[1.3] pabrt's Frost Wall Kinetic Blaster - Budget Friendly!

Have a friend who uses a Shadow with Kinetic Blast + CoC + Frost Wall. After repairing his tree he finds his clear speed is much the same and seems to think the Frost Wall damage is actually really high. I didn't get a chance to confirm how the explosions react to the changes though.

His current Tree is this:


His chest links are Kinetic Blast + Frost Wall + CoC + Pierce + GMP + Reduced Mana.

Sadly he goes nowhere near Scion so it would be hard to replicate.

Yeah, frost wall damage is much higher.

Can you get him to try (in his hideout) manually casting a frost wall, then shooting a kinetic blast through it, and comparing whether he gets more or less explosions than last patch?

For me I am getting (what seems like) much less and in a smaller area. I've even had a hard time keeping up mana/ES on single targets because of the lack of explosions/condensed area in which they hit.

Beyond that simple test, I am getting incredibly nerfed health/mana gain and single target damage in real world testing. Aoe seems... okay, but kinetic blast never had a problem with aoe to begin with.

Pabrt make plz new tree for scion 2.0 we try play

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pabrt wrote:

Yeah, frost wall damage is much higher.

Can you get him to try (in his hideout) manually casting a frost wall, then shooting a kinetic blast through it, and comparing whether he gets more or less explosions than last patch?

For me I am getting (what seems like) much less and in a smaller area. I've even had a hard time keeping up mana/ES on single targets because of the lack of explosions/condensed area in which they hit.

Beyond that simple test, I am getting incredibly nerfed health/mana gain and single target damage in real world testing. Aoe seems... okay, but kinetic blast never had a problem with aoe to begin with.

He just checked for you now,
When his Kinetic Blast "pierces" (69% chance with current build) the wall there are no extra explosions. He only gains extra explosions when the projectile "hits" the wall.

So yes, your observations would appear correct and I imagine this would cause issues with the utter Frost Wall spam we were seeing before (as in, having difficulties causing them). Only thing I feel worth mentioning here is that he finds the actual Frost Wall damage itself to be very high and can still sufficiently lock-down opponents.

Not sure how workable this info is for you but there you are.

Good luck.

This might be the reason for the decreased explosion triggers:

"Projectile skills no longer "shotgun". You can't hit the same target with more than one simultaneously-created projectile from the same source any more. They've been rebalanced around this."

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fae76 wrote:

This might be the reason for the decreased explosion triggers:

"Projectile skills no longer "shotgun". You can't hit the same target with more than one simultaneously-created projectile from the same source any more. They've been rebalanced around this."

It was working in beta since the removal of shotgunning. This is a more recent change (although maybe it's a change inspired by the same philosophy).

I'm a huge fan of this build - easily my favorite character to play. However, I've also been noticing dramatically reduced damage and survivability since The Awakening. My tests also confirm that piercing a frost wall doesn't trigger kinetic blast like it used to, completely ruining this build's firepower, which also has a big impact survivability. Killing high HP single targets is a nightmare...

Is there any hope for this build with some modification, or is it completely dead? Right now there doesn't seem to be any benefit to this build over a conventional ele kinetic blast build.

I'm wondering if replacing KB with Barrage could be a solution.
From what I've seen in videos Frostwall is much longer now, deals quite a bit of damage and Anger does add it's damage as well. Why not use Frostwall itself for AoE and single target damage?
Getting 5 green sockets on Voll's will be a nightmare though... maybe swapping GMP for another spell or crit damage is an option.

Here the options I see for this kind of build:
1) KB + GMP + Pierce + CoC + FW + Accuracy/Crit% > any wand
2) LA/IS + GMP + Pierce + CoC + FW + Accuracy/Crit% > any bow (Quill Rain + Drillneck?)
3) LA/IS + GMP + Accuracy + CoC + FW + Crit% > Infractem + Drillneck
4) Barrage + GMP + Pierce + CoC + FW + Accuracy/Crit% > any bow or wand
5) Barrage + Accuracy + Pierce + CoC + FW + Crit% > any bow or wand
6) Barrage + Accuracy + Pierce + CoC + FW + any spell > any bow or wand
7) Barrage + GMP + Accuracy + CoC + FW + Crit% > Infractem + Drillneck
8) Barrage + Accuracy + CoC + FW + Crit% + any spell > Infractem + Drillneck

Of course with anything else but KB the number of hits and therefore procs will be a lot smaller...

How about Chain instead of Pierce? Then its still proccing 3 times more in packs.
Only for bosses you need another solution.

Just respecced.

This is my lvl-80 build tree


As stated before, still working fine against mob packs, but build is dead against single targets.