[3.3] Whispering Ice CI Quad Icestorm Totems

Once again, great suggestions Parabola01. I've finally got my internet sorted in the new place and have had a chance to update the guide a bit. The culling strike got me thinking about a MF weapon swap idea for bosses because weapon swapping to the same skill doesnt despawn the totems. will have to see if it really works out :D

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boombrakka wrote:

Once again, great suggestions Parabola01. I've finally got my internet sorted in the new place and have had a chance to update the guide a bit. The culling strike got me thinking about a MF weapon swap idea for bosses because weapon swapping to the same skill doesnt despawn the totems. will have to see if it really works out :D

Glad you like it! That's how I've been playing so far and it has worked very well. I'm only level 76, but with 78/78/76 elemental resists, Enfeeble + Temporal Chains, Chaos Inoculation, and nearly 10k energy shield, it has been extremely survivable. I can't facetank bosses, but with a totem build, you don't need to. Just set them up and run!

Had some theorycraft ideas I'm unable to test myself:

- Emperor's Wit/Mastery over a good rare jewel. Is the percent increase in Int worth losing the other bonuses?

- After taking Ritual of Awakening, is it worth leaving Ancestral Bond and picking up Elemental Equilibrium? (spamming the Lightning skills, we can proc an extra -50% Cold resist on enemies)

Just played around with the Emperor's jewels on PoB and it seems that they (preferably Mastery ofc) are just about better than any rare jewel you can get. The only downsides are that you don't get cast speed and that they are pretty expensive. All of my jewels cost between 5c and 20c each while the Emperor's ones are >2ex/>5ex (on standard) :/

In the end you have higher hit damage so even if the actual dps stays the same because of the cast speed loss you will still have higher ES than an 8% increased ES jewel (even with only the Wit jewels) making it worth it.


Really not so sure if EE will work because each hit from Icestorm should trigger it. You just get too many hits from this. Maybe Firestorm could work if you link it with Echo and Faster and maybe duration or so but even then you would have to stand there casting it constantly which takes away a lot of mobility which I would personally prefer not to do.

If I'm wrong and the Icestorm totems don't trigger EE then I think that would be pretty decent, though you would ofc lose a little bit of clear speed by losing a totem.

Yeah, you're probably right on EE. I haven't gotten to test out 4 totems yet because I'm missing one trial for Uber lab.

Some more thoughts:

Sanctity node, going up from Shaper line. 10% Increased energy shield, +10 Int, and +1% ES regenerated per second. I thought it looked like a good pickup. The only problem is that useless dex node in the way, but I'll still take it.

Shavronne's Revelation. We don't need mana as long as we have max energy shield, and this ring regens 3% ES per second, on top of a fat Int roll. But when you get put under pressure, you can't Flame Dash away if you don't have full ES and no mana. I'm not sure how I feel about this one and I'm unable to test.

Definitely get Sanctity if you have the skill points for it :)

Shavs Revelation is interesting but probably too annoying to use. The damage and max ES are better with it but it makes getting max resists tricky and then theres the no mana regen thing :/ I'm personally too lazy to use mana flasks plus its expensive :D

I am not noticing a tooltip DPS increase with faster casting gem, is this just a glitch or does it not work? Also wondering about elemtal focus, you are unable to freeze things with this in socket correct? the freezing seems like a huge boon

The tooltip for Icestorm only shows the average damage per hit of each ice shard so faster casting won't show an increase. The only thing you can do is look at your cast time and then work out how many more instances of icestom you can get from that.

Elemental focus does indeed prevent this from freezing. I personally don't really like freeze because it can be hard to freeze bosses. Because this skill has lots of tiny hits you will pretty much never get a freeze on a boss and you should be able to kill everything else so easily that you don't need to freeze them. The great thing is that you still chill because of the frozen ground left by the skill reducing the downside of elemental focus.

hope that helps and let me know if you do get bosses to freeze :D

Probably not likely to freeze them with 5% crit so point well taken. I am loving this build btw. Its so cheap and so good. I may start next league with it too although I have total adhd lol

I'm thinking of giving this build a try in one of the upcoming race leagues. What's your opinion on the suitability of the build for that? I'm not looking to post leaderboard results but I do want something that can get to endgame relatively quickly with little investment (i.e. no astramentis).

Probably a bit risky to be honest. I never really took part in races because I don't have enough time so I don't know how easily you will be able to get a whispering ice and good enough gear to get to endgame and that. Also with some of these extra area mods it could be a bit slow because things like exiles can take out your totems pretty fast before they can do much damage. So maybe ok as a league starter but probably painful for these events. If you do try it though let me know how it goes :)