[3.5] Scold Snap™ - a low-life league starter Cold Snap Occultist
" Kind of, in that I died to the final explosion because I completely forgot about it. I won't however be working on uber elder any time soon, I set up elder ping-pong on UGS (it started from bog so that was kind of a long way to go) and have been farming that since. I might however be going back to it later in the league. " I'm actually using both! While I love running with multiple speed flasks and phase run during normal mapping, I have flame dash for the few times you need to jump over ledges (UGS has a few of those, and some incursion temple layouts benefit as well) or for dangerous boss abilities that are best avoided with a dash. (shaper slam, chimera circle) I'm also not the best at layout planning on the fly and need to backtrack a few times occasionally, and flame dash is definitely a lot faster than phase run without having flasks up. Something else that would be worth experimenting with would be switching to a sceptre and going shield charge + fortify to get some sweet damage reduction. " It's something I kind of forgot about, but that I surely will be experimenting on as soon as I get home as it seems like a pretty good improvement! " Absolutely true, but they're not competing on current gear: cold multi is a prefix that can only be rolled on weapons and jewels at the moment I think, while aspect of the spider is a suffix that can go onto your less stressed-out gear. (shield, wand and gloves suffixes are all great spots to find a slot for it) " That's possibly true, although it's probably more of a late-league concern, mostly because easily-found suffixes that are useful for us basically only consist of resistances (and on that note, not having to look for crit on your weapon is going to produce loads of cheap hits, my current wand cost in the ballpark of 20c), and it's very few rare ones that do something (reduced mana reservation to possibly run an additional aura, onslaught on kill, energy shield on block, etc), so the belt resistances don't do too much for us in the current economy state. Veiled mods will also be quite interesting to experiment with: increased damage, additional ES and evasion, energy shield regen with nearby rares/uniques and additional flask effect all sound vey powerful stuff in their specific area of use that we miss on with a unique belt. The point on recharge is also absolutely valid, and I'd love to get rid of Rime Gaze, but my greedy side can't currently contemplate passing up that much extra damage from it. Last edited by Maxpoggi on Dec 20, 2018, 2:40:33 PM
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Do we have any other feasible options in terms of applying curses? I personally hate the clunkiness of orb of storms / storm brand, and would love to drop them entirely (especially if it frees up support slots for a movement skill).
How bad would it be to get some cast speed and link curse on hit and our 2nd/3rd curse to frost bomb? (I'm still using the normal scold's cwdt ball lightning combo to apply EE). Potentially something like Frost Bomb-Less Duration-Curse on Hit-EW? | |
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Another option is to use Cold Snap + Cascade for clear. Outside of T15+ bosses I don't even take Cascade off anymore and I have less damage than you do (5L, worse rare gear).
Also look for +2 to Duration/AOE/Cold Gem Rime Gazes. I got lucky and picked one up for 30c yesterday (bad rolls but who cares). Pretty nice damage increase. IGN: Dmillz
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" You need a lightning spell ticking to get the EE bonus anyways, and if you want space for a movement skill I'd sooner cut the ball lightning cwdt setup since it's fairly overkill on normal mobs and fairly unreliable on bosses. If you take a look at the tree I posted above I'm running flame dash linked to faster casting, but if you want to go the shield charge + faster attacks + fortify route you might need to cut phase run or roll some elder faster attacks gloves/fortify boots. " Thanks for the tips! I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for corrupted rime gazes, and I'll try experimenting with cascade a bit. Another thing I forgot to mention that came to me while writing this reply is some skill duration elder boots as a way to upgrade our sin trek. We could even manage to get both increased duration and fortify for shield charge if we want to go that route, making our boots a 3L + 4L (shield charge + faster attacks + the two effects and cwdt immortal call) Last edited by Maxpoggi on Dec 20, 2018, 3:09:03 PM
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" The continual ball lightnings should be triggering EE plenty, I would think? Is this not practically true? I get what you're saying, but I'd hate to drop the scolds/malevolence combo since it's kind of the theme of the build (and one I enjoy thematically/visually). That said, if it really no longer serves a purpose, I can drop it and probably pick up some rares that might get me some chaos resistance (that likely isn't necessary, but I'd still like to get some). | |
" I really like this idea. There's a variety of boot mods that could replace Sin Trek, and elder boots are a great example. |
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" The problem with ball lightning is that it's overkill for map clears (all the trash dies anyways) and boss attacks usually do a fair bit of damage so you're aiming to not get hit or at least get hit very few times which is sort of counterproductive to wanting to keep EE up. Whether you have enough damage to forgo EE on map clears is mostly up to your gear, but I'd say with all the buffs that's a pretty low threshold to meet and after that it does become sort of unnecessary. | |
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Fair enough, I'll give dropping CWDT-Ball Lightning a go and see what kind of decent helm and glove rare replacements I can get for 1 or 2 Ex.
New skill gems would probably end up being: Vortex group (6L) Cold Snap group (4L) Storm Brand - Curse on Hit - Curse 1 - Curse 2 Blasphemy - Curse 3 Discipline - Blood Magic Shield Charge - Fortify - Faster Attacks Flame Dash - Frost Bomb - Arcane Surge How are you setting up your curses currently? I'm usually running Enfeeble on the Blasphemy with EW and Despair through Curse on Hit. Last edited by Smogs on Dec 20, 2018, 5:03:29 PM
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" I'm running temp chains on blasphemy, frostbite on curse on hit and I have a despair flask: we have two max curses (provided you went with the new ascendancy nodes rather than profane bloom and malediction), so we don't want three curses always up, and the despair flask gives us the second curse for mapping while not really being available for tough bosses, where frostbite kicks in instead. Also reporting in: I'm not a fan of cold snap + cascade (and while I did try it with a level ~13 cascade the issue wasn't the damage, but having to actually spend time casting spells... who does that?), but I am definitely a huge fan of going 6L vortex (92% cooldown recovery speed? sign me up!), especially without the conc effect from not being in the helm anymore. I'll be trying storm brand next to see how it feels: the more frequent proc seems nice to quickly recover EE uptime when we refresh our dots, but I'm not sure the fact that we don't need to be in melee is going to matter that much since we could just refresh orb of storm when we were going in for our vortex cast anyways. We're also losing two levels of arcane surge (1% spell damage, 1% cast speed) to be able to proc it with a single cast, at least for the doedre-less version. Last edited by Maxpoggi on Dec 20, 2018, 7:26:10 PM
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" Ah, there's the piece I'm missing. I followed the original guide and got profane bloom and malediction. I'm guessing I should have gone void beacon and frigid wake. rip |
