[2.3] HC Non crit Frostbolt/Vortex – Dual Cursing – 75% slow stacking – Reflect viable - Cheap

Or second idea what comes to my mind is playing it like melee, dont use fbolt cos its maybe even slower than just going in melee range and use vortex. Just build it very tanky and play it more like old ice nova style. dunno but trying to combine fbolt and vortex seems like very slow mechanic, even slower than contag+ED.

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nikeyla wrote:

Or second idea what comes to my mind is playing it like melee, dont use fbolt cos its maybe even slower than just going in melee range and use vortex. Just build it very tanky and play it more like old ice nova style. dunno but trying to combine fbolt and vortex seems like very slow mechanic, even slower than contag+ED.

Yes the combo is rather slow and still need to aim your cursor in that direction otherwise it won't combo...

I can see these two skills become like this:

1, Frostbolt with dual wielding wand with ~40% projectile speed mod on each wand to fix the super slow-mo bubble. Seriously they should rename this skill into water bubble... really... It does looks more like a bubble, not a bolt!

or

2, Just focus in Vortex, the burst damage is quite high. And spamming vortex is what I do right now when dealing with rare/bosses, with frostbomb as support. So far in my levelling process this is a super fast way to kill boss...

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nikeyla wrote:

Well guys, what are ur thoughts? I lvled with firestorm, switched at 64 to bolt+vortex and im not sure about my opinion. The dot part seems underwhelming. Im stil using 4 link cos my rngesus is an as*hole and I like the initial burst, but the damage over time does nothing and single target is meh...Considering rebuilding it to crit and give up on the dot.

If it's anything like my Ice Nova build in the last league the damage will spike once you get Elemental Conflux, and is hard going before that.

On the topic of Rapid Decay I honestly don't think it's worth it. Unless you're replacing Life Leech Cold Pen is the weakest gem you could replace and Cold Pen would still be worth more, even if you were using Ele Weakness + Frostbite.

Cold Pen will affect both the burst and the degen, whereas Rapid Decay only affects the degen. At best if the enemy has 0% resists you gain an extra 2% damage over Cold Pen. At worst (if the enemy is overcapped) Cold Pen will at least still reduce their max resists.

I personally like Frostbolt but do agree it's way too slow. Faster Proj is basically mandatory in some way, but at least the spell itself hits pretty hard considering.

Are you positive the Cold Penetration gem will affect the degen portion of Vortex? The wiki article for Burning states it isn't affected by the Fire Penetration gem(or others that require Hits) since it's a degen. I assumed that would also be the case for Vortex's degen.

Degen is not affected by penetration.
The only way to deal wtih bosses is melee spam vortex. And fbolt is too slow even with faster proj. Looks fun if u want to "chill" through maps and dont use too much brain, but if u prefer clear speed and actually getting somewhere, its horrible.
Atm im trying taryns shiver, but I might switch to dagger shield and just get cheap 5/6link chest. What u guys think about Taryns shiver? The +1 gem is nice, but it requires to link the staff which is more expensive than buy a white 5l/6l chest and chaos it. Maybe even give up on the +1 gem and use it just cos of the dmg boost and nice cast speed.

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Einzbern wrote:

Are you positive the Cold Penetration gem will affect the degen portion of Vortex? The wiki article for Burning states it isn't affected by the Fire Penetration gem(or others that require Hits) since it's a degen. I assumed that would also be the case for Vortex's degen.

If it doesn't then Elemental Equilibrium becomes more interesting if you want to maximize the degen as Pyre will not affect the degen but will affect the initial burst. So the burst will proc EE which is then active for the degen.

However I think the burst is where you're going to get more overall damage potential due to cast speed and whatnot. My math only takes damage into account but when you start spamming Vortex 2-3 times a second the burst just does more. The degen being an added bonus.

In this way Vortex is just a superior Ice Nova. It deals more damage even without the degen and with Frostbolt can be procced at range for relative safety.

I'll go with the degen damage and travel to the dot nodes in shadow's area.
IMO, degen damage is very promising for dealing with bosses. For trash mobs, I just swap to ice nova.
However, the degen won't stack since it is a ground effect, just like caustic arrow and its caustic cloud.

I'm not sure about pyre and EE, the degen should benefit from the reduced resistance but the exploded corpse kinda annuls Beacon of Ruin.

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sharbe wrote:

For trash mobs, I just swap to ice nova.

The rest is fine but don't bother with this, just spam Vortex. Vortex does about 20% more damage than Nova and costs 30% less mana. Might as well save the slots.

Vortex outclasses Ice Nova in such a way to make it obsolete for everything but CoC builds, where it's in addition to something else.

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MrTastix wrote:

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sharbe wrote:

For trash mobs, I just swap to ice nova.

The rest is fine but don't bother with this, just spam Vortex. Vortex does about 20% more damage than Nova and costs 30% less mana. Might as well save the slots.

Vortex outclasses Ice Nova in such a way to make it obsolete for everything but CoC builds, where it's in addition to something else.

It's kinda weird. There was a time my nova can one shot trash but my vortex couldn't. But now vortex is so much better in almost every way. I'm lv53 atm and finally, I can get rid of that +1 blue wand and change to geofri. I take off spell echo because the degen won't benefit from that.

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sharbe wrote:

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MrTastix wrote:

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sharbe wrote:

For trash mobs, I just swap to ice nova.

The rest is fine but don't bother with this, just spam Vortex. Vortex does about 20% more damage than Nova and costs 30% less mana. Might as well save the slots.

Vortex outclasses Ice Nova in such a way to make it obsolete for everything but CoC builds, where it's in addition to something else.

It's kinda weird. There was a time my nova can one shot trash but my vortex couldn't. But now vortex is so much better in almost every way. I'm lv53 atm and finally, I can get rid of that +1 blue wand and change to geofri. I take off spell echo because the degen won't benefit from that.

Would love to know why given Vortex scales better with levels than Nova does.

Another upside to Vortex is that it does not have the decreased damage effectiveness of Ice Nova, which means Added Damage gems and Heralds will provide maximum benefit, giving even more damage if you use these.