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

Hi, thanks for this build. It provides pretty much everything I need to know to play a cold witch. I actually translated a part of this build to post on another forum to introduce the power of cold witch.

I've been following your build and reached lvl 86. I'm using Tabula Rasa for 6L ice spear. While life leech-spell echo-cold penetration-LMP are pretty much fixed, I'm undecided on the last supporting skill. Added chaos damage provides more DPS than ïncreased critical damage or cold to fire.

My question is in terms of freeze mechanics, does it take all kinds of damages that you deal to calculate the threshold to determine whether you can freeze your enemy? Or does it only calculate your cold damages and disregard your other kind of damages (such as from Herald of Thunder, Cold to Fire, Added Chaos Damage...)? Because clearly if the cold damages is the only type that would be used to calculate whether you can freeze, increased critical damage will be the only choice for me since it increased cold damages the most.

Also, I'm using lvl 2 Cast when Damage Taken, lvl 5 Enduring Cry, lvl 4 Immortal Call and lvl 20 Increased duration. They seem to work fine, especially that they would be activated automatically - comparing to spell totem - summon skeletons which requires me to stop my ice spear and cast a totem that can be killed by the boss even before it summons any skeletons sometimes. And sometimes there would be mobs that emerge suddenly from nowhere before I remember or get the chance to cast a totem.

By the last, do you have any suggestion for armor? I'm running life build although my friend got an CI armor. What would be the best unique armor for life build cold witch? Or I'm better with a rare armor that has life and resistances mods?

To calculate the freeze duration only your cold damage is taken into account.

There is no particular unique chest i would recommend. Cloak of defiance is popular but only makes sense if there is enough mana left to take some damage. When running clarity/a purity aura/HoI/HoT that probably won't be the case.

I would look for a non corrupted 6L (pure ES or ES-eva hybrid because of the socket colours). Normal, magic or rares with bad rolls can be bought for 5-10 exalt. That's an amount one can achieve by grinding for a few months and selling some stuff without relying on a lucky drop of a high value unique. All you need is to roll a high life mod on the chest and use the masters if you still need a resistance mod.

Thanks for the reply. So it makes sense to use Increased Critical Damage or Added Cold Damage even instead of Added Chaos Damage.

Unfortunately when I woke up this morning, my account was robbed by some a*h. All my currencies and my Tabula Rasa were stolen. So this 5-10 exalt plan has to be postponed...

I switched the cry-call to CWDT-Frost Wall-Temporal Chain. This combo works great against faceroll mobs. They will be blocked away after 1 hit and cursed to become really slow. The only one that is still a problem is the one with Proximity Shield when the frost wall became a block for me. But it's worth it overall.

My secondary skill is using Ice Nova-Spell Totem-Increased AOE-Elemental Proliferation. Its damage is incredibly low at this stage. However, its CC effect is so good. Plus the damage against the mobs are acceptable or even better than I was expecting. The skill has an increased freeze duration (as well as ignite, shock). I think it's from the passive tree which make me feel great as I was afraid that Ice Nova can only chill the mobs instead of freeze them.

Using Spell totem to cast it make it a nice bait and doesn't need me to stop my ice spear. As an ice spear spammer, I think Ice Nova works perfectly with it as Nova aimed at the small area control effect. Cold Snap has really high damage and freeze effect. But the 3 traps setting is quite a problem against the high mobility mobs or bosses. It's hard to hit them except several bosses that I'm extremely familiar with (Sry lvl68 Dominus).

Those are legit variations on your secondary skills. Cold snap has its merits when opening boxes but can be tricky versus fast moving foes especially when desync makes it hard to aim correctly.
I used the cwdt-frost wall combo for a while on a HC dual totem char until he ripped due to being trapped by a frost wall in a corner with some foes. On SC i guess it is a good alternative to the usual EC-IC setup.

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Was just asking about potential uses for Freeze mine here, but as it stands even on a CWDT-Freeze Mine setup I just can't see a use for it. The Cold snap - Ele prolif - trap seems to just outclass it in every way.

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LordNumberwang wrote:

[deleted]

Was just asking about potential uses for Freeze mine here, but as it stands even on a CWDT-Freeze Mine setup I just can't see a use for it. The Cold snap - Ele prolif - trap seems to just outclass it in every way.

Before the 1.0.5 patch freeze mine was used to permafreeze bosses by placing it on a white foe in the vincinity of the boss. As freeze mine didn't do damage back then one could keep the trash mobs frozen forever and thereby the boss by elemental proliferation.
Today it has to be used just like any other damage dealing spell but is inferior to trap-cold snap because of the placing mechanism. Can't remember a build that still uses it.

Hey Bada,

I progressed to lvl 87 (standard league, life build - 4150 life, EB,ice spear) and suddenly have a mana problem with having too much mana. Reason for that is I finally bought a 6L chest with 500 ES which boosted my mana just over 5k and my regen to 220. Additionally the chest capped my resistances, which makes purity of elements obsolete --> more mana available

Currently I'm running HoI, HoT, Clarity, tempest shield and AA. Have you got any ideas what to do with all the mana? I was thinking about discipline, since this would boost regen a little, but I dont know how much mana or regen this would provide. AA lvl 20 drains 229 mana/sec, think an additional regen mod on gear is more beneficial than running discipline for these 9 more mana/sec I need. Poe Wiki says AA can be leveled to 28 but I don't know how this can be achieved.

Another possibility would be to run haste. my current dexterity value would allow a lvl 15 haste which is not too bad. Maybe this is the best choice to solve my mana "problem".

Grace might as well be a good choice, but I'm often in a party with a friend who runs it.

Specific purity aura's (+4% extra resi) do not seem very attracting to me. Maybe for tough boss fights, but I'm not sure whether these 4% are really worth it. Gem colours are also problematic, since you would have to recolour your sockets each time you face a different boss, which is too much of a fuzz to me. For trash mobs, this extra resi is not interesting (besides of reflec maps, which I avoid anyways).

Another question concerns survivability. As mentioned often in this thread, I have issues with packs of jumpers/chargers (rhoa, goatmen, these psychedelic frogs, blackguards) and especially with devourers that show up in packs of 8-10 together with a rare one... that's often instant death, no possibility to cast skele totem. Any suggestion how to protect against this? Is CwdT-EC-IC fast enough to proc on the first hit before getting the second and third? How is you experience with Cwdt-frost wall-decoy/temp chains when facing a bunch of devourers?
I feel that reduced stun recovery might be an interesting choice with devourers, without, it seems impossible to lightning warp out of these packs, which should be by far the best defence. Did you consider "practical application" at some point in time, since it is very close to the witch starting point and provides some extra strength/dex, which might save a point somewhere else?
I also thought about block, but as you said, the nodes a hard to reach. Nevertheless I would rather go for deflection than for sanctuary, since you pass blood drinker and get 40% block recovery. You think that block nodes are still worth it?

My last question concerns block chance applied to spells. How does it work? Is it a trade-off to attack block. e.g. 60% spellblock means only 40% attack block left? Does spellblock stack over 100%, giving us extra block chance vs. spells?

Hope you are not annoyed by this long post ^^

P.S.: Another viable unique item that was not mentioined so far is Alphas Howl (+2 aura gems, reduced mana, cannot be frozen). Might especially be good for CI eventhough no ES on it.

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spartakussis wrote:

Hey Bada,

I progressed to lvl 87 (standard league, life build - 4150 life, EB,ice spear) and suddenly have a mana problem with having too much mana. Reason for that is I finally bought a 6L chest with 500 ES which boosted my mana just over 5k and my regen to 220. Additionally the chest capped my resistances, which makes purity of elements obsolete --> more mana available

Currently I'm running HoI, HoT, Clarity, tempest shield and AA. Have you got any ideas what to do with all the mana? I was thinking about discipline, since this would boost regen a little, but I dont know how much mana or regen this would provide. AA lvl 20 drains 229 mana/sec, think an additional regen mod on gear is more beneficial than running discipline for these 9 more mana/sec I need. Poe Wiki says AA can be leveled to 28 but I don't know how this can be achieved.

Another possibility would be to run haste. my current dexterity value would allow a lvl 15 haste which is not too bad. Maybe this is the best choice to solve my mana "problem".

Grace might as well be a good choice, but I'm often in a party with a friend who runs it.

Specific purity aura's (+4% extra resi) do not seem very attracting to me. Maybe for tough boss fights, but I'm not sure whether these 4% are really worth it. Gem colours are also problematic, since you would have to recolour your sockets each time you face a different boss, which is too much of a fuzz to me. For trash mobs, this extra resi is not interesting (besides of reflec maps, which I avoid anyways).

I don't think running discipline is necessary. Some additional manareg on gear should be enough to run a lvl20 AA. (Getting AA to lvl 28 you need to corrupt the gem for lvl21, socket it in a +2 cold gem item and link it with a corrupted lvl 4 empower).

If you can sustain the higher mana costs per second of ice spear due to the cast speed increase (and you have enough dexterity) running haste is a good choice.
I personally prefer running a purity aura. Having 79% resistance instead of 75% means 16% less damage taken from that element. If your gear doesn't allow for socketing all purity auras (or at least fire and lightning) i would run purity of lightning. It helps versus piety and dominus (4 maps); purity of fire is necessary only versus crematorium boss and the magnus exile. Lightning damage also is more dangerous than fire damage because of the shocked ailment so you want to mitigate that more than fire damage.

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spartakussis wrote:

Another question concerns survivability. As mentioned often in this thread, I have issues with packs of jumpers/chargers (rhoa, goatmen, these psychedelic frogs, blackguards) and especially with devourers that show up in packs of 8-10 together with a rare one... that's often instant death, no possibility to cast skele totem. Any suggestion how to protect against this? Is CwdT-EC-IC fast enough to proc on the first hit before getting the second and third? How is you experience with Cwdt-frost wall-decoy/temp chains when facing a bunch of devourers?
I feel that reduced stun recovery might be an interesting choice with devourers, without, it seems impossible to lightning warp out of these packs, which should be by far the best defence. Did you consider "practical application" at some point in time, since it is very close to the witch starting point and provides some extra strength/dex, which might save a point somewhere else?
I also thought about block, but as you said, the nodes a hard to reach. Nevertheless I would rather go for deflection than for sanctuary, since you pass blood drinker and get 40% block recovery. You think that block nodes are still worth it?

You can't really protect against devourers. Frost wall does more harm versus devourers as it may just prevent you from running away but it is no help if you are in the middle of a devourer pack. The EC-IC setup ain't helping that much either as the stun from the first hit often is longer than the IC duration. Every build has its nemesis and for ice spear (and many other builds) it is devourers. The best advice i can give, is to not run the lvl73 dark forest map as devourers are its signature monster.
Dropping a cold snap trap with elemental proliferation might help sometimes (if you carry that along). It sure helps when laying it around boxes. Freezes even spawning devourer packs. But getting stunned in the first place might prevent that.

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spartakussis wrote:

My last question concerns block chance applied to spells. How does it work? Is it a trade-off to attack block. e.g. 60% spellblock means only 40% attack block left? Does spellblock stack over 100%, giving us extra block chance vs. spells?

There is no trade off and you can have more than 100% "of block chance applied to spells" so your spell block exceeds your attack block.
For example:
Rathpith globe (25% block, 55% of block applied to spells) + rainbow strides (25% of block applied to spells) + stone of lazhwar (50% of block applied to spells) + tempest shield (additional 4% block).
Attack block: 29%
Spell block: 29% x (1 + 0.55 + 0.25 + 0.50) = 37%

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spartakussis wrote:

P.S.: Another viable unique item that was not mentioined so far is Alphas Howl (+2 aura gems, reduced mana, cannot be frozen). Might especially be good for CI eventhough no ES on it.

I don't think alphas would be a good choice. The lack of ES outweighs the gain of 2 levels for discipline (and it has a high dexterity requirement). Plus heralds ain't auras so won't be affected.
To not be frozen it is better to use a dream fragment ring or just carry 1-2 of those flasks along:

Hi Bada_Bing,

First of all, I'd like to thank you for your beginner friendly guide! I'm new to PoE (but not to hack'n slashes, I played diablo 2 for more than 10 years) and was looking for a relatively easy character to build. I checked alot of guides about the game mechanics before starting to play and didn't want to "fail" my first character. I began with a ranger but didn't really like it, I was soon trying your cold witch and kept playing that baby since then.

Given that I am not confident enough yet I strictly followed your Life build and the Gear you proposed, it turned out to work pretty well : I finished merciless 2 days ago and started farming 66 to 68 maps decently. I don't play 24/7 but whenever I want to and I am now lvl 69.

Fact is that I was kinda lucky on my drops during my leveling because I droped an early Tabula Rasa that helped me a lot with my main spell's support gems. I was also extremely lucky to see a Shavronne's wrappings when I defeated merciless Piety.

So here I am, lvl 69 on my first char with a nice stack of ex to spend in order to improve my actual gear. That's why I wanted to ask you to have a look to my actual stuff and tell me what I should change in priority (quality on gems ? which ones ? buying another chest ? weapon ? going for spell block ?)



I am also leveling frostbite, ice spear, spell totem and summon skeletons on my weapon switch (used frostbite and skeletons totems to level up).

Anyway, thank you again, I really enjoyed leveling that witch and will continue to farm her for a moment !