Best way to freeze someone is...

... what?


I'm trying to build cold/fire witch in Diablo II style - freeze then burn.

My fellow players tell me that it can't be done, but I'm eager to prove them wrong.

What about Ice nova with high crit chance?

Ice spear with high crit chance?

Something which freezes target by default? Preferably aoe.

Is it possible or my friends are right?
I have not seen such build anywhere, so that points to them being right...

Thanks.

Probably because the way sockets work in this game doesn't reward swapping between two elements like that. You usually only have one 5link or 6link spell that is more powerful, so people just spam that one spell 99% of the time.

There's no reason this wouldn't work though.

Your other option is to use a cold spell with Cold to Fire support on it. Ice Spear is a good choice for this. Freezing Pulse is ok for this. Ice Nova is pretty terrible at high levels.

Alternately, you can have a totem doing one of the elements and you doing the other. For example Ice Spear + LMP + Elemental Proliferation spell totem is very good at freezing things.

cold snap with ele prol,freeze all the mobs then firestorm them to death

i'm kind of a noob, but I'd imagine you could get +5% freeze node, stack crit on that with MP and faster att/cast -- the extra crit would also help burn them.
I building a power siphon dude with a bit of that in there.

The best way to freeze a single target is 2h glacial hammer.
For AoE a critical freezing pulse/cold snap.

Freeze mine got buffed to be somewhat useable lately, stick ele prolif on it and you have an effective quick freeze. If you happen to be in the area to take dual curse then you can also take breath of rime and the nearby freeze passives to improve it.

A good fire spell to use in conjunction with that would be fire trap with added burning damage, as the enemies will be stuck in place letting you make the most use of the burning ground. Both freeze mine and fire trap are improved greatly by the mine/trap speed passives in the shadow area, though the ones in the middle of the tree are a bit too far to be worth it when you could be going after pyromaniac instead.


However, I think you may actually make use of the cold to fire gem if your strat is to cause lots of freezes, chills and burns. Use ice spear with ele prolif and get your crit chance high enough for the second form of ice spear to always crit. This will mean always spreading a lot of elemental effects with just 1 attack. Stacking crit multiplier would be an easy way to increase the damage and duration of all the elemental effects so you don't have to waste points going after both cold and fire/burning damage nodes.

Say you were to use all 3 of those skills, you'd have a pretty strong build, using ice spear at range and the mine/trap combo for enemies too close to crit on with the spears second form. With dual curses, one flammibility and one frostbite, you'd have a very powerful witch.

4 link cold snap + cold snap + crit chance + elemental proliferation
4 link cold snap + cold snap + crit chance + elemental proliferation
4 link raise zombies + added fire + chance to ignite + elemental proliferation
2 link anger + reduced mana
3 link critical weakness, frostbite + increased aoe

>start as shadow
>get the ignite passive in beginning
>get the freeze passive in beginning
>get double curse
>get critical weakness, frostbite
>get lots of crit nodes

>the zombies procs ignite
>you proc freeze/chill with 4 cold snaps(1 sec cast time)
>curses help proc freeze, you dont really need fire curse because its already high enough.

Ice spear with power charge on critical + lmp and you will freeze the whole screen. If your crit chance is low you can also use quality added cold dmg

On the other hand fire spells are pretty terrible (lag + boring)

if you´re doing a 2-ele-style damage build also don´t forget elemental equilibrium

"

Spysong192 wrote:

if you´re doing a 2-ele-style damage build also don´t forget elemental equilibrium

Burning doesn't trigger EE so the OP would need to be alternating fire and cold spells, meaning both an M1 and M2 spell and only 1 will ever get more than 4 links. Unless they were to use flame totem to trigger EE, in which case there'd be no strong burns and it'd be better to just be a pure ice witch with a flame totem than to mix damage types. Plus it'd make use of the cold to fire gem useless.


E: Came up with a quick build that would make use of cold and fire procs, I kinda wanna make it myself now hehe