Is Frost Shield Bad To Use On ES/CI Builds?

I've been playing around with Frost Shield on some lower lvl zones to test out how it feels but it's on a character with very little ES so I'm not sure if I want to lvl up/buy the gem.

From what I can tell, when you activate FS it stops your ES recharge, you lose a little bit of ES to gain the barrier then need to wait for ES recharge to start again...but the thing is you need to be standing in the barrier to receive the dmg reduction/absorb, which means you're probably constantly getting hit, right?

I'm guessing that since CI and high ES build rely on recharge rate to get ES back that standing within a small area/bubble is not ideal?

I know some builds have insane regen/leech but that still doesn't compare to natural recharge rate; not sure really.

Interested to hear from people who have been using the new Frost Shield.
Thanks.

It helps in heists when you open the door to have a shield already up if you are a ranged character yourself. Otherwise I tend to think it's better for a hybrid character defensively. Because then you can have 5 layers of defense. Life, ES, Mana (Mind over Matter + Agnostic), Frost Shield itself, and whatever guard skill you want to use.

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BearCares wrote:

It helps in heists when you open the door to have a shield already up if you are a ranged character yourself. Otherwise I tend to think it's better for a hybrid character defensively. Because then you can have 5 layers of defense. Life, ES, Mana (Mind over Matter + Agnostic), Frost Shield itself, and whatever guard skill you want to use.

I will be using it on a ranged char for sure, but as ES or CI the builds tend to be limited on defenses so I'm not sure if Frost Shield will be a good addition to it or not.

Not having played it, I took a quick look at PoE Ninja. The builds using it cover everything incl CI, LL, hybrid and life based.

Since it drains your ES, unless there is something I don't understand, you would need enough ES regen to offset the drain. There will obviously be interactions with ES recharge as well.

I would look at builds similar to yours on Ninja, and see how they are managing the ES degen.

And, yes, you can certainly go for a very high ES as your only defensive layer, but ES builds are not limited to ES if you choose to build other layers.

20% of dmg taken will be transfered to Frost Shield, the question is how far away you can be from the Shield before transfer stops.

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GreyLensman wrote:

Not having played it, I took a quick look at PoE Ninja. The builds using it cover everything incl CI, LL, hybrid and life based.

Since it drains your ES, unless there is something I don't understand, you would need enough ES regen to offset the drain. There will obviously be interactions with ES recharge as well.

I would look at builds similar to yours on Ninja, and see how they are managing the ES degen.

And, yes, you can certainly go for a very high ES as your only defensive layer, but ES builds are not limited to ES if you choose to build other layers.

If you're going as *only* ES for your only defensive layer you need around 10K+ ES though, don't you? Not sure most people will achieve that. I think I've gotten around 8K at most once.

The 1 second drain for Frost Shield really isn't that big of a deal, even at max lvl. What I find most annoying, apart from the ES recharge interruption is actually not getting hit during that 1 second. FS pops off 4x/stages during that 1sec with each stage adding more total to the absorb barrier.

When I was playing around and a bunch of melee were on me (didn't want to move b/c I was standing in a max stage Sigil of Power) and popped FS, I would only get 1/4 stages. That is such a minuscule amount of absorb, let alone smaller amount of crit chance.

Just overall I'm not sure about the skill.

I don't know how it works. It says "drains your energy shield for one second or until you run out" so I've assumed it runs longer than 1 second if you have more ES, but maybe it's one second max. Is that what you were seeing?

Maybe someone who is using it effectively will chime in here for you on how to get the most out of it.

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GreyLensman wrote:

I don't know how it works. It says "drains your energy shield for one second or until you run out" so I've assumed it runs longer than 1 second if you have more ES, but maybe it's one second max. Is that what you were seeing?

Maybe someone who is using it effectively will chime in here for you on how to get the most out of it.

The wording was a bit confusing to me as well but it is in fact only 1 sec drain at max. It takes 1s for it to charge up all 4 stages/layers of absorb, but if you have only a couple points left of ES it'll insta stop/until you have none.

I really like the skill but it feels clunky kind of, as it's not something like Arcane Cloak that gives you an instant full absorb or whatever other defensive skill you can pop. You have to make sure you don't get hit in that 1sec for it to fully charge up.