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

Have been trying out Vortex with Frostbolt, gotten up to lvl 80.
Using a slightly different passive tree and not using uniques OP suggested.

However I can agree to people saying that Frostbolt is too slow, it's almost unbearably slow, so Vortex spam is the one thing that wrecks almost everything.
So trying to focus on Vortex at the moment. Got a Taryn's shiver, just for the Cold damage bonuses you get, and freezing with Echo Vortex is fairly good, so the damage basically oneshots packs in T7-T8 maps (highest done so far)
Using Frostbite and Warlord's Mark as curses in blasphemy, dumped Herald of Ice, cause gave only 500 tooltip dps. (5L vortex with cold damage atm, had Rapid Decay, the double vortex degen was okay, but one-shot was prefered, will test with cold pen)
So everything in combo with Rashkaldor's Patience and the status aliments it provides as well as Elemental Conflux, stuff outside the AoE of Vortex dies fairly fast to burn really often.

Gonna try Pledge of Hands next, just to see if it's a marginal DPS increase.

<chiping in my experience with Vortex so far>

Here is my version.

still working on it.

gear


My next plan to check is:
1. The Writhing Jar flask or 2 for better single target (maybe its good idea)
2. heretic veil for cheap blasphemy (need to get dual curse first and i will drop hoi and hot. I'm thinking to use temp chain + warlord mark in helment and maybe frostbite + ele waknes in frostbolt)

I'm running a frostbolt/vortex char in SC Prophecy.
It's going ok so far - level 75 atm, not ran higher than t5 maps.
Original idea was to use frostbolt as curse on hit delivery and to trigger vortex. Was not going to run any aura's and use clear mind. Kind of worked, but was a bit clunky so changed back to blasphemy curses (ele weakness and enfeeble).
I'd like to go triple curse and squeeze in temp chains too, but that would probably need heretics veil.

Focusing on the DoT damage - makes the build a little different from 'just' a nova build plus reflect safety.
In general it is playing like a nova build - just running into packs and one shotting, but frostbolt does let me lay a trail of degens or target more dangerous mobs/bosses from distance.
I have added faster projectiles to make it safe/less annoying. Funnily enough you don't want it too high a level - too fast and it makes it hard to trigger correctly. If I can get a bit of proj speed on the tree/gear I might drop it.

Damage is a LOT better when I have ele conflux up - might start running a writhing jar to help keep up against bosses.In general single target isn't great against any ele resist high HP bosses/rares - helped by swapping in conc effect and hopefully better with more levels.

Currently running Vortex - Controlled Destruction - Inc AOE - Rapid Decay - Faster Casting.
I don't want to add in Conc Effect until I have a carcass and/or grab extra AOE from near scion. Faster Casting is just quality of life. Elemental focus is not a good idea - ups the tooltip a lot, but prevents any shock/burns/chills.

Using a 5l +2 staff. It's a bit all or nothing, a +3 5l or a 6l +2 don't add that much, so will probably hold out for a full +3 6l with empower. Might look out for a +2 with good spell damage rolls though.

I'm using Pyre + elemental equilibrium. It doesn't convert the DoT so they get lowered cold res all the time. Does reduce the initial hit damage if you spam vortex though.
Basically easy to gear though - not really not any uniques other than pyre that help (Unless anyone has any bright ideas?) so just get life and resists.

Keeping ele overload up via a blade vortex CWDT. It's a bit erratic as it does require getting hit, and getting close to mobs. When I get another 5l I'l add inc crit to my frostbolt to try and keep it up that way too.

I'm unsure about taking the skill duration node(s). As vortex degen doesn't stack it isn't a dps boost, but would be a QoL one. It would also impact the speed of my lightning warp.
If I do take it, i will be via using an intuitive leap to grab just the 25% node, skittering runes and the 2 scion inc AOE nodes. It's quite an investment though.

My current tree



And gear (mostly self found and not great)



Will update once I get into 'proper' maps and better gear.

Carl

I have yet to make it far enough to try my build but it sounds pretty garbo so far, and for some reason I'm unable to edit it? Anyone know why?

Starting again, but this time with Frostbolt in the 6 link with Vortex purely for bossing. Stacking Ele damage, projectile speed and using a pyre ring for conversion. I'm hoping it will be similar (and stronger) than burning arrow.

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LikeMaHStatus wrote:

I have yet to make it far enough to try my build but it sounds pretty garbo so far, and for some reason I'm unable to edit it? Anyone know why?

Starting again, but this time with Frostbolt in the 6 link with Vortex purely for bossing. Stacking Ele damage, projectile speed and using a pyre ring for conversion. I'm hoping it will be similar (and stronger) than burning arrow.

Don't know how it stacks to Burning Arrow since I've never used it but ZiggyD has a video of the Vortex in action if you're interested.

His build being closer to the hybrid alternative in the OP's post. I personally wouldn't focus on the degen portion of Vortex though because while it's decent it's effective dps is really poor compared to just firing Vortex off 3+ times a second.

If you've ever done an Ice Nova build it's fundamentally the same thing. For a look at what Ice Nova can do here's the build I used last league.

I found that getting Elemental Conflux is when you'll start dishing out more damage and dying less.

"

Don't know how it stacks to Burning Arrow since I've never used it but ZiggyD has a video of the Vortex in action if you're interested.

His build being closer to the hybrid alternative in the OP's post. I personally wouldn't focus on the degen portion of Vortex though because while it's decent it's effective dps is really poor compared to just firing Vortex off 3+ times a second.

If you've ever done an Ice Nova build it's fundamentally the same thing. For a look at what Ice Nova can do here's the build I used last league.

I found that getting Elemental Conflux is when you'll start dishing out more damage and dying less.

Thanks for the video link. I shouldn't have said that the general build sucks, just that the combo wasn't quite what I had intended in terms of playstyle. I wanted to blow stuff up mostly from a medium-long range utilizing the combo, though with Vortex being the bigger link, it's more of an ice nova playstyle than anything, like you said.

Agreed on the degen, preferably would want to buff both the burst and the DoT, if possible.

My aim for putting Frostbolt as the 6 link is to change the playstyle into being sometimes short ranged, mostly long. The damage cap on Frostbolt is high, the proliferating ignite from conflux + beacon should be plenty strong enough to one-shot packs. Vortex will be used for difficult targets as a means of slowing them down and dealing additional damage while the Frostbolt burn chips away.


Links I'm aiming for:

Frostbolt - Faster Projectiles - Cold Pen - Controlled Destruction - Faster Casting - GMP/Added Cold (AoE and Single)

Vortex - Elemental Focus - Controlled Destruction - Added Cold (no Spell Echo since primary damage is Frostbolt).

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LikeMaHStatus wrote:

Agreed on the degen, preferably would want to buff both the burst and the DoT, if possible.

From my perspective the degen is a dead end largely due to scaling. It doesn't scale with cast speed and it doesn't scale with auras. At least from my own testing, I may be wrong so someone correct me if so!

As an example let's say your Vortex does 1,000 base damage and you manage to get enough DoT damage from the tree so your degen does 1,000 damage per second, too.

If the cast speed of Vortex was 1s (1 cast per second) then the dps would be evenly split between the base damage and the degen, but the moment you start getting any cast speed the base damage has a higher damage potential.

Let's say you get the cast speed down to 0.5s (2 casts per second), this is relatively easy with Spell Echo for example. While the damage is still the same, 1000 for both, in a single second the initial burst would deal 2,000 damage while the degen still only deals 1,000. If you use Spell Echo this problem is amplified because you're firing off an extra shot everytime you cast the spell.

The final nail in the coffin as I see it is auras. The degen doesn't benefit from Heralds but the initial burst does. It also doesn't benefit from "adds X damage to spell" affixes on an item.

The degen is still a good, safe, and cheap way to kill someone but you could just as easily kill them by spamming Vortex anyway.

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LikeMaHStatus wrote:

My aim for putting Frostbolt as the 6 link is to change the playstyle into being sometimes short ranged, mostly long. The damage cap on Frostbolt is high, the proliferating ignite from conflux + beacon should be plenty strong enough to one-shot packs. Vortex will be used for difficult targets as a means of slowing them down and dealing additional damage while the Frostbolt burn chips away.

I suggest using the Faster Projectiles gem and looking for projectile speed on gear. Frostbolt's projectiles move horrendously slow. So slow that in the time it takes to reach the enemy I could have walked over to them and killed them with Vortex.

But it hits like a truck.

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MrTastix wrote:

The degen is still a good, safe, and cheap way to kill someone but you could just as easily kill them by spamming Vortex anyway.

I suggest using the Faster Projectiles gem and looking for projectile speed on gear. Frostbolt's projectiles move horrendously slow. So slow that in the time it takes to reach the enemy I could have walked over to them and killed them with Vortex.

But it hits like a truck.

Agreed 100%! I was hoping that the DoT would stack, but since it doesn't it's more of a neat bonus to the skill rather than something you would want to build around.

Yeah, projectile speed will be important. I'm getting the support gem and considering the karui ward prophecy necklace instead of chayula for my CI build. 30% projectile speed, 10% movement and some off stats doesn't sound too bad!

Scratch that, Karui ward is awful what am I thinking haha. Going to try out dual blasphemy, star of wraeclast with some aura radius nodes instead. Looks really clean on paper, can't wait to share it!

I'm still persevering wih the DoT approach, scaling it as much as possible, going for a +3 staff (But have you seen the new fated version of realmshaper? looks a good cheaper option) , levelling an empower etc.
The clear speed is still great, just struggling on single target. I might have to start using frostbolt as a secondary damage skill as people have mentioned, drop the vortex and nuke them with frostbolt. Problem there is would really want to drop GMP, which makes it worse for laying down vortex.
Also would probably want to drop the whole pyre/ee setup so we can run cold pen in frostbolt. Which at least has the advantage that we can use a better ring.

I tried an atziri run, but the single target just wasn't there. Will try again with levelled gems/the frostbolt setup.

Getting a carcass jack really helped though, let me run conc effect alongside inc aoe and still have a decent area.

Few other gearing notes

Southbound REALLY helps prolif - stops pyre from destroying the corpses. Build ends up playing a bit like a discharge build, burning down the whole screen.

Be careful if you end up with cold damage enchant on your boots like I did. Not quite sure how the interaction worked, but I quite often ended up giving high hp/resist mobs cold resists, presumably via EE even though it should all have been converted. I used my merc lab enchant to re-roll them to stun avoidance.


My current gear

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Carlovski wrote:

Be careful if you end up with cold damage enchant on your boots like I did. Not quite sure how the interaction worked, but I quite often ended up giving high hp/resist mobs cold resists, presumably via EE even though it should all have been converted. I used my merc lab enchant to re-roll them to stun avoidance.

The reason this is happening is because of Blade Vortex.

Blade Vortex, being an attack, benefits from the extra cold damage from your gloves. This means that it applies EE. It's what makes Cyclone decent with Righteous Fire and EE.

Using a spell avoids this, taking care not to have any "Cold Damage to Spells" instead.