[1.3] The Frozen Shotgun - Ice Shot, HoI, shatter the world

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This is what I would do if the templar area is really necessary: with templar.

Thank you very much Ohjeah this one seems much more solid. Imo the templar area is very good for this build, I'll try it with Chin Sol to have a decent damage to shot in a close range while enemies are Chilled/Frozen.

@Murdurface could you please link your gears+gems and tree? Your image has really caught my attention.

Thanks for your time Guys!

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Ohjeah wrote:

This is what I would do if the templar area is really necessary: with templar.

Sniper and Quickness bring much more to the table compared to Catalyse: 1% more dmg per point, proj speed and some juicy movementspeed!

You are quite right (and Quickness is even helpful for the +10 Dex!). I changed my "base" tree to include Sniper and Quickness, leaving Catalyse as a later optional node.

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Ohjeah wrote:

I have somewhat in my mind that you cannot evade the cone damage of ice shot (because it always hits). Thus reflect is an issue even with ice shot. A herald of ice explosion cascade just makes it worth.
On the current live servers I would not play ice shot with out vaal pact. To achieve that, one obviously needs to drop the templar area.

It was confirmed that you can evade the Ice Shot cone (see: here). I'm expecting a very significant increase in gearing expense once you drop RT, since you're not grabbing ANY accuracy nodes on the tree you'll need decent flat rolls on several pieces of gear (and I'm not sure how high you could get it even then).

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Ohjeah wrote:

On another note: if you don't convert 100% of your damage and have a slow phys bow, 2% mana leech is enough to sustain your mana.

Yeah, especially if you go the Acro route, I think it's worth exploring dropping EB and picking up Mind Drinker. Even more so considering the beta changes as you also menioned :)

I'm currently doing some experimenting with this build on the beta, including seeing if some of the new tools we've been given (Hypothermia?! How about Ice Bite linked to our HoI?!) make up for the really severe prolif nerfs. On the plus side, HoI reflect is a non-issue. As is any reflect right now though... :P

You are right about the accuracy. With the tree I'd use lioneye's glare.

Gear


Build (It's incomplete)


A lot of my gear is the best I could do at the time for getting my Dex required and my resists capped. The build has a few obvious nodes I'm near that I'll pickup once I have more points to allocate.

Some things to note:

The quiver's additional 19% cold conversion.
I recovered passive points by getting Dex on gear.
The amulet I'm wearing helps a ton with stat requirements, like the dex.
The mana regen lets me shoot carelessly and endlessly while leaving Arctic Armour on at all times.
The helm adds +1 to Herald of Ice (20% Quality)
Increased elemental damage is a great thing.

Also, I was basically one shotting myself on reflect magic packs even with Purity of Ice up. I felt like, what's the point? If I have to just make sure I don't shoot crazily into a reflect pack anyway, I decided to swap it for Herald of Thunder. The increased elemental damage buffs (passives and gear) apply to the Herald of Thunder in addition to Frost so it's not too wasteful.

Also make sure you don't over level the CwDT, Enduring, Immortal setup.

My Arctic Armour gem is new and I'm using it to find the proper place my mana regen will allow me to leave it on 24/7 for the extra run speed. I have a max level one I swap in when I know I'll be taking heavy damage.

I don't really have trouble on bosses, I just need to watch out for excessive damage and move in and out of the fight as my HP needs to regen. Not sure how Atziri will go though. The only thing that really kills me as I am is reflect packs, so myself. I'd like more defense so I can be more careless but it's not something I'm willing to make large sacrafices for.

I feel like all of my gear could be upgraded, especially to have additional life if I can maintain resist cap. Also some of the gear has wasted stats. The bow is about 450dps, and obviously I'd like a 550 dps bow, but I don't have 300 exalted (Holy shit why is it so expensive.)

For those on a budget you can save a good bit of passive skill points by not taking RT and instead using a Lioneye's Glare bow which has Hits Cannot be Evaded on the bow. They average about 320-350dps but the Hits Cannot be Evaded increases your damage more than a normal bow with that kind of dps on it would.

Dunno though, I feel about using .

I have around 10k tooltip on a shitty cold snapper tree.
This is pretty strong in 2.0 with new gloves and new support gems.

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Murdurface wrote:

Gear...

Hey, if you're using a +1 helm anyway, I bet even a L1 empower will add more HoI explosion damage (with less mana mult) vs the added cold. You get the added bonus of a bit of additional flat cold damage on your Ice Shots too! And if you can afford/corrupt a higher level empower it'll probably be significantly better. I haven't tested this yet--let me know if you try it and it ends up better, in practice :)

You do lose any extra freeze chance from quality Added Cold though, but I bet it's not very significant.