Very detailed feedback from cold stormweaver perspective

Greetings,

I play cold stormweaver sorceress. Nothing special about it, just straightforward damage, skill level and crit. Pretty much the basic design. The build was pretty bad, until I got super lucky and found Astramentis and sold it for 120 divines. Then I spent 2 days calculating and monitoring market to catapult myself into end game. The build is solid, nothing game breaking, I'd say this is how you planned for the game to be played. I can do any content, except delirium, the 26% movement speed (30 from shoes, minus penalty from chest) and only blink to move forward, I just can't keep up with the mist and I don't have one button delete screen skill. Now I have no way to increase my character power significantly, maybe I could do like 15% more overall damage while keeping defenses the same if i had 200 more divines.


Here is a detailed description -

I tried multiple variations of the build, I spent around 2 million gold on respecing it back and forth, tryin to play with multiple skills and this is what I found out.

I have +11 to my cold skills (5 weapon, 2 focus, 3 amulet and 1 skill tree), most of my skills are level 30. Every level increases overall damage by 12%, but also mana consumption by 12%. It can't keep up with casting frostbolt for more than 8 seconds. Thats insane. I have 171% mana regen from skill tree, 243% from equipment, 30% from skill gem and Arcane Surge (Force of Will) which gives me 46.6% MORE mana regen. Almost all of my gear has at least 100 mana on it, how am I getting mana issues? I have 2005 mana and 666.2 mana per second from regen, but its not enough.

My skills require 190 intelligence. I had to sacrifice one suffix on gear to get more intelligence. All of my skill nodes apart from 1 dex are int. There is no way I can use anything else than int based gear or int based skills. This is very limiting build wise. The only other class skills I can use are from Witch, but her skills are either minions or chaos spells so I am stuck with my class out of which 1/3 is fire 1/3 is lightning so I only have 1/3 of skills in my disposal unless i cant to sacrifice considerable amount of damage.

I did try play with 2 elements, having 2 different element weapons and using the 24 point two weapon skill system, but its bad. There is a significant delay while swapping weapons, its not instant. You can't just cast two cold spells, two lightning spells and go back to cold without noticing the delay and significant DPS drop. Its not worth. What a shame, I was looking forward to that since the sorceress preview trailer.

I play with Chaos Inoculation (CI) and tried playing with Mind over Matter (MoM), even Eldritch Battery (EB). The MoM was for extra cushion of health when they break my energy shield, but the 50% LESS mana recovery is incredibly punishing, unplayable. I even tried adding EB to the mix to be mana blood sorceress, but I only got around 4k mana which is way worse than my 8740 Energy Shield and my mana was depleting while casting fast, not to mention with CI, MoM and EB you have no stun threshold. I had to drop both MoM and EB.

I am not sure how Hypothermia curse, Cold Exposure and Cold Penetration work together, but i assume they don't at all. If I curse enemy, its resistance its lowered form lets say 60 to 24 (basic value of curse is 36) then both exposure and penetration can bring the resistance to 0. I have 57% cold penetration and either 56 or 72% exposure, depending whether Scouring Winds sorceress talent adds 20% base or additional exposure. Which means no matter what I do, if I apply my exposure, the enemy resistance to my cold damage will be 0% and the curse is completely irrelevant, hence why I don't bother even casting the curse. Which is a change from POE 1 when all these three effects stacked.


major issue I have with the game are support gems, more precisely lack of support gems. here is what I use

1) Sigil of Power - very good skill, my spells deal 15% more damage per stage up to 60% more. I use my 2nd weapon skills to increase area and duration. not it lasts almost 30 seconds. This is probably the best usage of the 2nd skill tree, for utility.

-Persistence 40% duration
-Magnified Effect 40% more area, I think this one is bugged and only does 40% increase instead
no other support works for this skill

2) Frostbolt - this is pretty much all I cast while mapping, except when I run into rare mob or a when I run into danger

-Scattershot 2 extra projectiles, and the reason why I don't use Eye of Winter which doesn't benefit from this
-Acceleration 40% more projectile speed. This is a must, even with the increase I walk faster than the projectile
-Considered Casting -15% cast speed, 40% more damage, probably best support in game
-Arcane Tempo +25% cast speed
-Unleash +2charges of the skill over times, doesn't work with skills or supports that adds cooldown which is the reason I put it here. i wanted damage, but there is no damage support gem left

3) Comet - insane skill, high cast time, high damage, can one shot lvl 80 ultimatum boss when its frozen, or at least take 80% of its HP

- Concentrated Effect 40% more damage, 50% less area, I only cast it on bosses, sometimes rares, I don't care about area
- Spell Echo recast the spell, -30% cast speed. 1.7 seconds or 2 seconds cast is no difference, you can only cast one during the enemy freeze duration anyway
- Hourglass 40% more damage, adds 10second cooldown, thats fine, you can't freeze enemy sooner anyway (second time)
- Elemental Focus 25% more damage, can't inflict alignments, thats fine, i don't need comet to freeze enemies
- Cold Mastery +1skill level. I simply don't have anything better

4) Frost Wall - its great defensive skills, creating 3 layers of walls, great for blocking projectiles, surprisingly good at killing unstoppable monsters or big size bosses since they walk over it and shatter it instantly, taking damage

- Spell Cascade obvious choice for this skill, triple the protection, creating 3 walls instead of 1
- Font of Mana 40% increased mana regen if I stand close, I had nothing better
- Extraction 25% damage as extra chaos, sacrifice 10% of life per cast. With CI you don't take any damage. Increases my damage by like 10%, had nothing better
- Glacier increases wall HP by 100%, why not, nothing better to put there

5) Frost Bomb - for inflicting exposure.

- Inspiration -40% cost, I didn't have anything else, might as well, it doesn't matter
- Strip Away 30% increased exposure effect - obvious choice
- Cold Penetration damage penetrates 30% cold resistance, completely irrelevant, does nothing, but why not

6) Cold snap - I was using this skill quite a lot in early and mid game, freeze enemies, then shatter them, but now its mostly useless. I only use it on rare monsters or when the boss is still frozen after comet hits twice. There is a huge targeting issue with this skill not prioritizing frozen enemies. Even if my cursor is directly over the frozen enemies, it doesn't always shatter it and its cast at different location, which is even more apparent when you add cooldown to the skill.

- Rising Tempest 12% more damage per elent you cast recently so 12%, better than nothing
- Supercritical 100% increased critical damage bonus, 20% less chance to crit. This gem is designed very poorly like all crit gems. It makes sense only if you have 0 extra crit damage, then it increase damage by 50% and decrease it by 20 so 30% overall. But my Crit bonus is 250%, 100 more brings it to 350%, and thats only 28% increase (difference between 4.5x and 3.5x you need to add the 100 base) and 20% less critical hit. This gem does NOTHING, even worse, its easier to get crit damage from skills than crit hit.
- Excise 40% more crit chance, 6 second cooldown
- inevitable critical adds 25% increased crit up to 100% over time, useless gem base crit of a skill is about 12-13%, 100% of that is surprisingly only 12-13%
- empty slot, yes I have 5 slots unlocked and nothing to put it, wow

7) Blink a must spell, saved me a lot, replaces roll with teleport, but has long 4 second cooldown. Issue with this spell is that it can whiff and go on a cooldown when you are near edges or pillars, trees and other obstacles.

- Ineguity 30% increase cooldown recovery
- Clarity 30% increased mana regen while the spell is active
- Energy Barrier does nothing, just have it there for the 0.01% chance that i would be stunned while casting blink

8) Grim Feat - ES replenishing, possibly building up buffer, useful for mapping, useless for bosses

- no skills, nothing works with it

9) Arctic Armour - I have 30 extra spirit on my amulet, otherwise I wouldn't be using this. It helps with normal mobs which kills themselves upon hitting me in melee

- Glaciation 50% more freeze buildup, I didn't have anywhere to put this on, my Frostbolt is better off with more damage since the re freeze nerf. Its dead gem
- Deep Freeze 50% longer freeze duration, same as above, irrelevant

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as you can see, half of my support gems are bad, doing nothing, or close to nothing and I wouldn't be using them, if there was any other choice. And even if I made all my skills 5 slots, I wouldn't have anything to socket in them.
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Elemental Storm from the Tempest Caller ascendancy tree does VERY little damage to the point its completely worthless. Anything else is better than this, especially cos of the lack of support gems. the base damage of cold storm is 45-68, so 160-272 per second (triggers every 0.25second) which is nothing. Frostbolt does 120-180 at lvl 19. You need to increase it at least 5 times for people to take it. its supposed to be the ultimate ascendancy skill while it just tickles enemies.


What would help is

-adding more damaging support gems, at least 3 times more
-fix all the critical related gems since they are all bad
-cap all the gems mana cost at skill level 20.
- Fix the temporal chains debuff, thats supposed to slow you by 7-10%, but decreases mana regen significantly and the speed shrine buff doesn't increase mana regen at all so you are constantly out of mana.
- Remove Cold snap ability to shatter frostbolt, cos who cares, its minor damage and it just messes with targeting
-Increase delay before delirium mist starts disappearing by at least 100%
- double projectile speed of frostbolt
- fix Ritual Altar spawn points to prioritize open spaces
- give player more control over what maps they want extra content on, tablets are a poor design, instead of adding the tablet to watchtower, you just put it in with the waystone while opening the map, it substracts one use from the tablet and grants its bonuses
- add markers on the map to lead you to citadels
- while both players are in safe area, whether any hideout or a city, add option to open trade window without the need to be in the same location. This should have been a thing in POE 1 long time ago. It speeds up trading by a lot and no more random DCs.


the optimization of the game is incredible, my potato (i5 3570, 16gb ddr3, SSD, rtx 4060) shouldn't be able to run this game at all, and the gameplay is completely fluent, visuals are not, but the game is responsive at all times. All thanks to Nvidia reflex with boost setting. Whoever coded that deserves a raise and whoever designed support gems should be fired cos of lack of gaming experience and basic build understanding.