Ice or lightning trap

Hello,

i'm somewhat new to PoE, and i recently decided to try out for myself a trap based character. so far it's been pretty fun and easy clearing areas, but i'm torn between ice trap and lightning trap as my main skill.

so here i come with a simple question - which one (lightning or ice trap) is better and why?
so far i'm using lightning as my main attack for clearing mobs, and sometimes switch to ice for bosses, because obviously ice trap has higher damage, but at this point the damage area is not as great as for lightning trap (i'm lvl 43 atm).
since this is my first experience using traps i am yet undecided which one of these i want to make as a full-time main skill. hoping to get some advice and pros&cons for both of these skills :)

ps: i hope i posted this in the right section, if not i apologize, i'm new to the forum :)

Well, you can go for both. But I would recommend you to choose only 1 as specializing your passive tree will give you much better results.

Personally I would go for Ice trap, with a vaal lightning trap to shock bosses. Ice trap is more reliable and has better damage, with the advantage that chill and freeze are a great defense and in this game you can't have enough defenses.

Lightning Trap is a great pack clearing skill, but can never be a single target skill. Builds using Lightning Trap will have one or two more traps for single target damage.

Ice Trap, on the other hand, can do everything by itself. You'll find that if you stack sufficient quantities of increased AoE it will clear very nicely by itself.

So it's sort of up to you what flavour of build you want to go for here. An Ice Trapper will probably not use much else in the way of damage skills. A build using Lightning Trap will probably have 3 or so damage skills.

Meh, I just use both, personally. Lightning traps for clearing, ice traps for bosskilling and taking out more resilient packs.

Building around only one trap can be rough, because even with the 2 second base cooldown of ice/lightning traps and the 70% increased cooldown recovery you can reasonably get, you can still find yourself running out of traps and having to wait a bit before you can throw out more. Carrying around both gives you something to do while you're out of one.


Of course, if you're worried about trying to spec for two different elements at the same time, or two different priorities (projectile on lightning traps, area on ice traps), you can just use a custom trap as your 'backup' with the Trap support instead. Vortex traps are outstanding right now and scale on the same factors as ice traps (except penetration doesn't help the damage over time part), and Ball Lightning traps are pretty nice with the right setup (socketed into Sire of Shards) and mostly scale on the same factors as lightning traps (though in that case you may want to avoid global sources of increased projectile speed, they make ball lightning a bit less effective).

I've had an Ice Trapper in Perandus, from scratch with no currency, and did all content, aside from Ubers and T14+ (I think)... with all-rare gear.

Ice Trap and ... not much else is needed. OOS to trigger EO.

Passive Tree