Frost Blades CoC?

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Gilgamesjh wrote:

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Thanks for testing and sharing your experience. What are you planning to use for single-target boss fights, e.g. all the act bosses that don't spam adds continuously?
As 2nd spell you could use FreezPulse. It has good damage and offers defense too. I would go with LMP/GMP instead of Chain though, which will also give FP quite good AoE. Firestorm is nice too of course that is if your graphics card can handle it :-)
Could you post your tree and maybe give some insights why you went this route?

I did some tests with a Tabula yesterday. The number of spells that fire on a crit is hilarious. I did tests with SRS in order to get numbers. In average I got ~6 spirits per skill-use. Now this was with a lvl 14 CoC gem using FrostBlades + Multistrike + GMP and I still have a 2nd Spell slot open. I believe with a lvl 20 CoC, Chain instead of GMP and a 2nd spell it's possible to fire off 14-16 spells per skill use. Positioning is crucial however since ProstBlades initial projectiles can't target backwards...

Unfortunately targeting with FrostBlade feels quite clumsy but this is the case for every single-target skill I used so far. I was really hoping that lock-step would fix this issue but unfortunately it didn't. This is especially annoying for fast moving mobs.
I still want to try this, create a new toon, level and see how far I can push it.

My plan so far is to use Voll's Protector, Voll's Devotion, Romira's Banquet, Saffell's Frame, the possibility to run all 3 purities simultaneously and min 5 Endurance charges. This setup should give me plenty of Power- and Endurance charges. Damage scaling comes purely from crits and the very high spell proc rate.

Normal setup:
- HoI + 2 Purities
- FB + MS + GMP/Chain + COC + Spell + Spell (probably GMP, FPulse & CSnap/FStorm/Arc)
- manual Enduring Cry, Immortal Call + Duration
- FB + Crit% + COC + Assasin's Mark
- not using Romira's

Boss setup:
- all 3 Purities, no HoI
- manual Enduring Cry, Immortal Call + Duration
- Frenzy + CoC + ImmortalCall + Duration/Crit%
- Romira's to generate Endurance charges as fast as possible > 100% uptime of IC
- not sure about the main skill setup. I see different options (have to test)
1) MoltenStrike + GMP + CoC + FastAtt + Spell + Spell (FP + FS?)
2) DoubleStrike + Multistrike + FastAtt + CoC + Spell + Spell
3) DoubleStrike + FastAtt + CoC + ImmortalCall + Spell + Spell/Crit%
4) Cyclone + FA + CoC + ImmortalCall + Spell + Spell
5) MoltenStrike + Multistrike + CoC ImmortalCall + Spell + Spell (needs a 2nd 6L Voll's)
6) MoltenStrike + Multistrike + CoC + Spell + Spell + Echo/Crit%/CritX/Spell (2nd Voll's)
- high crit/s should allow a 100% uptime of Surgeon flask
- damage might suck, but this toon should be near immortal once IC and the flasks are up.

Tree could look like this: 107 points and level 100 which might allow Arctic Armour on top of the Purities and finally there is a staff variant (if only Hegemony's Era could somehow get the Vagan mod, sigh).
Obviously no variant is HC viable and all require a Vagan weapon. My biggest concerns are stun-locks, mana regen and one-shots before being able to pop flasks (Phase Run might help).
Getting the Acrobatics-cluster instead of the additional flask nodes might be better..

I also pondered over a CI variant but I did not have enough points to grab Zealot's Oath and regen nodes without sacrificing crit% and Endurance charges. Both things I'm not willing to do. The best thing I could come up with was grabbing Shaman's Dominion and then use Frenzy + CoC + Immortal Call + Rejuvenation Totem every 3s to keep IC and regen up and boost crit% at the same time.

I went down from shadow, into duelist to pick up frenzy instead of going up to pick up power and endurance.

My build was just hastily tossed together to test the concept, and have only 3500 life, but Acro + Phase Acro.

106 points

The idea was to get attackspeed from frenzy, and dual wielding 2 daggers (so Twin Terrors).

To be honest, multi target is fine, feels no better or worse than other Coc, single target is horrible.
I have tried quite a few combinations of Coc, and this is the worst single target yet :)

Maybe a 4-link Cyclone - Coc - Discharge - Something can remedy that, but I did not want to recrome my Coc gear to test.

I was thinking of testing with SRS (does Animated Weapons work with Coc?), maybe I will do that today, if I get time before the 1 month.

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Gilgamesjh wrote:

To be honest, multi target is fine, feels no better or worse than other Coc, single target is horrible.
I have tried quite a few combinations of Coc, and this is the worst single target yet :)

Thanks for sharing!
I know single-target is terrible, this much was clear from the very beginning. I approached this in search of an AoE CoC option. My single target is set (more or less). I want to go for damage immunity over dps hence it's more important to refill flask and generate endurance charges for IC fast enough for permanent uptime. I have to go 1h + Saffell's. Further I don't like Cyclone. This left me with wands (Barrage & Kinetic Blast) or Daggers/Claws where I had to find a good trigger replacement for Cyclone. Well I think I've found it. The reason to go Dagger/Claw is Vagan's mod (it's simply too good to ignore for CoC) and it seems more point efficient as well.

I give up on FrostBlades, the targeting is just too clumsy. Nearly half of the time I miss with the skill, even more on fast moving or small mobs. Multistrike's auto-targeting does not improve the situation much. Furthermore it's the same for lock-step or the legacy predictive net-mode. This really is a shame > back to single AoE skill spamming.

I really hope GGG can improve targeting for single-target skills. MeleeSplash alleviates the targeting issue a bit but its Mana multiplier and damage penalty are imho way to big for it's tiny AoE and therefore simply not worth it.

For FrostBlades I see 3 options:
1) generate projectiles regardless if the melee attack hits (same as MoltenStrike and LightningStrike)
2) the projectiles should not be limited in angle.
3) let the projectiles hit the initial target if there are no other targets in their range to make it single target viable.
At least one of these or some other fix and I will give FB a 2nd shot even with the current clumsy targeting.