[1.3]Cold Witch guide for beginners (Lvl 1 to Atziri)

If you have enough free mana you could add Herald of Thunder. I tried it today and although you won't benefit from the extra damage when shocking the additional lightning damage is a nice boost if you have unreserved mana that you don't need.

Updated the guide a bit.
Added A build summary section with exemplary gem usage and an Atziri section.

Hey Bada, I'm curious about how will you adapt the build to the changes affecting Freezing Pulse, Crit and Block. I'm kinda sad myself :(

"

Saxarona wrote:

Hey Bada, I'm curious about how will you adapt the build to the changes affecting Freezing Pulse, Crit and Block. I'm kinda sad myself :(

I don't know. As available block nodes for the witch went from 28% down to 4% (only nerfed Deflection left) going full glasscannon and dismiss the possibility to go HC or level beyond 90 is the most obvious choice atm.
It will be tough protecting against physical damage with the new patch:
- Block nodes in the witch area are gone/moved away; block on shield gets lowered.
- Stacking armour or evasion ain't much of an option for a build that has to use a lot of blue sockets.
- Immortal call will be tough to max due to the STR requirement and Potency of Will/Exceptional Performance being too far away to pick up to boost IC's duration.
- Grace + Iron Refelexes only is an option if you butcher your standard build and go for a HC build that doesn't mind spending a ton of points just for defence.

So yeah, atm i am a bit clueless as to how to rebuild that char.

Used this build as a first charachter on rampage league. It worked great. The only pain in the ass was all those green gems required. Cold pen, faster projectiles, lmp etc. Was hard to find gear with those gem colours. Other than that i didn't have any problems.

I eventually changed the gems in my chest to glacial cascade instead. Don't need green gems anymore and best of all is not projectile speed reliant.

Great guide and so on. But this time i think i will do a different witch with totems as a first charachter on torment.

As for being tanky. Use cloak of defiance + arctic armour. Not much can hurt you with those items. Even though both have been toned down they should still be more than effective enough.

Edit: I think it's a crime not to include the three power charges in a crit build. Also sniper in a shadow area is probably worth getting too. In addition to the nice 30% damage for 2 points you get 10% projectile speed as well.

Overhauled the guide for 1.3.
Massive changes to the CI tree.

I'm using this build and, so far, it's very fun to play!

Thanks !

Hey bada,

thx for this great guide. I just recently started to play and had a lot of issues with my witch until I found your threat. I almost use the same set up as you describe.

Thus, I do have following questions:

- I have not so good experience with herald of thunder, since it procs very rarely, was there an update of this gem recently that you didnt incorporate into your guide, or could you please explain the mechanics of this gem a little bit? Probably I misunderstood something. Could you plz share another idea what to use on the boots that fits the char?

- Could you please elaborate on the Freezing Pulse mechanics? Does Freezing Pulse physical damage as projectile and cold damage as spell? I didnt understand why you suggest to skill into sniper and assassination. How does the projectile dmg bonus of sniper affect freezing pulse, or are you only after the 10% projectile speed?

- The critical strike chance from Assassination only affects physical attacks, as far as I understood. Therefore this shouldnt boost the freezing pulse damage, unless it makes physical damage as projectile. What is the reason to take assassination?

- In case Freezing pulse does physical damage, how is it calculated and where are the values displayed?

Hope my questions are not too noobish.

Your answer is very much appreciated

Thx

"

spartakussis wrote:

Hey bada,

thx for this great guide. I just recently started to play and had a lot of issues with my witch until I found your threat. I almost use the same set up as you describe.

Thus, I do have following questions:

- I have not so good experience with herald of thunder, since it procs very rarely, was there an update of this gem recently that you didnt incorporate into your guide, or could you please explain the mechanics of this gem a little bit? Probably I misunderstood something. Could you plz share another idea what to use on the boots that fits the char?

- Could you please elaborate on the Freezing Pulse mechanics? Does Freezing Pulse physical damage as projectile and cold damage as spell? I didnt understand why you suggest to skill into sniper and assassination. How does the projectile dmg bonus of sniper affect freezing pulse, or are you only after the 10% projectile speed?

- The critical strike chance from Assassination only affects physical attacks, as far as I understood. Therefore this shouldnt boost the freezing pulse damage, unless it makes physical damage as projectile. What is the reason to take assassination?

- In case Freezing pulse does physical damage, how is it calculated and where are the values displayed?

Hope my questions are not too noobish.

Your answer is very much appreciated

Thx

1) Herald of Thunder has two components: It adds flat lightning damage to your spells (in your case freezing pulse). Now if freezing pulse crits, the lightning part of its damage will apply shock status to that enemy. If you kill that enemy while he is still shocked, then the second component of HoT triggers, the one that hits surrounding mobs (or objects like barrels) with a lightning strike.

For that to happen regularly two things must happen: a) your crit chance with FP must be high enough b) HoT must be leveled up. With a low level only a small flat lightning damage is added to FP that might not be enough to make it past the 300ms barrier (if the lightning damage on crit is to small compared to the life pool of the enemy, then the shock status will not be applied).

Early on i therefore wouldn't use HoT if you are low on mana or don't have enough sockets. Just level it in the backhand. CWDT - enduring cry or a spell totem-summon skels is probably more beneficial while leveling in the early and middle stages. The HoT-curse on hit is a (possible) setup for lategame (lvl80+ i would say when you have some decent gear, your gem levels are 17-18 and the base tree is almost finished)

2) FP does 100% cold damage. No physical damage involved. FP also is a projectile.
Therefore every node that affects projectiles, cold damage and elemental damage applies in the same way to FP. If you have 20% increased projectile damage and 8% increased cold damage and 10% increased elemental damage then the damage of FP is calculated
FP base damage x (100% + %increased proj. + %increased cold + %increased elemental). So it is simply FP x 1.38 in that case.
The speed modfier also is a reason to take sniper.

3) Critical damage modifiers from the tree are neutral to the damage type (whether it is physical or elemental).
There are nodes that say "crit...for spells". They apply to spells only, but the damage type (physical, elemental) doesn't matter. Nodes that say "crit...with[weapon]" only apply to attacks with that weapon (again nomatter whether the damage type is physical, elemental or mixed). Unspecified crit nodes (like Trickery) apply to both spells and attacks (again it doesn't have to be physical)

Maybe you confused that with the leech mods that can show up on gear. They read "leeches xx% physical damage" and only apply to physical attacks (not to spells, not to elemental)

I think you can make 2 optimizations to your trees:

For life, this saves a passive point:



For CI, this gives more dex from tree so you might be able to drop the 30 dex node:



You're not taking sniper in the CI tree?
You're not taking power charges in either?