trio and trash i'm interested in. Colonade map boss tanking, Palace, Academy, Necropolis, Crematorium, Jungle valley map bosses all can do alot of damage, so boss fights here could also be interesting to see, maybe even double boss mapmod if you're crazy, and beyond bosses are always interesting too.

Faster attacks/movespeed bone rhoas charging at you are one of the scariest things for me to encounter, so thats also a good test i suppose.

or just any map with harder map mods (turbo, added damage, vulnerability, minus max etc).


oh, and desecrated ground/burning ground. you got that on the new residence video, is the degen from there actually noticable? I mean, would you avoid this mapmod lets say on a underground river map with all these narrow pathways ?

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cmphx wrote:

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kungfooe wrote:

Actually, it's what ended up killing me in Bloodlines.

The Story: I was in a 74 Maze with GMP and monster damage mods. I had done maps like this before without too much difficulty. The problem that I got into was that there were birds and chaos bomb throwers. I kept tanking hits, slowly watching my health pool dwindle down thinking "it'll be fine. I'll start regening back up again soon, just like all the other times before." Except it didn't happen. After about 10-12 seconds of this I was down to about 10% of my life and went to warp away but before I could do that, I got hit with several crits which just ripped me quickly. It was an easily avoidable death, but I was thinking "this character is tough, I can keep taking it."

Basically, I got too comfortable with how tanky the build was, and repeatedly kept making bad decisions, ultimately leading to the character's death. Easily preventable, and something I'll be paying much closer attention to in the future when I reroll it. :D

man, that sucks ! just by watching your videos, I was thinking that you'll be really not caring about everything after a while, because it just feels like you dont take any damage ever; I'm not a very experienced player (only played actively for about half a year) so realizing I'm in a bad situation and I should be careful isn't always easy for me :D but I hope I can make it to level 85.

This build is forgiving enough that I think it will help you begin to learn when you're in a bad situation. With many builds, if you get in a bad situation you can get killed so quickly you don't have much time to react. With this build, not only is there a larger health pool, but the regen helps to counteract the damage you take immediately, giving you a little bit more time to react. Basically, look at the types of things that chunk your health quickly. In many cases, those are the types of combinations of enemies, environments, and mods that you want to avoid.

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cmphx wrote:

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kungfooe wrote:

That's definitely a good idea, and something I'll have to look at trying out. I didn't have the chest socketed and linked at the beginning of making this character, so I just ended up using the sockets for a culling skill. Because I'm scaling through Spell Damage (and Doon), I'm not tied to using a cold spell. What suggestions would you have for a high-damage single target skill? I'm thinking two of the links would be Iron Will and Trap, but don't know about the others.

Trap is actually a good idea! Basicly you need a spell with very high base damage. Cold snap has that, or arctic breath if you use it with LMP and you manage to shotgun things. fire spells also come with great base damage, e.g. flameblast. Or the combo vaal glacial hammer + vaal spark (the sparks are reflected by the vaal glacial hammer frost wall) with proper links, and the vaal glacial hammer performed with a 2nd slot vagans sceptre. Firestorm with increased duration could work, you cast it once, it goes off, you go back to using glacial cascade again - there are plenty of options on paper, but i think in the end it will break down to 2-3 options, maybe you can do some testing. maybe even a second glacial cascade, optimized for single target (conc effect, added chaos or something) could work.

Another thing that i wanted to discuss here: Do you think Apep's wand is an option to consider too ? It gives spell damage, alot of cast speed and added chaos damage to your GC, but comes with higher mana cost. If you were able to handle the mana cost, do you think it could work? The chaos damage would get amplified by the iron will alot.

I think it will be worth testing some Vaal Spark, or perhaps Vaal Molten Shell. I'll have to do some testing to determine which might be more efficient.

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cmphx wrote:

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kungfooe wrote:

Glad you enjoyed the videos and you're interested in making this character. I'll make and upload some other videos later on. Any special requests for maps or bosses?

oh youre taking requests! Thats nice :D
So, merciless dominus, maze vaal tanking. Atziri clear, if you're able to, i think you mentioned earlier you tried to, especially trio and trash i'm interested in. Colonade map boss tanking, Palace, Academy, Necropolis, Crematorium, Jungle valley map bosses all can do alot of damage, so boss fights here could also be interesting to see, maybe even double boss mapmod if you're crazy, and beyond bosses are always interesting too.

Faster attacks/movespeed bone rhoas charging at you are one of the scariest things for me to encounter, so thats also a good test i suppose.

or just any map with harder map mods (turbo, added damage, vulnerability, minus max etc).


oh, and desecrated ground/burning ground. you got that on the new residence video, is the degen from there actually noticable? I mean, would you avoid this mapmod lets say on a underground river map with all these narrow pathways ?

I've done all the bosses you mentioned, with the exception of Palace Dominus. I'll look at making some more boss fight videos of those and put them up.