[2.0] Crit GC tanky 40k+ tooltip
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Disclaimer
My first guide! I for w/e reason decided on Glacial Cascade before this league started and wanted to do it self cast + crit, but had no idea what I was doing. Hundreds of regrets later and after testing every decent idea I could come up with, I'm feeling like I'm getting close to my ideal GC build. My gear is relatively expensive atm, but you can make it work on a budget (expect less dps obviously). My current dps is way more than what's needed, I was running with half this dps in 82 maps and atziri with no problems. I'd imagine you could get a budget version of this build working for under 3 ex, probably a very solid end game content viable build for between 20 to 30 ex (mainly 6L coil and taste of hate). And ofc you can throw as much money at it as you can muster if you so choose :P Anyway, onto the guide! 
Pros
Tanky build with 5.5k hp Phase Acro + atziri boots, Lightning Coil, Taste of Hate, Alchemist node + surgeon flasks, 4 endurance charges, fortify, 2-4% insta leech, range + chill/freeze mobs Solid dps 40k+ tooltip (clear speed is pretty good) Easily Atziri Viable (Possible uber viable? haven't tried yet) 80-82 maps are easy with most mods (excluding core map, although probably still doable I haven't tried in quite some time) Ability to run any single map mod except no leech, and most map mods in general Whirling blades movement skill, yum! Solid all around build A really fun build to play! Probably HC viable (never played HC, but I really only die when like my mouse runs out of battery mid map or I'm doing something stupid that nobody with a brain would do on HC, that kind of stuff)
Cons
Damage is pretty variable, crits do massive damage and non-crits are pretty meh Having to use 2 skills all the time (GC + ball light for curse) isn't ideal Immune to curse maps are annoying (but doable) Clear speed is fine, but won't compare to coc cyclone and similar builds (can't wipe out an entire screen with a single attack, aoe is only so big with this:P) Can be expensive? (isn't that the case with every build?) Build really encourages getting higher levels, the last few passive points give a lot of value
Offense
Like many skills, tooltip is pretty inaccurate for GC. The tooltip assumes a single hit from GC, but GC generally hits 2-4 times per wave (I think the average is around 3), so you can basically start off by tripling the tooltip. Then with hypothermia you add 40% dmg on pretty much any mob that isn't immune to chill, then another 50% dmg on any mob you shock, and ass mark adds a ton of dmg.. the list goes on. My standard gem setup is:
Standard gem setup with heralds (no charges/pots)
Same as above but with charges (5 power/3 frenzy)
Same as above plus flasks
 Atziri Setup swaps hypothermia for added cold (20/23 atm) and added light for conc effect (20/23 also):
Atziri setup base
Atziri setup with flasks (generally don't have charges for vaals/trio/atziri so not including an s/s of that)
Defense
 Not shown in the above screenshot is the lightning coil (30% phys dmg taken as lightning), taste of hate + flask nodes means another 39% of phys damage taken as cold, fortify from whirling blades, 4 endurance charges constantly up from warlords mark, or chaos golem. Ele resists with ele flasks go up to 88 resists obv, and with surgeons can have near 100% uptime. Instant leech on top of all this gives this build very good survivability and ability to do some pretty nasty map mods. Oh, and chilling/freezing mobs is a defense by itself :P
My Current Gear
Jewels
Obviously last two jewels are temporary, last jewel was originally to cap resists but it's unnecessary now. I plan to keep it and swap it in for ele weak maps however.
Flasks
I'll often swap the ruby for Atziri's flask for Atziri or other easy maps.
Level 96 Passive tree + Bandits
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwYAAZEC_gSzBbUI9A5cD6sRDxXnFm8WvxhqGjgabB0UIG4i6iL0I_YkiySqJP0mlScvKjgt0jBxMHw26TfUOVI6QjpYOtg74zwFPV9BlkLDRPtFfEV-S3hMLUyzTZJQMFBCUUdSU1M1VUtVxlgHXfJh4mQJZlRqQ2r6bAttGXBScNVzs4Kbg9uExYV7idOKKIw2jX2Nv45kj0aQVZMnl5WXl5f0mjuboZu1n9-hL6IArJius7b6vOq-isBUwGbDOtAf0PXUI9Wm217dqN-E42rkIudU6NbsOO087T_vfO_r8B_wa_em99f60v_e Bandits: Normal: Oak (+40 life) Cruel: All (passive point) or Alira (5% cast speed), I went with all Merciless: I went with Alira (power charge), but really any choice you make is fine. Probably get slightly more dps with the Kraityn (frenzy charge) but I don't always blood rage, but I almost always curse so figured the power charge was a better choice. Endurance charge for more survivability is also a very solid choice. Passive point is probably the least appealing to me, but if it lets you get an extra jewel or something, by all means :P
Gear Choices
Body Armour
Although carcass would seem to be the obvious BIS, 2.0 has made LC almost mandatory if you don't have a bunch of armor (stacking armor with acro isn't going to work out well :P). You can still run carcass or rare armor with life/res (even tabula rasa tbh), but you have to be really careful of the map mods you run and can't play carelessly. Phys dmg is just scary in 2.0 :(
Daggers
Rare daggers can be hard to find, but you're looking for 80% implicit if possible, spell damage, spell crit, spell multi, and flat ele dmg to spells. On a budget you can find a dagger with 60%+ spell dmg, 30%+ multi or t3+ ele dmg to spells and craft on spell crit. Divinarius is crap for this build. Rare wands might be okay, but ability to use whirling blades and the implicit crit is op. Void batteries might be BIS however (I don't have and haven't tested though).
Helmet
Any generic rare helmet with life/resists. Prioritize resists because you're going to be tight with LC + 2 uniques with no resists. BIS would probably be a warband mod helm (redblade 10% of phys dmg taken as fire dmg) along with life/resists. Evasion is probably the best choice, but I wouldn't make it a huge priority.. other stats are definitely the priority.
Gloves
BIS is maligaro glove if you can get enough resists from other pieces. Gives roughly 13% more dmg, which is pretty op. A not too distant 2nd best would be a rare glove with life/resists. I often swap out my gloves on ele weak maps with the second pair.
Boots
BIS probably atziri boots, that spell dodge gives like 30% more survivability against spells and reflect. Also life is nice. The mutewind boots are actually very nice too, I like to swap to them for chilled ground maps and get a pretty nice dps boost at the same time (3-5%). If Atziri boots weren't so op I'd probably use these a lot more. Rare boots with life/resists are also fine if you can't cap resists.
Belt
Pretty standard rare belt with as much life/resists as you can find. Getting some flask mods on it (inc duration or less charges used for ex) would be really nice.
Amulet
All you really need to find is multi + life and an open suffix to craft on crit. Getting spell damage/cast speed/resists/stats too would be amazing, but not required.
Rings
Ideally diamond rings (could also be two-stone or something) with life and resists. Cast speed would be amazing too, but it's very hard to find a ring with enough life/resists that also has cast speed :(
Jewels
GG jewels are crazy efficient right now (each jewel is worth ~3-4 passive points imo), so any that you can pick up with 2 points is an obvious win, and ones that are 3 points away are a good investment if you have gg jewels. Do not even look at jewels that don't have life on them. For my gear.. each 1% cast speed increases my dps by ~110 each 1% spell dmg increases my dps by ~63 each 1% spell multi increases my dps by ~77 each 1% spell crit increases my dps by ~24 Knowing this, basically a perfect jewel would be: 7% life (prefix), 16% spell dmg while dual wielding (prefix) 12% area dmg (suffix), 12% spell dmg (suffix) A close second would be to swap one or both suffix with 10% spell multi for spells or 4% atk + cast speed (slightly less damage) or perhaps some resists if you need them. You should be aiming for at least 5 jewels (2 points away), and more if you are going for the very high levels. It's going to be rare/expensive to find 4 mod jewels, so I usually look for 3 mod jewels with the prefixes I want and one decent suffix and exalt it. Had pretty good luck so far :P
Flasks
Pretty self explanatory. No regen because of vaal pact, you'll want an hp pot. You'll need a mana pot to supplement mana regen on single target or curse immune mobs. Taste of hate is absolutely amazing if you can afford it, but you can get by without. Atziri flask for ~20-25% boost to dmg, and elemental flasks for more resists. Surgeons on everything that can roll them, and have spare pots in your stash to swap out for different map mods. (I.e. don't be a tard and go into a shocking ground map without anti-shock flask). Use common sense.
Links
Glacial Cascade links
I ran life leech from level 1 to 95 and it worked just fine, I bought empower recently and was pleasantly surprised that I now had enough dmg to leech to full very quickly with just the 2% leech on warlords, and can use the empower instead most of the time. I still carry the life leech gem with me for curse immune and other dangerous mods. It's also nice if I'm doing dailies or some other low level area and don't want to spend the time cursing everything (rely on mana pots if not cursing). Anyway, no big deal if you can't get your hands on a level 4 empower, life leech works just fine. Although conc effect is attractive for that dmg boost, I don't use it outside of bosses (use added light 99% of the time). The extra aoe without it allows you to stay farther away from anything dangerous, and has better clear speed when you can hit more things with each cast. Also the shocks really help offset the tooltip loss. For bosses that you can safely get close to and you are unlikely to shock anyway, conc effect is the way to go :P 6L would be: GC + Echo + Faster Casting + Hypothermia/Added cold + Added light/conc effect + life leech/empower. That's bbbbrg, which is kinda annoying to get on LC, the vorci calc is saying most efficient method is using the forge for at least 2 blue, and it'd cost just shy of 1400 chromes on avg. 5L you'd probably want to take out added light dmg. You really want to keep that red socket, the ability to use a life leech gem makes immune to curse maps possible as well as reflect and many other dangerous map mods. The green socket can also be used for mana leech on curse immune maps, which is very helpful against bosses if you don't kill them in a couple seconds. I don't recommend 4L, but I guess you could try it and ditch the green socket (hypothermia/added cold). You don't need all 21/20 gems to make this build work, it just adds a little dps. Working towards at least all q20 gems that are leveled is definitely recommended however.
Curse on hit
Warlords Mark + Ass mark are the only curses you should consider for this build. They beat out everything else by miles (poachers with be a very distant 3rd choice). I really really really wanted to make the CoH setup work with a herald for the convenience, but I eventually abandoned it. Herald of ice was great with just ass mark, but when I started needing warlords and came up to a tanky mob, I'd stop leeching which is really annoying. Then I tried herald of thunder and figured I'd kill trash beforehand, but if I stopped to loot or went in to a boss that doesn't summon adds, the boss wouldn't get cursed, and same issue. I started to bring another spell to swap in for herald of thunder when it wasn't working, and I ended up swapping so much that I eventually ditched this setup completely. Ball lightning is the obvious self cast spell choice, can lob it down a hall and GC behind it, curses everything you hit with GC. The synergy is very obvious when you try it. I will sometimes swap out for arctic breath against bosses for the chilled ground, gives a bunch of dmg with hypothermia on bosses you couldn't otherwise chill. For mobs, arctic breath sucks though. Other skills like arc/shock nova are okay, but arc won't curse a whole pack with one cast and shock nova only hits mobs that are near you. They will work, but ball lightning is clearly superior with a GC build.
Whirling Blades/Fortify
No brainer here. Low level whirling blades + faster atks + fortify is the way to go. This is one of the big reasons to go with daggers, don't skip this.
CWDT setup
This one isn't 100% necessary, I wouldn't judge if you wanted to try some other links. I run level 20 CWDT mainly for the molten shell, it's actually very good damage. I think it's actually very useful when a bunch of mobs are circling you and you can't hit them all at the same time with GC. They hit you enough and they trigger CWDT, if they then hit enough to trigger molten it'll blow and generally wipe out anything in its radius. This actually happens all the time, especially for strongboxes and the like. If your enemies are cursed (they should be), the molten shell is almost guaranteed to insta full heal you. I would HIGHLY recommend taking out molten shell on ele reflect maps however. I like the chaos golem in here too, it's mindless recast whenever you're taking damage. Also helps to distract mobs/bosses w/e is doing enough damage to proc CWDT, and obv gives you a little extra phys damage reduction. The immortal call is decent, 2.5 seconds of immune to phys isn't too shabby. I tried enfeeble in here for a while (in place of chaos golem), but was just getting annoyed that I had to curse ass mark again. I found I liked ass mark much more than enfeeble, but I think this is just personal preference.
Heralds and whatnot
These aren't really needed, just add a bit of dps. Would be perfectly acceptable to run AA + a purity or something of the like. Even running grace would be fine. Just make sure with a 6L you have at least 250 unreserved mana, I've tried less and it was annoying. Could skip enlighten and just run AA + one herald (probably thunder)
Last random gems
Having blood rage in wep makes it okay to use even though I have no life regen. When I'm not attacking mobs I can quickly wep swap to cancel it and leave my life at nearly full. Flame dash to jump over obstacles, and decoy totem is useful in various situations. In the scariest maps you can just summon decoy totem ahead and kill anything that goes for the bait. Takes a while to clear, but probably safest way to do it on aids mods. That's the guide! I'm not planning to add in too much leveling info other than freezing pulse or ice nova have very similar trees and there is a lot of info about leveling with those skills elsewhere. I'll probably add more info later ;P Last edited by Aderp#6515 on Sep 8, 2015, 11:26:46 PM
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Really loving the build! Nice work
I'm a bit poor to properly gear mine, defensively, but my dps is awesome! Just gonna save up and try to 5 or 6 link my LC, get some nicer resist rings and then everything will be set. Thanks for the awesome build! Edit: also, would you ever consider a more defensive version of the build? Possibly adding Saffel's Frame or Rathpith Globe for extra spell block? Last edited by Aramatheis#3552 on Sep 7, 2015, 2:32:40 AM
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" Haha thanks! I don't see why a more defensive version of this build wouldn't work (plenty of dps to spare), but I'm not sure going for block would be the best avenue. It would be fighting against acrobatics (30% less chance to block) and you'd lose a ton of damage (taking off either dagger essentially halves my damage, and there is no way to come close with a shield like rathpith). My first thought would be to sacrifice a bit of damage on tree for more life nodes, but I'd need to play with the tree a bit to see how that'd work. |
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Hahahah you're totally right, I was mixing up spell block and the spell dodge from Atziri's step.
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Man Your Dagger is so incredible i can find any one like that on poe.trade. Can i use daggers that have less Global Crit chance and use jewel instead.
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" Yup, you can get by with less crit. You don't even need to compensate with jewels actually, with an 80% implicit and 60%+ spell dmg crafted on you're only losing like 2% total crit (would drop me from 43% base to around 41% base). Not a huge deal. My old daggers were around 65% spell dmg and 35% multi, and I crafted on spell crit (implicits were 60% and 80%). Getting the higher crit and ele dmg to spells is nice, but not needed. |
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I'm still having so much fun with this build!
Don't know if you recall, but I'm the guy who posted on r/pathofexile about that crit spell dagger craft a few days back. I made that specifically for this build, and it's awesome! I actually managed to craft another similar dagger (albeit a bit less powerful) and it's just a ton of fun. My tooltip dps is still a fair bit lower than yours (I'm at ~11.5K) but my character is only lvl 71 at the moment. Here are my two daggers, for comparison (they are weaker in the spell dmg department, I'm waiting to have enough currency to craft them carefully): Anyways, thanks again for the build! Always wanted to play something like this, never had the opportunity |
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Haha I do remember, I'm a little jelly XD Glad you like the build! I think that 11k dps is more than sufficient at 71 and with some more levels and gear you should easily get to around 20k which is sufficient for most end game content (that's where I was at when I started doing 80+ maps), and any more dps than that is just icing on the cake ;P Happy mapping!
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" You kidding? Your Loath Scratch dagger is a beast! " That's good to hear. I knew my damage was nice but I don't have many spell nodes atm (since I'm only lvl 71). My question is, if you had a +1 curse ring or amulet and could run a third curse, which would you use? Frostbite for the damage? Enfeeble for physical damage mitigation or Vulnerability for overall damage increase? I'm torn between Enfeeble and Frostbite. I'd love the damage boost, but Enfeeble is just too practical to ignore. Also, what are you thoughts on using Ice Bite rather than Blood Rage? Last edited by Aramatheis#3552 on Sep 11, 2015, 8:48:35 PM
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" My third curse would actually be poacher's mark most likely. Mainly for the frenzy charges, but the flask charges would be really nice too. Second choice would probably be enfeeble, curses like frostbite/vuln/ele weak don't scale well with GC since it is part phys and part cold, and the curses only effect 1/3 or 2/3 of GC's dmg. Blood rage definitely works for sustaining frenzy charges, but the degen is pretty annoying on a no life regen char (hence still open to other methods to generate frenzy charges). I did experiment with frost bite with my heralds, but didn't have much luck with it. I tried frostbite linked to both heralds, tried HoI + culling + frostbite, and the results were pretty much the same.. I'd get a random 1-2 frenzy charges occasionally, but definitely not 100% uptime. Even when I was testing in docks, it was a real chore trying to go fast enough to keep the frenzy charges up. It's apparently not super common for my heralds to get the kill, so I've stuck with blood rage for now. If you figure out some links that make this work.. lemee know! |
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