[1.2.0] Ice Pierce Crit Ranger

In light of the changes to 0.11.2 I came up with this build.

link

Pure evasion(Ondar's Guile + Acro/P.Acro), life based, no crit ranger Ice Pierce.

Stats
244% Evasion Rating
148% max life
3.5% life regen (quite good for a ranger that doesn't venture in the marauder part of the tree)
30% chance to Dodge Attacks
20% chance to Dodge Spells
55% Attack speed
99% Projectile Damage
40% Max Mana
60% Mana Regeneration

Only problem might be not enough life.
The mana and mana regen should be enough to support IS. Worst case I will use Mana leech.

For life regen I could Use Split Arrow/RoA with LoH/LL.

That leave me room to play with IS.
Ice Shot
+WED
+LMP/GMP
+Ele. Prolif.
+Cold Penetration
+Mana Leech (if necessary)


Curse - Projectile Weakness.

My concern is if I will be able to freeze with no crit.
If I can't, than I could use Pierce support gem with Frostbite curse.

By definition, you either need a chance-to-freeze node/gem/whatever or you need to crit, in order to get a freeze.

I see that build for about level 84, are you respeccing your existing ranger? It looks pretty good, just from a quick offhand glance.

I still think you will have trouble with mana, but go ahead and prove me wrong. Personally also I like to have some HP return from attacks at least, but I suspect that's just a quirk of my personality.

"

Kirielis wrote:

By definition, you either need a chance-to-freeze node/gem/whatever or you need to crit, in order to get a freeze.

I see that build for about level 84, are you respeccing your existing ranger? It looks pretty good, just from a quick offhand glance.

I still think you will have trouble with mana, but go ahead and prove me wrong. Personally also I like to have some HP return from attacks at least, but I suspect that's just a quirk of my personality.

After researching a bit, it seems that I really need to crit in order to effectively use Ice Shot.

Kind of sucks that freeze is the only status ailment that can't get increased the proc/freeze chance. Burning has Chance to Ignite Support, Shock stacks has Static Blows passive and Freeze has nothing.

I made another version of the build using crit ~300% (x4 mutiplier).
Here it is.

Life and evasion had to suffer.
I am not satisfied with the life and evasion loss:
-130% evasion
-30% life

only to get that crit...

I believe that a lot of optimization is still needed. I need to get to lvl 70+ to certainly say what is the minimum threshold for life and EV for this to work.

We will see.
I hope GGG will put a "chance to freeze" support gem in game, otherwise Ice Shot will still be an underused skill.

so this is a softcore build but if i wanted to take something like this to hardcore or onslaught would you recommend droping the crit and getting more health and damage or sticking with the crit but going with chain to decrease damage done but add more hits.

also if your having trouble with not enough pierce due to not cursing why dont u drop projectile weakness and weapon ele pick up pierce and cut your losses but also gain some more surviablitly

I would definitely drop the crit for HC. As it happens I'm building a duelist to a similar spec, sans crit, on onslaught. We'll see how that goes.

Now there's a thought. Pity dual totems is on that side of the tree...let me see if I can make this work anyway. New build idea go. =D

You do not need to crit to use IS effectively. The mobs will still be chilled and your survivability is still fantastic. You know that "chance to knockback" that projectile weakness gives? It's huge when you're hitting each monster multiple times per projectile. FYI, 300% from tree is barely enough. If you can't hit 30-40% crit chance, it's not reliable enough to be a crit build.

No, I don't have trouble with not enough pierce. Being able to curse takes me from average DPS to half the party's total DPS. It also increases survivability by a fair amount in two ways: knockback and speed clearing. Kills me on reflect, but that's what crit builds do.

While playing last evening, I've been doing some party Dock runs.
Guess what, there was an Ice Shot Ranger.

She gave me an idea that I didn't thought about before.

The thing is that for ranger is very very difficult to build up crit chance.
All Bow Crit Chance nodes sum up 200% Critical Chance with Bows.
That means exactly 15% real crit chance on a usual bow.

Now what you can do is to use PCoC. If you Crit with 15% Chance to Crit and get a Power Charge(50% Crit Chance), your Crit chance will go to 17.5%.

Finally when you get 4 Power Charges you end up with 25% Crit Chance on a 5% Bow.

Now let's say I manage to get a 6.5% bow, now my final crit chance could go up to 32.5%.

The problem is that Power Charges are not reliable enough so you might get or you might not.

The damage will be strictly related to the damage of the bow.
So I must say that this build will get quite gear dependent.

Otherwise, give up entirely on the freeze idea, and go full survivability (EVA and life) and projectile damage + WED.

I tend to believe that this last option will be much better in the end. No use to try to build up crit so hard, because you won't have more than 25-30% crit anyway, and that's while sacrificing a lot of survivability.

"

so this is a softcore build but if i wanted to take something like this to hardcore or onslaught would you recommend droping the crit and getting more health and damage or sticking with the crit but going with chain to decrease damage done but add more hits.

This is no-crit version I'm successfully running on Onslaught:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/466367


Still probably HP could be little bit better, I'm trying to resolve that, stay tuned for update.

"

Otherwise, give up entirely on the freeze idea, and go full survivability (EVA and life) and projectile damage + WED.

I think we should probably examine the freeze idea by just taking the nodes which add +freeze chance on passive tree for this. And probably also reiterate, integrate quality added cold dmg which is providing the freeze chance.

?

I'm looking at 440 from tree and 200-250 from power charges, giving me up to 690% increased crit chance. Do the math on that, it is 27-40% on a regular bow depending you use power charges or not. With a 6.5 bow...you do the math.

That's more than enough to be called reliable crit.

Quality added cold is an awesome idea, not sure if the numbers are good enough to justify it, but if you're looking for freeze in a non-crit build this is the way to go.

Kiri, what do you use as your main survivability? Evasion? Armor?
If evasion, do you get any of the dodge nodes in the ranger tree?

my evasion with grace and 6 frenzy charges is only about 4600, which does not seem high.