Need some help [Occultist: Ice Nova/Cascade Dual Apep's]

Hi, I'm coming back from a long absence (Before Awakening), and when I came back, I noticed that I had two Apep's Opal Rage and a 6L Carcass Jack, and I remembered that I wanted to make a Ice Nova/Glacial Cascade based build using Dual Apep's and Added Chaos Damage.

Please don't just say something like "Freezing Pulse is better than Glacial Cascade because of the damage multiplier", I know that but I am absolutely set on using Dual Apep's with Cascade and Ice Nova

I know that many other spells are better suited for this purpose, but bear with me -- I am certain that I want to do it this way because Ice Nova and Glacial Cascade are my favourite spells in this game, and I most certainly do want to make them work with Apep's Opal Rage. So, after looking at a couple trees, I came up with this tree.

Poeplanner: www.poeurl.com/ZPD
Official: www.poeurl.com/ZPE

I specced my level 85 witch into this and.... damage wise, I think it's okay, I have a tooltip dps of 17k on Cascade and 12k on Ice Nova,



I originally thought that maybe I should run it as crit, but now that I'm looking back at my equipment (Apep's have no Crit modifiers), I'm beginning to think that perhaps I should drop the crit aspect so that I can use Controlled Destruction instead of Concentrated Effect, and that would also free up quite a few nodes on the tree for say, more life.

I also can't go CI because I need a massive, massive mana bank -- Ice Nova, even with Vile Bastion at like 10-20 stacks can deplete all my ES (2k) and mana (397 left). Also, I'm still confused on how some modifiers work with Apep's, such as, say, %Increased Spell Damage -- do those nodes near the beginning of the Witch tree affect the Chaos damage output from Apep's?

Currently also using Eldritch Knowledge to get some (small) amount of increased Chaos damage.

My current gear:


Thank you for any and all help!

Okay, I came up with a bit of an alternative tree which should have much more survivability. Gets rid of crit to get more plain spell damage. Not sure whether or not this is better than the original one.

Poeplanner: www.poeurl.com/ZUF
Official: www.poeurl.com/ZUH

Also, I redid some of the crit tree, still need more life because I keep dying. Vaal pact made a huge, huge difference though.

Poeplanner: www.poeurl.com/ZUK
Official: www.poeurl.com/ZUL


Left out Ascendencies by accident, but too lazy to fix it.
Damage wise, the crit tree's doing fine, but survivability's kind of hard. I'm a bit scared that if I use the non-crit tree that it doesn't have enough spell damage and I won't have enough damage overall.

Okay, I realized that I messed up on my tree, and I got the wrong nodes (Force Shaper) instead of getting Corruption like I should've.

Currently at this tree, www.poeurl.com/0ku

Not at my desktop right now so cant' recall numbers precisely, but off the top of my head, I believe that my Ice Nova DPS has risen to 16k tooltip and my Glacial Cascade has gotten to 18k.

Also experimenting a bit with Vortex, which does more dps (Almost 19k tooltip) than Ice Nova, but is'nt as good at clearing. Cascade so far is amazing at just shredding bosses, but sucks at clearing, probably by virtue of the fact that it's usually at least 2-3 hits.

Also considering using the Pyre + 2x Consuming Dark instead of Apep's to get more chaos damage. I tried it this afternoon and my Vortex DPS dropped to 15k and my Ice Nova DPS dropped to 14k, but now with >3k chaos instead of the 2.3k chaos that it's at right now


Also considering speccing out of life and EB to go CI because I've only got 2.5k life, which really, really sucks right now, though that'd mean that I'd lose the 20% AoE that Carcass Jack gives me.

Maybe I could make that up by dropping crit as well, stretching across the tree to get Elemental Overload and the AoE nodes by templar. That would make sense because

I'm thinking something like this. www.poeurl.com/0kz , where I lose the reduced aura reservation. Losing that is a little bit annoying, because then I'd have less mana to cast with, but 191% ES, which is far better than 80% life.

Still not sure in what direction I should go, and nor do I have the exalts to invest in all those regrets, so I guess I'll stick with what I have for now until I can farm enough currency to respec it a bit.