[2.4] Ice Spear Theory Build

Preface
So, upon reviewing the patch notes, and my own interest in builds I wanted to try for a while now, I decided to try and come up with an Ice Spear build. I've always wanted to give it a shot, but the horrible base damage on ice spear always prevented me. With the 70% damage buff, it may now be possible.

The idea going into this is to try and instantly pop trash targets, and perma-freeze higher health targets to grind them down as necessary.

Passive Skills:

Adjusted for More mana regen if mana issue arises


The idea here is to pick up critical strike chance and multiplier. The priority is to go right into the dex quadrant first, as the natural survivability from freezing enemies should help with not prioritizing life / energy shield. Rush Annihilation and power charge bonuses, before moving your way over to grab throatseeker, and run down to Assasination and the extra power charge.

I've allocated more points than you would normally, simply to give myself a better idea of where I would eventually pick up survivability, but again, the health and ES is lower priority for me, though allocate as necessary.

In this build, I'll be going occultist for the power charge and curse synergy, since the large nerf to conflux, and lack of AOE in this build makes elementalist fairly 'meh'. The priority here will be to rush the power charge generation, then malediction for the extra curse (prioritizing projectile weakness in the mean time), and finally the energy shield bonus (if this ends up being able to clear UBER labs).

For gems:


In the 6L we'll be priotizing standard supports, GMP and Spell Echo. After that we'll go into Ice Bite, and Hypothermia, eventually finishing off with ICD.

I'm not particularly happy with the curse setup. I've been playing around with a couple different ideas, such as CoH with frost bomb, but with lack of AoE nodes in this build and the 2.5 sec CD on frost bomb, i feel like it will be too detrimental for clear speed. Perhaps CoH + Freeze mine might work, but I've left it with blasphemy at the moment as we're not really prioritizing any other auras.

We're also rocking a lvl 1 CwDT setup with frost wall and frost bomb for a bit of retaliation defence. With the changes to Frost Wall no longer blocking friendly projectiles, this won't hinder our build, and will help keep targets at a distance. We can also easily jump it at any time with whirling blades.

Edit: Moved around a couple gems, Vaal haste to main CWDT setup to link with existing inc. duration, opening slot to link golem and decoy totem to minion/totem elemental resist support.

Edit: Moved whirling blades to 4l, as enlighten was completely unnecessary. Reduced mana instead of power charge on critical also viable for whirling blade 4L just to travel open spaces faster. (Increased duration won't effect the fortify buff.)

Bandits

Oak, Talent Point, Kraitlyn.

Fairly self explanatory. Aliria might possibly be a decent third bandit as well for this build, but we'll be stacking frenzy charges very easily from Ice Bite. So it comes down to "do you want yet another additive 50% crit chance bonus, or do you want 4% cast speed". This build should have enough crit chance as is, the extra power charge will be minimal compared to the extra frenzy charge.

Gear
One of the nice things about this build is it has no dependent uniques. Pretty much everything will be rares, which will work well with the essence league mechanics. The only unique I really have my eye on would be the Star of Wreaclast, due to the extra movement ability, and large cold damage bonus.

For weapons we'll be using daggers, prioritizing spell damage > crit multi > crit chance.
Other gear is pretty standard life, tri-res, movement speed for boots, the usual rare item stuff. Focusing on energy shield armor.

Edit: Someone brought up Bitterdream. This would be amazing to find, or quickly pick up while leveling. But late game you'd absolutely want the crit multi, and spell damage from the daggers. You'd also need something other than whirling blades for movement, which would lose us fortify as well. So Bitter dream would be great for leveling, but I'd probably drop it in merciless.

Clearing

Labs will not be this build's friend. With low health, no damage reduction, "low"ish mobility, and standing still to deal damage this build depends quite heavily on freezing threats to stay safe, which of course does not work with traps.

For mobs, we'll need to be wary of "Cannot be frozen" combined with fast movement, which is where we're depending on the decoy totem to save our skins.

For map mods, we'll just need to avoid elemental reflect at all costs. This build can and will quite easily one shot itself even with low elemental reflect %. No other map mods should really pose any issues for this build.

Summary

I'm quite excited to give this build a shot with the new buff to ice spear. Please feel free to let me know if you have any alternative items to the passive tree path, or feel like there's improvements that can be made anywhere, or even if you feel like this build will fall flat on it's face. But I think it will be a ton of fun to see everything explode into little ice cubes. Unlock those essence mobs from their crystal prison just to put them back into another one.

What about test in STD now?

I've tried it out to a limited extent, but without that 70% buff, it's hard to gauge. I've been getting everything set up so I can give it a shot once the 2.4 patch hits in STD before I dedicated myself to it in essence league.

its ok for this build?

I likely wouldn't personally use it. It does match the theme of the build, but I believe the better base damages from something like Star of Wraeclast, or a good rare ammy would overtake the additive crit multiplier. Though it would depend what the rest of your gear looked like at the time. I might run some calculations to see if I can figure out when Marylenes would be better, but at a glance I wouldn't specifically look for it. Though if any build were to make use of it, this would certainly be one of them.

I can't even think right now. I just tried running it through a calculator, and somehow I was coming out with still over the 95% crit chance cap with Marylenes, which shouldn't be? I'll have to take another look tomorrow.

With standard, not taking into account + global crit from weapons
(base crit * (1 + second stage + passives + power charges))
(0.07 * (1 + 6 + 3.05 + 3.5)) == 94.85% (hard cap met at 95% rounded)

With Marylene's:
(0.07 * (1 + 6 + 3.05 + 3.5 - 0.4)) = 92.05% chance

So as long as you had at least 43%~ crit chance from weapons (extremely easy to meet) you would still meet hard cap crit chance with Marylenes.

In respect to DPS we would be looking at

net DPS = base DPS * (1 + base Critical Strike Chance * (1 + increased Critical Strike Chance) * (0.5 + increased Critical Strike Multiplier))

Lets say the base DPS of ice spear will be 447.7 (70% over current)

Standard:
Hit: 447.7 DPS
Critical: 447.7 * (1 + .07 * (1 + 13.55) * (0.5 + 1.59)) = 1400.70 DPS (2101.05 DPS)
(*1.5 just spell modifier for star of wraeclast as our comparison ammy, as all other spell modifiers are same, and multiplicative to total)
Total Average DPS: 2015.90

With Marylene's
Hit: 179.08 DPS
Critical: 447.7 * (1 + .07 * (1 + 13.15) * (0.5 + 3.99)) = 2439.78 DPS
Total Average DPS: 2260.05 DPS

So Marylene's does win sheer damage output by about 12%, however we would have to keep in mind that it offers nothing else for us except culling strike, where star is offering 30% fire resist, 15% all resist, and 30% curse radius for our blasphemy setup (if that's what we stick with), a movement ability, and immunity to silence for lock boxes.

We also have to keep in mind, in the event that we get bum rushed, and we can't hold the mob(s) at second stage distance, we're losing the 600% second stage crit, leaving us with:

Standard:
Hit: 447.7 DPS
Critical: 447.7 * (1 + .07 * (1 + 7.55) * (0.5 + 1.59)) = 1007.71 DPS (1511.57 DPS)
Total Average DPS: 1009.95 DPS

With Marylene's
Hit: 179.08 DPS
Critical: 447.7 * (1 + .07 * (1 + 7.15) * (0.5 + 3.99)) = 1594.50 DPS
Total Average DPS: 887.50 DPS

So if we don't keep them at bay, Marylene's actually ends up doing about 12% LESS damage.

In result, Marylene's would be a viable option, but you would absolutely have to make sure you're always hitting second stage ice spears, and you'll have to make up the resistances elsewhere.

Marylene's has a less penalty, not just reduced. So you have to multiply your total crit chance with 0.6.
With a good dagger and max power charges you should have app. 1400% increased crit strike chance in the second form. With Assassin mark's crit bonus and the less penalty you'll end somewhere around 70% crit chance for the second ice spear form (rough estimate).

"

Bada_Bing wrote:

Marylene's has a less penalty, not just reduced. So you have to multiply your total crit chance with 0.6.
With a good dagger and max power charges you should have app. 1400% increased crit strike chance in the second form. With Assassin mark's crit bonus and the less penalty you'll end somewhere around 70% crit chance for the second ice spear form (rough estimate).

I was wondering about that, I couldn't find any resources stating which it was, though this patch note for 2.2.0 (http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Marylene%27s_Fallacy) linked to Marylene's leads me to believe that the subtraction is additive as well
"All sources of increased Critical Strike Multiplier have been changed to additional Critical Strike Multiplier. This change brings the functionality in line with how most players think it works."

And I completely forgot about assassin's mark in my calculations... /sigh

"

VapidActions wrote:

"

Bada_Bing wrote:

Marylene's has a less penalty, not just reduced. So you have to multiply your total crit chance with 0.6.
With a good dagger and max power charges you should have app. 1400% increased crit strike chance in the second form. With Assassin mark's crit bonus and the less penalty you'll end somewhere around 70% crit chance for the second ice spear form (rough estimate).

I was wondering about that, I couldn't find any resources stating which it was, though this patch note for 2.2.0 (http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Marylene%27s_Fallacy) linked to Marylene's leads me to believe that the subtraction is additive as well
"All sources of increased Critical Strike Multiplier have been changed to additional Critical Strike Multiplier. This change brings the functionality in line with how most players think it works."

And I completely forgot about assassin's mark in my calculations... /sigh

The amulet says "40% LESS critical strike chance". Less (like more) is a multiplier. If it were to be subtracted it would read 40% REDUCED critical strike chance.

"Critical strike multiplier" is something completely different. While "critical strike chance" specifies how often you can crit, the csm specifies how much more damage you do if you crit. Normally you would do 150% of normal damage on a crit. If you have 100% increased critical strike damage from gear/tree your critical strike multiplier would be 250% of normal damage.

With that being the case, there's just no way Marylene's can compete, it would do up to 20% less average DPS on second stage spears (66% crit not including +crit chance from gear). A couple quick calculations, the maximum crit this could achieve with the current build and max crit daggers would be 72% (amazing estimate you made). Outside of random crit chance on armor / rings. to make it even equal, you would need to find yet another 350% crit chance *somewhere*.


I'm too tired to re-run my calculations, but I'm pretty confident in saying Marylene's would not be a great option. If you don't have *anything* for an amulet, it will kind of work, but Yea, it just doesn't seem to be a great option.

Which is kind of sad, this is *exactly* the build it appears to be designed for, and it's still not an option...

It needs some number tweaks to make it viable, or I'm just completely missing something on how it could be viable. This would be a capped/near cap crit build, and still the "crit damage" ammy can't compete...

Obiviously correct, save 1 point!