[2.1] Ice Nova - Life based - Dual blasphemy curse - Very budget, self found viable - Massive AoE

2.1 Tree


I needed an extremely budget build to get into the Talisman league, so this is what I came up with. There is no required gear, and you can easily find good enough gear yourself.

Strengths and weaknesses
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Strengths:
-Very, very cheap. The only recommended gear is a +2 dagger.
-Massive AoE and great clearspeed.
-Great to level with.
-Many great end game options for gear upgrades: divinarius, 6 link staff, carcass jack, belly of the beast, lightning coil, kaom's heart are all excellent choices. You can make this build your own using whatever things you want to use.
-Very survivable. I freeze everything around me so I rarely even take damage.
-Not gear dependent at all. Ice nova's damage scales with gem level, so just buy a 20/20 ice nova once you hit level 70 and you should be set damage wise (I use a 3-link at level 81!). However you will need a bit of spell crit on your weapons, because the rest of the crit comes from power charges and assassin's mark.
-Enemies are always dual-cursed with blasphemy. This allows you to constantly have 6 power charges up with assassin's mark, and you can pick which secondary curse fits your playstyle. I prefer to use frostbite.

Weaknesses:
-Terrible single target damage. I use freeze pulse just to kill rares and bosses.
-Low-ish HP. You can only get 129% hp excluding jewels. You can make this HC viable by getting life on jewels and using Belly of the Beast.
-Very difficult to get enough dex on this tree.
-Enemies with curse immunity take forever to kill. Curse immunity is not a viable map mod.


Current gear
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The only gear you really need is a +2 dagger once you can get one. Then you just work on capping resists, getting life, and getting spell crit.


Perfect gear
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The perfect gear would be dual wielding divinarius with a 6 link carcass jack and a level 4 empower. If you are in HC I would recommend either a lightning coil or a kaom's heart or a belly of the beast. You want to try to get either life or chance to freeze on your jewels, and then crit multi.


Flasks
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Have an instant divine/hallowed.


I like to have an eternal/sanctified with charge recovery that I constantly am using.


I have bleed immunity on both of mine, but that's a mistake. Try and get freeze or curse immunity on the instant pot.
I also like to have a

preferably it would have charge recovery but the only thing that really matters is the %armor.

Then you want a

freeze and chill is good for this, then charge recovery. If you want to get a little DPS boost you can get one of these
.


Links
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If you have a 3 link +2 dagger use
ice nova - spell echo - increased aoe.

If you have a 5 link chest use
ice nova - spell echo - ice bite - increased aoe - empower.

If you have a 6 link you can throw in cold pen, increased crit damage, added cold, life leech, or something else that sounds good to you. If you are using a different curse than frostbite than I would recommend using cold pen even in a 3 link. Use life leech if your going to do an ele reflect map.

Your other links should be a
whirling blades - faster attacks - fortify.

An optional link would be freezing pulse - then any other support links you want to use. This would be your single target, and you will most likely not have your charges up in fight where you are using this. So I would use increased crit chance, or iron will (we have decent strength), added cold, crit damage, slower proj, or some other major damage booster.

You will also need
blasphemy - assassin's mark - frostbite (or a different curse). You can use enlighten if you need more mana and have one available.

Other than that you just need space for blood rage if you aren't using ice bite, summon ice golem, Herald of Ice, and frost wall if you want it.


Leveling
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Get a +1 dagger/scepter/wand using the +1 cold recipe (cold res ring, alt orb, weapon) level with freeze pulse until you can use ice nova, keep freeze pulse with you and use it for single target. When you can, get a +2 dagger. Everything else is up to you, try and get through the travelling on the tree as soon as possible, then fill out the nodes later on.

Bandits: Oak life, alira cast speed, alira power charge.


Notes about single-target
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So this build is not built for single target. Assassin's mark is what sustains life and mana, which is through life/mana gain on kill. So for major single-target encounters you can do some preparing to make the fights go smoother. First of all, assassin's mark may not be the best curse for a fight with no adds. It is used to give us our power charges, which is pretty much our only source of crit. So with no adds, we have very little crit. This means that you should either replace assassin's mark with ele weakness, temp chains, or some other curse that you think would work better.

Ice nova is also a terrible single target skill for fights with no adds. This is why we have freeze pulse, and frost wall. Frost wall is a great way of locking your enemy in place, until you can freeze lock them with freeze pulse.

Note: this is only about fights with NO ADDS. Fights like Malachai are fine, and you can use your normal build without changing anything. The only fight that I would follow this section for, that I can think of right now, is Daresso.


Videos
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Videos are currently uploading and will be added ASAP! My internet connection is very slow so this might actually take a while.

Here is a dried lake run to showcase the playstyle.
https://youtu.be/3hbA6M0IpvE
Note that ice nova and freeze pulse are both only level 18. I would post a higher level map but I don't have any right now, my highest tier is tier 3 which is barely any different than dried lake.
Last edited by Lord_Krueger on Dec 28, 2015, 12:22:13 AM
RESERVED
Why not just use Vaal Storm Call for single target? It doesnt use many souls and is generally considered fairly strong for bosses
EHC: Wyvernborn
How should i deal with the bandits?
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ruv wrote:
How should i deal with the bandits?
I added bandits to the levelling section of the guide. You want to take Oak life, Alira cast speed, Alira power charge.
"
szym3n wrote:
Why not just use Vaal Storm Call for single target? It doesnt use many souls and is generally considered fairly strong for bosses
I haven't tried this yet, I'll give it a go when I can and update the guide.
I completely randomly stumbled upon this thread in search of builds similar to mine - this one is the closest. I had the exact same idea - something viable with zero investment.
The goal was to have it power clear Dried Lake to generate currency to move on. What I ended up doing is a bit different, but the jist of it remained (I just sold all the crap currency I gathered until a4m which got me 93 chaos orbs - it was cruise mode from there on).

I would like to meet up with you ingame and share ideas to get this build rolling better. I've had a couple thoughts and some of the solutions I came up with are pretty neat, but it's far from really great - there's quite some space for improvement.

I'm kinda wondering why you chose Templar?...

Either way, here is my passive tree and gear at the moment. I play entirely solo right now (meh). Current stats 3.9k HP, 25k DPS.

Passive tree link.

Current gear
Life is tough... but it is tougher if you're stupid.
"
VenatorPoE wrote:

I'm kinda wondering why you chose Templar?...

Either way, here is my passive tree and gear at the moment. I play entirely solo right now (meh). Current stats 3.9k HP, 25k DPS.


I chose Templar because I liked the proximity to life for early leveling and starting closer to Sovereignty and Whispers of Doom so I could switch over to dual curse earlier.

The stats on my character, at level 81, are 4k hp and 12k DPS. On freeze pulse it's 24k DPS. I've only done up to tier 6 maps so far and I haven't had any problems, but I don't think this build will survive into the later map tiers. I think it will be able to get to level 90 pretty easily, though, and get the challenge.

Your build does look really similar to mine, but there are some pretty big differences. The biggest difference that I see is that you're using cold to fire. I wouldn't use that in my build, because one of my biggest defenses is freezing the entire screen, and frostbite wouldn't benefit the fire damage.

I don't know how much I can help you, but I would say that using blood magic and reduced mana is a giant waste, I would rather spec into some mana and drop both blood magic and reduced mana, or spec into life regen/leech and at least drop the reduced mana. But of course, if it's working well for you than go ahead and use both of those gems.
Oh but not using Reduced Mana, not sure where you saw that :P

My initial idea was to do blasphemy triple curse - grabbing 3 points into the templar aura ring would make that possible, but I ended up opting for HoI instead. The reservation this way becomes too big to support the massive 75~ mana per nova cast that I have right now, so I opted for the BM gem. I was thinking about some other solutions, mainly EB (possibly MoM as well) with all mana reserved as it is now, but it would still require quite some passive investment - if I just switch those points into damage or taking all the HP nodes available on the path, I think I get more out of it.

The highest map I did so far is tier 9 (I tend to stick to lower tier maps and try to get that Rarity going - pretty good currency income). The XP also adds up (lv84 atm).

The current DPS (lvl19 nova) is 27k (without Atziri flask, at about 85% crit chance). I use cold to fire because it gives me more than Cold Penetration (maybe I'm wrong when it comes to numbers, but the clear speed is better), and the cold damage I do still freezes and shatters everything (including most yellows - there is always that annoying rare mob with high resists and high HP who takes a couple hits to drop, and I don't have a single target setup because of no available sockets). On any mobs who randomly survive the initial crit hit, the ignite finishes them off.

For the curses, I'm running Assassins Mark and Warlords Mark. AM gives me insane damage and keeps me at 7 power charges at all times, and WM keeps me at 4 endurance charges and gives the life leech (I have max charges every time Immortal Call procs, so that's really nice). Frenzy charges are generated with Blood Rage and provide a massive boost as well.

When it comes to defences, as you say, using cold damage is really beasty - even if not frozen, things are definitely at least chilled. What comes into play here is how fast you dropped the pack - if you one shot the pack, they dont have any time to deal damage. My playstyle with the character revolves heavily around these mechanics - I have Whirling Blades with FA and Fortify (hence Fortify is always on) - so I quickly whirl around into packs and one hit kill them, immediately moving on to the next pack.

Frostbite is nice but WM outplays it with better consistency and defensive capabilities.


The main issue for me right now are reflect maps and curse immune maps. For curse immune maps I swap in Anger and Herald of Thunder instead of 2 curses (reserves 50+25+25 % of mana), and PCoC instead of inc. crit strikes - life flasks and Atziri flask take care of life just fine (a small drawback is not getting endurance charges). Reflect maps I reckon wouldn't be an issue if I swapped the weaker dagger for Kaltenhalt and ran a simple 10% cold flask, but I don't want to be bothered. Generally I just reroll maps with these mods or if they're yellow save them for another character.

On another note, using Tabula Rasa is a big pain in the ass as well, but I really don't want to move down to a 5L and getting a great 6L is really expensive for me right now.

You are pointing out Whispers of Doom - I'm probably going to switch to that soon, I bought these boots wanting to triple curse, but now that idea is gone it would be a better idea to drop 3 points into WoD and get a great pair of rare boots instead (would shoot me up at a bit above 4.1k HP).

What are your thoughts about Jewels? I've not yet acquired any good jewel myself. You took 3 jewel sockets so I'm wondering what you got running there. I'm thinking cold dmg + crit mult would be great. I still do have the issue of randomly dying to really large single hits though (mostly bosses, rarely a crazy rare mob), and I don't think I can do much about that without completely changing the build...

You sustain mana because of 3L and spell echo (still 60ish mana per cast), I opted for Faster Casting instead to get better crit consistency, and at 5L/6L setups the mana cost becomes Huge. What's your plan for switching to more links (right now you only have a couple mana nodes, what's your mana pool like?)? I'll do some testing now to see if I can rearrange my gems and skip BM, but it will require sacrifices which I don't believe are going to be worth it...
Life is tough... but it is tougher if you're stupid.

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