[2.4] Ice Spear Theory Build

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fuma83 wrote:

Also good luck getting 6 offcolors into that chest

True enough, true enough... just a pipe dream

What would the pro/cons be to uniques (or what uniques would be good)? For example, would Heretic's Veil be good? What about Maliagaro's virtuosity gloves? I'm still unclear over if the idea is to prioritize increasing crit chance or crit multi. Also will you be updating and adding gear etc to the guide as it fleshes out?

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Myra9 wrote:

What would the pro/cons be to uniques (or what uniques would be good)? For example, would Heretic's Veil be good? What about Maliagaro's virtuosity gloves? I'm still unclear over if the idea is to prioritize increasing crit chance or crit multi. Also will you be updating and adding gear etc to the guide as it fleshes out?

Yes, I'll keep adding to the main page as I get a better idea of where it sits. Crit multi would be the main priority. Once you've generated your power charges, we'll already be hard capped for crit chance, so getting more would just be icing to help build power charges faster.

Heretic's Veil could certainly work, and allow you to take the more defensive ascendancy. You'd lose a bit of bonus chaos damage, but well worth the defensive utility. I think that would be a personal preference thing, the build can operate either way.

Maligaro's wouldn't be a very good fit. It's not a ton of multi, the attack speed is wasted, and like I mentioned, the crit would just be icing. A rare set of gloves would be far superior.

For gear we're largely looking for:
defensive stats (cap resists > hp, ES > Armor > Evasion) > crit multi > base damage (+ spell damage, + cold damage, + elemental damage), extra damage *{x} lightning damage to spells) > cast speed. of course movespeed on boots is pretty important, but that's nothing special.

Cold resist *must* be capped at all times if you want to have any hope of not popping yourself. I've already come close a couple times.

I should also mention, I'm currently trying out a pierce variation of the build. I went down to pick up piercing shots, and so far not a fan. I don't feel like that pierce is adding a whole lot, and that's a *lot* of points. I'll keep trying it out in futher maps, maybe it will start to shine, but currently I don't feel like 65% pierce is adding enough to compete with the survivability and mana, or even base damage we could get out of other nodes.

Sorry I don't know how to quote, but would warlord mark be of any worth to run instead of the two curses atm (or even tri curse?) And with the last gem would faster casting be any good instead of increased crit multi or would the damage be markedly more with the crit multi (I like the feel of firing the ice spears really fast).

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Myra9 wrote:

would warlord mark be of any worth to run instead of the two curses atm (or even tri curse?)

Warlords is a fine curse. It's going to offer you some help with the mana issues you'll likely experience leveling this build, and 16% phys damage reduction is no laughing matter either. Though the effect of projectile weakness is *very* powerful with this build.

I think tri-curse would be a little hard to pull off. You'll either sacrifice survivability, or critical damage output, which is the focus of this build. So you'd be cutting yourself short (I would think, maybe someone could make some tri-curse magic). That is of course, unless you pick up heritic's veil, but I'm not sure what the best method would be to apply the third curse. Depends on what you wanted the third one to be I suppose.

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Myra9 wrote:

And with the last gem would faster casting be any good instead of increased crit multi or would the damage be markedly more with the crit multi (I like the feel of firing the ice spears really fast).

Faster casting has good synergy with spell echo, and we don't have a *ton* of cast speed in our build, so it will work fairly well. My only concern about this choice is that I don't see how you're going to keep up with the mana cost. Sure, you could potentially fire them really really fast, but you won't have the mana to sustain that kind of casting.

If I was to choose a different 6l, I would likely either go with controlled destruction, cold pen, pierce, or even added lightning damage to try to get shocks in. Though I've also been looking for alternatives to ice bite. It's not offering a ton for us, but it's our only frenzy generation. I might swap frost bomb in the level 1 CWDT to blood frenzy, and try to pick up some health regen to keep up with blood frenzy so we can link more of these mentioned gems, or even a reduced mana gem to try and control the mana hungry beast that is ice spear.


Edit .....aaaand it just happened. RIP Level 64, oneshot to ele reflect

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VapidActions wrote:

Edit .....aaaand it just happened. RIP Level 64, oneshot to ele reflect

AAAH so sad to hear about it mate.. Did you have vaal pact and/or any form of life leech?

for it to happen this early it really means that the dmg output is kinda insane.. i usually managed to struggle with spark whitout ll in merci but coping somehow and this was before the spark nerf. If you got oneshot the dps must have been nuts, what was it?

Thats why i was so scared about reflect, especially since you can hit it offscreen with this build, i feel like Vaal pact and life leech are absolutely mandatory.

Yesterday i had an isp problem that has only been resolved now, as soon as i can i'll test it in my CI version if it's possible to mantain the DPS and stay alive at the same time.

about a possible 3 curse variation: you'd need to have both 34% reduced mana(that means the nodes close to the templar) and an eretic veil to make it possible while still keeping enough mana to cast.

Having 3 curses would be nice but it's expensive and not doable in early game.

the problem of this build so far are mana and reflect, i feel like those should be adressed before minmaxing in 3 curses.

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VapidActions wrote:

Edit .....aaaand it just happened. RIP Level 64, oneshot to ele reflect

AAAH so sad to hear about it mate.. Did you have vaal pact and/or any form of life leech?

for it to happen this early it really means that the dmg output is kinda insane.. i usually managed to struggle with spark whitout ll in merci but coping somehow and this was before the spark nerf. If you got oneshot the dps must have been nuts, what was it?

Thats why i was so scared about reflect, especially since you can hit it offscreen with this build, i feel like Vaal pact and life leech are absolutely mandatory.

Yesterday i had an isp problem that has only been resolved now, as soon as i can i'll test it in my CI version if it's possible to mantain the DPS and stay alive at the same time.

about a possible 3 curse variation: you'd need to have both 34% reduced mana(that means the nodes close to the templar) and an eretic veil to make it possible while still keeping enough mana to cast.

Having 3 curses would be nice but it's expensive and not doable in early game, but if you invest so much in auranodes you can maybe put in an herald of ice with ice bite(to solve the frenzy generation issue) or a clarity to help the manareg.

the problem of this build so far are mana and reflect, i feel like those should be adressed before minmaxing in 3 curses.

I was just being lazy, I saw it, but I thought it was just an ele resist for some reason. It happened because I was in an area where there was "powerful twinned monsters" thanks to prophecy, so I slammed both of them at the same time with the full 6 stack power, 4 stack frenzy crit. That's what happens when you go for this long straight I guess.... I should probably get some sleep now.

any ideas for deadeye version for this build?
i want 2 of new rings and chain+1 arrow ascendancy points

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francorocco23 wrote:

any ideas for deadeye version for this build?
i want 2 of new rings and chain+1 arrow ascendancy points

I'm finally awake again and back at it. Ranger would be really far away from a lot of the nodes, and would be missing at least two power charges (templar & ascendancy). You could certainly still do an ice spear build with it, I'm confident you would have access to more than enough crit, but it would be a completely different build. Focus on evasion instead of ES, projectile damage instead of spell damage, etc. You could do it, but it wouldn't be a variant, it would be a different build. If you'd like, I can mock up a skill tree, but it's a bit far off what I'm currently doing.

.... And in my first load in I oneshot myself again within 40 seconds...great. Yea, Need to start coming up with a solution to that. Going to pierce was an awful awful decision. Way too squishy, maybe delaying it until after templar would have been a better decision if anything.