Witch - FrostBolt build - Forum

Wanted to post a pretty fun build I've been working on / developing.

Witch Elementalist Life Based frostbolt.

The build is cheap with most focus on taking Rares for most equipment, no uniques are required but the ones i recommend are.

Winds of Change Ancient Gauntlets: They provide life, projectile speed, knock back, and 35% projectile damage. Everything this build needs.

Doryani's Invitation Heavy Belt (cold version): More cold damage, armor (this is a STR build so you can build up a nice amount of armor to protect yourself with. Leech from cold damage, additional freeze during flask use.

(2) snakepit rings: What more could you want, cast speed, extra projectile, more cold damage. Carrying two allows for you to remove LMP from your links, which is another damage boost, or you can keep it for more bolts of death. Overall I tried running GMP and found that with frostbolt more is not necessarly needed. LMP is all that is needed.

For rest of gear I just focused on dual wands with as much flat damage as possible. Since I am grabbing templar and maurder nodes, Crit really isn't a viable option with out a ton of cost / work in gear. Instead build focuses on just crushing with each cast with the help of elemental overload.

Skills / support Gems

Spoiler

FrostBolt setup
5Link No snakePits: FrostBolt, LMP, Iron Will, Faster Cast, Spell Echo.
6Link No snakePits: add in faster/slower projectile pick based on wanting faster casting or more damage.

If you have snakepits then you can drop LMP and pick up cold penetration support

Iron Will is a most for the build, it provides base spell damage boost along with additional based on STR. You should easily have 300+ str between gear and passive and upwards to much more with optimalized gear. This means iron will has potential to give you 48% spell damage + 60% or more from STR bonus. with a lvl 20/20% gem. That is over 100% extra spell damage.

I tried Iron Grip but it only applies to Attack projectiles not spell projectiles.

Golems: I run 2 active but carry 3 with me:
Mainly run Ice and Lighting, but when I need to take on a large pack or a boss I find stone golem does a good job at keeping attention off of me. We also have a good amount of life pool and take blood Magic passive nodes, he acts like clarity to offset the spell costs. I toggle back and forth though depending on situation.

Run Herald of Ice and Arctic Armor
Since we have blood magic we want to keep our reserves low, HOI and Arctic armor do this while giving large benefits. Everything will be shattering 100% so HOI is a no brainer.
Arctic Armor gives us 13% damage reduction, Chills enemies when hit (key to keeping ranged monsters from chewing us up before our frost bolt reaches them. It's extremely strong protective skill. The fire damage protection helps and the fact it gives you a slow / chill path behind you can be big for boss fights that love to jump around (flicker / leap).

CWDT setup: Immortal Call and frost Wall. We all know why immortal call reasons. We take frost wall cause frost bolt always pierces. This means when we get hit we get a nice barrier between the enemy and us that we can simply shoot right through no problem. Makes for a great defensive tool, and since it's setup with CWDT the wall gets put between you and the enemy right at the enemy's feet. You need to however make sure you keep lighting warp in build or it's possible to trap yourself in frost walls.

Main Weapon Setups 3L:
Spell Totem, faster casting, vortex: this is your single target damage booster. Vortex makes great use of the high flat cold damage to really lay waste. The fact spell totem can stack several on a single target, while you keep hitting with frost bolt makes quick work of bosses.

Secondary Weapon 3L:
Frost Bomb, Lighting Warp, and Less Duration. Frost bomb provides us with a huge amount of damage, and more important it provides -20% cold resistance, in general this is a 20% boost to our frost bolt damage. We need lighting warp to get out of danger in a hurry. and less duration makes frost bomb go off much faster and makes lighting warp fast enough to be useful.

The only left skill is frostbite. We will manually cast this as using blasphmey is not good. One it takes more reserve up which is risky with blood magic, and it won't reach most of the monsters as we have insane range with frost bolt. Frost bit gives us another -44% cold resistance, and 14% more chance to freeze.

As you can tell there is lots of room for other setups / configurations, to toy around, however as you build your gear out you will be looking for +str and

Passive Tree

Spoiler

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAMDAAQHBLMFQg3NDjwQWBEPES0UcRZvF1QaOBpsHM4c3B8CIoEkqiW8Jy8o-itQLJwwlzI0NZI26TmKOlg64UGHQZZEq0WdRlJG10rITC1N41NSVa5VxlZIVkpXlFnzWlJmnmjya3puqnGFcg9yqXasfIN-x4GvggeCEIKbgseD2448j6aQVZD6lQSaO5rgm12drp6hns2fy6IAplenCKcwqJqsmKyqrY2us6-br6exBbFCtfK3PriTuNDAZsT2yL_PftD10iHUB9Wm2CTYvdl82jrbT9yN323fsN-_4MPhc-Nq5CLli-oY6-7tIO088B_yQfJF8xH3Mvjr-dv56PrS_Ez-Cv5U_o8=

For the tree we focus on taking As much cold damage as possible, along with grabbing Elementalist, and Celestrial Punishment.
We take elemental Overload, as we won't have crit as a focus, it provides a large damage booster.

From there we focus on taking life, elemental damage, and str where possible. Can take Quick Recovery and keep it or trim it out later on after picking up blood magic, but it's needed early on to keep the mana costs of frost bolt in check. I keep it cause it provides life and life regen

For ascendance:

Liege of Primordial: pretty self explanatory
Shaper of Desolation: The shock and ignite greatly help our clear and single target burst.
Pendulum of Destruction: Gives us tons of damage boost, and it makes our vortex and frost bomb's cover a larger area.

From there it's a choice for me its between Beacon of Ruin and Mastermind of Discord.

If you take mastermind, then I suggest picking up flame dash as a trigger, The other option which I have tested and works quite well is to use firestorm, if you are a strong player you can then take equilibrium and toggle for the damage boost. I however tend to be too busy casting, using pots, etc to really get the timing well, and when done wrong it's super harmful. So I tend to just use flame dash to reposition, and to trigger the cold pen.

I personally went with Mastermind of Discord, we have high freeze chance, With this you basically start a huge chain freeze that keeps everything on the screen frozen. This tends to be worth it more than the cold pen.

As far as paragon. I've always seen it as a slightly broken setup. The idea is you take 50% less reflected elmental damage, and as a boost it gives you 40% of that damage back to you as a boost. So while it is blocking 50% it just boosted me by 40% so I'm taking more damage, but i do get 8% reduced damage. So in long run you basically save 18% reflected damage. Just not enough protection. And it's certainly not enough to protect you from your own high levels of cold damage you dish out. Elemental Reflects are a no, no with this build sorry. Mainly cause you just have so little options for spell leech period. If there was more leech options in this build you could manage it, but just not attainable, without relying on potions for leech, which is fine if you can maintain them, but you have to play really carefully with them.

How to play where does our damage come from?

Key to our damage is our ability to strip the enemy of resistances.
We have 5% cold resistance Pen from passive
44% from frostbit
37% from cold pen support (6L)
20% from frost bomb
Possible 25% from discord
So on a 6L chest setup we can have 106-131 cold pen / negative resistance. This clears almost all mobs resistances, with exception of a few bosses, and even then it puts them against the ropes.
This ends up being 100% + added damage to all of your spells as most mobs fall into negative resistances. This also means they are much more likely to be frozen which if you take beacon chains the whole pack to be frozen. This then gives us the boost of 25% damage from celestrial punishment.

If you take faster projectiles, your frostbolts with winds of change, will clear off screen mobs for what seems like days. In maps / areas where they get to fly forever, I often find myself just running to catch up to them and collect the loot.

In tighter areas, works just as well as mobs tend to get overlapped and hit by more projectiles from LMP / snakepits.

A fun side item to carry. In my off hand I tend to carry, sire of shards, 5L with GMP and frost bolt. This gives you the ability to lighting warp into an area and drop 9 frost bolts in every direction. I use this setup when I want to lighting warp, destroy, lighting warp, destory. Usually in lower level maps i'm just running for clearing or in maps where there are lots of open areas. Overall your damage will be lower, but it's just a lot of fun. I've also tested it with a 6L and spell totem.
Drop the totem, swap back to dual wands, let the totem cast 9 bolts out for it's duration, while you lay your own wall of bolts down.

As far as end game, it's very viable for most maps / map mods, Elemental reflect being the hardest to deal with. Overall you will be dropping bosses quickly, and have good clear speed in a relatively safe defensive setup. Keep in mind everything on screen remains chilled at bare minimal and is more likely always frozen and in a state of shatter.

The attack pattern I tend to have is, frost bolt, (this freezes most things) frost bite and frost bomb, while first wave of bolt goes on, then just hold down bolt. If a high hp target lay down spell totem vortex to drain it.

What I like about this build is it's cost can built in on almost zero cost and be able to run T10 maps all day long. Then as you get money saved up work yourself into optimal Rare gear and then run T15s.

You can do atziri with this build but it requires you know the fight well. You have decent burst on single but nothing compared to some other builds. Since you don't get the shatter effect from HoI on bosses, and your spell totem can find itself a bit hard to get placed just right on faster mobs, it can be a bit of a struggle, but it's doable once you get a feel for how the build plays.

For lab make sure you use stone golem, he is great at getting agro off of you. At end build you will have 5-6k life. But keep in mind not a ton of leech options, so get good potions to make up for it.

Hope you like this build, it's lots of fun to play and with last patch / essense league its gotten a lot more fun. I've got a few friends running / testing it on Essence league now and with the cold ring damage boosts, and added cold skills on weapons being common now. It has really took thsi build to the next level. I will try and roll this build in essence as well once I farm two snakepits.

This build still has lots of wiggle room for adjustments and perfection with gear, uniques, etc. But I've enjoyed it a lot.

Now only if I had that new MTX lined up. :)

Last bumped on Sep 24, 2016, 12:37:03 AM