How does cruelty buff and the painseeker unique gloves interact?

The Wikipedia says that the value of cruelty buff is calculated similarly to fortification and ailment thresholds:



Does this mean that it is affected by the painseeker unique gloves, which grants: "Critical strikes do not inherently inflict non-damaging ailments. Inflict non-damaging ailments as though dealing (100-200)% more damage"?


If they don't interact I have a second question. Which if any of these gems should I replace with cruelty?

Vortex, creeping frost, cold penetration, added cold damage, efficacy, hypothermia.

Thank you for your help!

If you are playing Cold DoT, you shouldn't be using any of those supports. You want to use Controlled Destruction, Elemental Focus, Swift Affliction, and Empower. If you can't get Empower, Cruelty can work here.

Thank you for the clarification.

Thanks for the suggestions regarding supports. I should have mentioned, I've been stacking freeze as a defensive layer using heatshiver and ofcourse painseeker.

I've got elemental overload, because in PoB it raised the damage a good bit. Doesn't make sense intuitively because I'm hitting so slowly. Should I drop it and go with controlled destruction?

EO has always been useful to non-pure elemental DoT builds (as in, builds that rely on hits for their DoTs or still retain a hit counterpart). Nerf made it a bit more splashable since it requires you to do a critical hit with the skill you actually want to get the 40% more damage boost. Depending on your crit chance (and use of Controlled Destruction on top of it) it might be a worth investiment for just 1 Passive (or wielding one of those Experimental scepters that gives you EO)

Elemental Focus is actually a very nice boost for Vortex or Creeping Frost - while it disables the chill and freeze from the hit itself (which should be minimal since you focus on DoT rather than Hit), the chilled area created by those skills will still apply its Chill (for 10% unless you have Increased Chill Effect), letting you gain any bonus from Hypothermia and similiar

Another suggestion for Creeping Frost - do you have it in the same links of Vortex? You are basically going with two 5L in that case. Would you consider using Creeping Frost as an alternative offensive source or utility spell? For example, Creeping Frost works wonders with Greater Multiple Projectile - the DoT damage is left untouched by GMP, and since the (now) five projectiles have an AoE ground damage, they are actually one of the few skills that can "scattershot" an enemy - this way you basically counter the Less Hit damage from GMP by hitting 3-5 times the same enemy with a single hit (depending on its hitbox)