[3.25] Ice Dancing Queen - Icestorm/Cyclone/CI - Viable For Everything

I'm just wondering. Why is the build not using Hydrosphere over Punishment?

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MrPindakaas wrote:

I'm just wondering. Why is the build not using Hydrosphere over Punishment?

Hydrosphere is not a curse and would net be triggered by Hextouch.

But it could be in the same 5link. Forfeit punishment, free up an enchant from neck and get Drenched debuff on enemies as well as Shock for free?

The Cast when damage taken will flop the ball over to the enemy

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Joeristoef wrote:

Hey all. I'm progressing pretty well through this build and loving it once again. (4th time i've been playing whispering ice). I seem to have some trouble getting through rares in maps sometimes. Am I missing something obvious on my character or do I just have to get more levels?

https://pobb.in/-jbkyvMWDKeE

Get a better helmet. 50+ int and ideally the %int roll on it if you can afford it. Make sure you get a Sunfire Circlet with the right itemlevel (75-79) if you want to craft it yourself. You can also look into Kalandra rings. The downsides can be horrendeous and they can be really expensive. However, if you are lucky and find the right combinations of bad mods on them that don't affect you much then you can buy them pretty cheap. You can probably buy one for 20-50 chaos depending on the bad mods and what you want to put up with in terms of negative mods. Otherwise you're looking at a price between 100 chaos and 1 div or more for a ring.

Bad mods to avoid: lose life per enemy killed and - %damage taken recouped as life, those will kill you.

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MrPindakaas wrote:

But it could be in the same 5link. Forfeit punishment, free up an enchant from neck and get Drenched debuff on enemies as well as Shock for free?

The Cast when damage taken will flop the ball over to the enemy

First of all. If you really really want to use it, nothing prevents you from 6linking the chest so you can use both Punishment AND Hydrosphere.

However I fail to see how using it would be beneficial. And please, correct me if I am wrong.

Drenched is just Cold and Lightning Exposure. We already apply Cold Exposure and we don't do lightning damage to make Lightning Exposure useful.

To make Hydrosphere shock enemies, you need to hit it with a skill that shocks it to make it do lighting damage. What skill exactly would you be using to shock it? And would the damage of Hydrosphere be high enough to shock enemies? You can hit Hydrosphere only once every second, so you would need to make Icestorm shock it or it would be only frozen all the time? If you get Icestorm to shock, why would you need Hydrosphere when Icestorm is already shocking enemies?

Also, don’t underestimate the usefulness of Punishment’s increased damage taken modifier. It’s multiplicative with all of the build’s other damage scaling and very noticeable once you’re bossing hard content.

Got them after two tries, I used fracturing orb on two T1 prefixes, T1 one suffix of the body armor (benchcrafted a suffix so it could have 4 mods, and also to reserve a spot for 6% attributes) hoping it would land on the evasion and ES as a base then turned out I got lucky with two yolo exalt slams. Now I need to craft two res on Warlock Gloves.

I've seen some players benchcraft "Minimum Endurance Charges" on the ring alongside the aspect of the spider to probably get better results. I didn't get the "good" prefix (Accuracy, Max Life, Elemental Damage, etc.) but a T7 max ES wouldn't hurt as I was looking for either all ele res or attributes when essencing, not to mention the annulment step to get rid of the unwanted affixes which was another layer of RNG to get through.

Holding alt while hovering on the ring it says "70% Increased" on both attributes and int suffixes, yet it doesn't get as high as above 180 int or the one I bricked earlier. Int was 58 (51-58) and Attri was 14 (13-16) before 20% quality?

Thoughts on crafting Cogwork ring instead which's 15 times cheaper than the Helical?

Also, one more question. If I have level 4 Enlighten, I can put Discipline back along with the spider, clarity, purity of ele, and zealotry?

EDIT: Redid this post to fix my math.

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I've seen some players benchcraft "Minimum Endurance Charges" on the ring alongside the aspect of the spider to probably get better results.

Maybe? The odds of successfully reflecting the good mods on a ring depends on how likely it is that the mist splits the mods into groups of size K and N-K for a ring with N total mods. We can make a table for various N:

For N=3 total mods on the ring (2 good affixes, one sacrificial):
K=0: 100%
K=1: 33%

For N=4 (2 good affixes, 2 sacrifices):
K=0: 100%
K=1: 50%
K=2: 33%

For N=5 (2 good affixes, 3 sacrifices):
K=0: 100%
K=1: 60%
K=2: 40%

Assuming independence, the odds of success are 50% regardless of how many sacrificial mods you add to the ring. There is anecdotal evidence that the ring is biased towards K=N/2 and away from K=0 (moreso than you would get if each mod gets rolled independently). As such you may be right that your odds are better with 5 mods than 4 on the ring, but it really depends on the weighting (and I wouldn't bother adding a Veiled Orb crafting step just to have five mods).

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Thoughts on crafting Cogwork ring instead which's 15 times cheaper than the Helical?

I mean, the build easily clears all content with a mirrored Two-stone Ring you can buy for chaos orbs.

The Helical Ring craft is for min-maxing and bragging rights. At which point you might as well not cheap out on the base.

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Drenched is just Cold and Lightning Exposure. We already apply Cold Exposure and we don't do lightning damage to make Lightning Exposure useful.

I did not mean to come across cocky or mean. How do we apply exposure with the Cast while Casting setup? You are 100% right on all the other facts you stated, you can shock when you have lightning damage on hit for cyclone through Hydrosphere but it's VERY mediocre.

I'm still learning the deeper inner workings so any real conversation about this is going to be worth it for everybody reading this. Let's say you have gotten so far in this build nad have the Ambush and ASsassinate forbidden flesh setup. You will have culling strike for Low Life enemies. Punishment only does the INCREASED damage to Low Life. Low Life for enemies starts counting from <50%HP. So I guess Punishment is 100% better but I'm exploring ways how to apply exposure through the CwC setup over the Single Target setup that doesn't run the Awakened Cold Penetration support gem.

Maybe I'm WAAAAAY overthinking this and wrong but please if somebody could explain it a bit better; please do. Everything I can learn to improve my gameplay for this build, the better. BEcause I LOVE the build.