[2.0] Arctic Breath Totem

Flame suit on - first build I've done/posted, openly welcoming critiques.

This isn't a cheap build, but it's pretty fun watching the screen filled with ice patches and a majority of the mobs frozen until death.

Gear


The gear isn't exactly cheap. I use a 6L Sire of Shards to blanket the screen in a nova of projectiles leaving a trail of chilled ground and larger patches when it strikes. Voll's Protector is utilized for the "Gain A Power Charge For Each Enemy You Hit With A Critical Strike", although a cheaper option (and one I may try) is to just link Ice Spear with Power Charge On Critical Hit. Even though it's not a 100% chance to gain a charge like Voll's, you should still not have any issue maintaining a full stack of charges. Victario's Acuity is not needed, although you do gain 25% Increased Projectile Damage and Dex/Int/Lightning Resistance.

Gems


Skill Tree


Fairly standard totem tree for the most part. Branched out towards the top with all of the Cold nodes. The build favors Armor with a decent Life pool.

General idea is a Critical Strike based Arctic Breath totem. Utilizing Ice Spear to generate 5 power charges that last 15 seconds. With full charges I have a 32.5% Critical Strike Chance coupled with 258% Critical Strike Multiplier. Fully charged tooltip DPS is almost 11k, however that is with a level 9 Hypothermia. Working on getting that leveled up :) Frostbite is the curse of choice as it lowers enemy resistance by 44% at L20 along with a 14% chance of being frozen by cold damage. I run with a Q20 version which adds 28% increased duration on freezes. Ice Golem is basically there for the 30% Increased Critical Strike Chance.

Gameplay Video


Just a quick couple minutes on a level 73 map. You can see it devastates packs of monsters. Ideally you wouldn't be face tanking everything like I was, and I moved my keybinds around a bit so I missed some curses but you get the idea. You also get to see one of the huge cons of the build, environmental objects block the projectiles. Can't have everything.

- Victario is a bad choice. Limited stats both offensively and defensively. No spell damage, crit and crit multi, no life. 25% increase projectile damage is not that big when you consider how much increase projectile damage SoS already gave.

- Your choice of gems is questionable. Faster Projectile sure gives a bit of damage and cast speed (with quality), but it falls short compare to Cold Pen. The benefit of projectiles going faster and further is neglectable as Artic Breath already has good range (unlike using something like Flame Totem or Incinerate Spell Totem). Added Chaos also outperform Added Lightning by a long shot.

- You have no point in totem crit cluster, so you are missing out lots of damage.