Shade of Solaris and Crit manipulation

I'm trying to work out a Shade of Solaris build.

My current idea is to use Ice Spear to trigger a crit that does no damage, then use Blade Vortex with Awakened Controlled Destruction (in a damage conversion setup) to do the actual damage.

This has led to several optimization questions I haven't been able to find answers to.

1) Can Shade of Solaris work on a weapon swap? If I have a weapon set with Light of Lunaris or a Duskdawn, can I use that to cast a crit and then swap back to my Shade of Solaris set to get the benefit of having crit in the past 8 seconds?

2) If I can't weapon swap the problem away, I want to minimize the amount of time casting non-damaging skills. I know that Spell Echo only rolls its crits once, but what about Unleash Support? What is the best way I have to quickly get a crit? Is there an easy way to determine that I've crit?

3) Can I crit when targeting Hydrosphere? Are there other crit interactions I can take advantage of?

4) I've read that Herald of Thunder procs hits 4 times a second. Does Herald of Ice proc at the same rate? If I have Self Fulfilling Prophecy to give the Heralds a 1% crit chance or Increased Critical Strikes Support to give them 2% crit chance, together that should 64 hits in 8 seconds. Is my math correct? Can I use this to generate small no damage crits to work with instead of self casting ice spear?

5) Is the 8 second window for critical strikes affected by Temporal Chains?

6) Are there ways other than Controlled Destruction to reduce the critical strike chance of Blade Vortex?

7) I've read old and contradictory accounts of how Blade Vortex crits. How does it currently crit? Does it roll its crits for every hit contrary to how the wiki says crits should work? If it hits 7.5 times a second for 8 seconds, that should be 60 hits in the 8 second window. If I have it linked to say a 6% quality Anomalous Controlled Destruction, with 10 stacks it should come out to just under 2% crit or ~1 crit every 8 seconds. Does this math work?

I appreciate any help.

1. not sure, my gut says this should work but haven't tried it myself because reaching 1 crit every 8 seconds isn't that hard and weapon swapping is a faff.

2. Best way to do this is by using skills like orb of storms or hydrosphere for cursing and linking them with Increased Critical Strikes Support as well. They will easily get a crit each 8 secs. You're probably only using these support skills on bosses or tough rares but that's where you'll need the dps boost in the first place.

3. Yes.

4. Herald of Ice procs as many times as you kill a frozen enemy. No cooldown.

5. No.

6. Anomalous Controlled Destruction gives you up to 100% less critical strike chance, resulting in 0% chance to crit.

7. Blade Vortex rolls for a crit each burst. It's Iffy to use for this purpose though because you have to cast it pretty constantly.

I'm not sure why you are actively trying to minimize your crits on your support skills though. Just having enough will always give you the damage boost. Nothing lost by having little bit of crit leftover. Youre not using them for damage anyways.

EDIT: Ah I misread, you're using blade vortex for damage. In that case I would just link it to 20% quality Anomalous Controlled Destruction and use Orb of Storms/Hydrosphere to proc the shade of solaris buff, as well as apply curses.