[1.0.1] HeavyUnit's 21k Single Target CI FP Crit Build!

whats your dps?

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forever0zero wrote:

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Stakhanov wrote:

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forever0zero wrote:

why get crit strike chance on the passive tree? I thought spells use crit strike chance on spells? and crit strike chance only affects attacks

I thought that when I first started the game too.

Turns out it works this way :

"Critical strike chance" applies to everything (i.e : Bloodthirst)
"Critical strike chance with spells" applies to spells only (i.e : Doom Cast)
"Critical strike chance with <type of weapon>" applies to the base crit chance of said weapon (i.e : From the shadows)
"Critical strike chance while holding <type of weapon>" applies to everything as long as you wield a weapon that belongs to said "type" (see "Serpent Stance")

so there is no difference between global crit strike chance and crit strike chance?

So Stakhanov kind of covered it in his post, but essentially there are 3 affixes that affect critical strike chance. For attacks base critical strike chance is calculated off your weapon. For spells base critical strike chance is shown on the tooltip for each spell. When you mouse over a gem, it will tell you if it is a spell or attack and what the crit chance is if it is a spell.

Global critical strike chance (that can be rolled on some weapons and all jewelry) affects both spells and attacks. These are explicitly stated as such - "80% Increased Global Critical Strike Chance". Crit nodes that do not mention spells in the tree belong to this group.

Increase critical strike chance for spells increases only crit chance for spells. Pretty obvious right? There are a handful of nodes in the tree that use this wording, and wands / ES witch shields can have a maximum roll of 109% spell crit increase.

Lastly, there can be a local crit chance roll on weapons only that affects the implicit crit strike chance of attacks made with that weapon. So if you have a dagger with base 6% crit chance, and a local crit increase roll of +30%, then your attack now has a base 8% crit strike chance.

Your base crit chance is what gets multiplied with all global crit strike chance to determine overall crit chance of the spell/attack you are using. For example, freeze pulse has a 6% implicit crit strike chance. In the tree and on my gear, I have +692% Increased Critical Strike Chance. The math looks like this:

(base crit chance of FP) 6 * 692% = 47.5% overall crit strike chance

Let's assume for a second that FP was an attack instead of spell (it's most certainly NOT, I just want to illustrate how local crit works) and had a local crit mod of +30%, now base crit chance is 8% instead of 6. So the calculation looks like this:

(base crit chance of FP + local roll) 8 * 692% = 63.36% overall crit strike chance

You can see that a higher base crit chance makes a huge difference in overall crit chance giving weapons and attacks a higher base to multiply from. The tradeoff is spell crit is much higher on gear and most of the crit nodes are in the witch / shadow trees.

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danisonxtc wrote:

whats your dps?

I know it's crazy, but if you read the guide, it tells you.

This is a fabulous guide! Can't wait to try it out tonight. Thanks for your time and effort heavyunit <3

can u post a screenshot of your deeps?

Updated slightly for patch 1.0.1.

This is really a great guide, thank you very much.

I am currently playing a Freeze Pulse Witch, at the moment it is life based, since I don't have any good ES gear available.
I am currently level 72 and my tool tip DPS is 2.100, which I feel is kind of low. However I am unsure, what gear I should be looking for to update my DPS (without sacrificing to much survivability).
This is my current gear:



I would really appreciate any hints. My passive skill tree (as I said, I am currently playing life based) is:




Thanks a lot!

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Peon wrote:

This is really a great guide, thank you very much.

I am currently playing a Freeze Pulse Witch, at the moment it is life based, since I don't have any good ES gear available.
I am currently level 72 and my tool tip DPS is 2.100, which I feel is kind of low. However I am unsure, what gear I should be looking for to update my DPS (without sacrificing to much survivability).
This is my current gear:

I would really appreciate any hints. My passive skill tree (as I said, I am currently playing life based) is:

Thanks a lot!

Your tree looks good. You need the life nodes until you can make the switch to CI. Your DPS is suffering for a few reasons however:

1. Your gems are not fully leveled and are not 20% quality. FP is definitely the correct gem to get to 20/20 first as it's your main skill. But quality on faster casting and LMP both add cast speed which you are missing, in addition to cast speed on your wand or jewelry.

2. Missing crit chance. I don't feel like doing the math on your tree so far, but you are missing intense zeal and bloodthirst clusters which account for almost 10% chance to crit on their own. That's a ton of damage. You are making up for it with the gem, but once you grab a few more levels and take those clusters, you should switch it out for an increased critical damage gem.

Otherwise man, your gear looks pretty solid. I'm not sure what your life pool is at, but the damage and res mods on all your gear are real solid. The first piece I would probably get is a chest. Just go ahead and knock it out as it will likely be your most expensive piece at first. Then start slowly upgrading other pieces one at a time. If you want to make the jump to CI sooner, then focus on your helm, gloves, and shield keeping in mind the benchmarks I discussed in the guide. I think this is the best option because your DPS will naturally increase as you take the crit passives and level your gems more. It just takes a long time, I know, but it gets there.

I ran low level maps (66-69) for a long time on life with gear not much better than yours. You just have to be more careful about what mods you run. Of course, 66 maps are mostly worthless now, but those area levels should be feasible for you to run. Don't be afraid to hop in a public lunaris or sceptre party either. Plenty of people run free 67 maps as well if you want a change of scenery. Keep me updated man, it looks real good so far!

Thanks for answering, really appreciate it!

My life pool is around 3300 health. Yesterday I killed Piety and it went quite well, I also leveled up and used the three skill points to get some crit nodes, which boosted my DPS quite a bit.

I think I'll try some maps the next couple of days, Dominus might have to wait a little longer (never killed him on merciless, but the only time I died so far was facing him on Cruel (was a little bit unprepared for the fight...)).

I'll keep you updated how it goes!

Hi,

I've been following this other FP CI guide: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/564774
and would like to transition using your guide. Nothing wrong with that guide but was hoping I could get rid of power charges and mana problems. I'm supposed to stack power charges with ice spear but I feel like it's not viable in a group and don't like the play style.

Here's my current build
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMAAv4EBwdjES8RUBVQFdcXLxdUGmwdFB8CIoEnqSlPLJwsvy0fNsU62DvhQsNEq0bXRwZMs03YUDBVrlXWVmNXK13GXfJfKl9qYG1jQ2TnbRlwUnDVc1N-WX_GgKSBSYFvgpuFfYauiEKIa4w2jHaOPI5kj0aPpo_6mZqdgJ2unjyeoaKjpwinK6-btQS297b6u9bAUcBUwcXB88Lsw23Xhtgk2t3bXtvn3fPfhOL344TkIuaB62Pr5OwY7DjyHfLh96b60g==


-I'd like to build towards group play is Sovereignty and or Influence worth getting and is it possible to run three auras (Discipline, Clarity, Haste) with mediocre gear?
- My goal is to improve DPS a bit since with my current build FP has sub 2k dps and I feel worthless in a group. I know I won't be the top dps in any group but would like to have some impact at least.
- I assume mana leech covers all mana needs and I won't need any mana regeneration nodes. Vague follow up question: In general how viable is it to stack mana regeneration on gear?

I'm basically asking validation for this transition. Will I see even a slight change in DPS, get rid of mana problems and improve group play.

EDIT: Already respecced. Thanks to Markwerf for freezing pulse dps calculations below. Made my own changes to skill tree and everything worked great.


Here's my current gear, already changed the gems for FP. Res capped and 5k ES with discipline, need to improve my chest.

Ok i've been running some numbers to get some better understanding how the best freezing pulse damage is done.
The formula for spell DPS can be written as:

TotalDPS = DPSofspell x BonusMultiplier x CriticalMultiplier x CastingMultiplier x Other

BonusMultiplier = 1 + BonusDamage/100
CriticalMultiplier = 1 + SpellCrit * (1 + IncCritChance) * (1.5 * IncCritDmgMultiplier - 1)
CastingMultiplier = 1 + CastingSpeedBonus

DPSofspell is the damage of the spell, freezing pulse here. For example level 18 freezing pulse has 300 naked dps.
BonusMultiplier is the bonus damage from any spell, elemental, projectile and cold bonusses you have from gear, nodes and gems. These all work additive!
CriticalMultiplier is the bonus damage you get due to critical hits. This depends on the base critical chance for the spell, how much your crit chance increases and your critical damage multiplier. Freezing pulse has 6% base critical chance for example.
CastingMultiplier is just the increase in casting speed from any gear,passives or gems. Once again these work additive.
Other is any bonus damage that sources that say "More" or "Less" instead of the usual "Increased" or "Reduced". "More" and "Less" work multiplicative while the rest is additive. Lesser multiple projectiles is a good example for this distinction, it gives Increased Projectile damage but Less Projectile damage too, these don't just cancel out.


Understanding a little bit how it works is good to understand the diminishing returns of speccing too heavily in to one aspect. Since stacking more of a multiplier works just additive it's best to spread your bonusses more.

For example I calculated the freezing pulse DPS for what Peon posted of his on the 15th.
Freezing pulse lvl 17 so DPSofSpell = 266.15
BonusMultiplier = 4.1 (all the cold/ele/spell/projectile bonusses from gear/gems/passives)
CriticalMultiplier = 1.89 (Critchance of 33.8%, CritDmg 3.65)
CastingMultiplier = 1.65 (From passives and Faster casting gem)
Other = 0.7 (Lesser Multiple Projectiles)

Resulting in:
TotalDPS = 266.15 * 4.1 * 1.89 * 1.65 * 0.7 = 2386

This is a bit off from what he posted of 2100 so I might have hade made a small erro, the gear is slightly different or something like that.
I use a simple excel sheet to calculate this and then also calculate by what factor DPS would increase if you invest x more in Crit multiplier, Crit chance, Spell/ele/cold/proj dmg (all the same) or Casting speed, since those are basically the choices you have to make with regards to gems,gear and passives for DPS.
In Peons case going for Critical Multiplier is by far the most effective now, he has few of this and adding 10 there (a typical Critical Multiplier passive node) adds 2.67% dps while 15 Critical hit chance (a typical Crit chance node) only adds 1.26% dps. Casting speed is not doing much either anymore with only 1.81% dps increase per 3 casting speed (typical casting passive node).

There are a couple things I haven't mentioned yet which are also important in the discussion.
You want to freeze as much as possible, armour affects your damage and mana consumption is also a big deal. Giving numbers to these is hard as I don't know them exactly but some general things can be said.
Freezing happens on crits but the length depends on the damage. Freeze duration:
Length of freeze = DamageDone/LifeofMob * 10
For example if a hit deals 20% of the mobs damage you freeze for 2s. The max freeze is 3.3s but more importantly the minimal freeze is 0.3s equivalent to dealing 3% of the mobs health in damage. In general to freeze more crit damage multiplier is the most effective as that deals more damage when you crit, exactly what you want for freezing. Between the others it's hard to say since you usually also have Frostbite going on with a separate freeze trigger which benefits faster casting more.
Armour affects smaller attacks proportionally more than big attacks. This basically means doing small powerful attacks is better than fast low damage attacks, casting speed bonusses are worse because of this.
Finally mana consumption is irrelevant between the options except fasting casting once again where faster casting usually means you have to compensate with getting more mana somehow.
There are also some other things which are very hard to quantify: higher crits may be riskier against reflect damage, do you want consistent freezing on smaller mobs (crit chance) or also the chance to freeze bosses/high hp mobs (crit damage), how much is overkill an issue etc. etc. I'll ignore these though as I think most are not that relevant compared to just maxing dps and freezing and minimizing mana usage.

So some general trends:
- The bonusses are multipliers so spread them out. What the best choices for passives, gear and gems are is not the same everywhere (i guess this is a standard rule for RPG's)
- Faster casting is often not that good. The dps bonus is nice but drops quickly if you get too much in it. It also just raises mana consumption quite a bit so you have to compensate with passives or even get a mana leech gem. Plus it's worse because how armour and freezing benefit fewer big attacks over more small attacks. I'd get very few in this and only get some if you can spare the mana and have few.
- Spell, Elemental, Cold and Projectile bonusses are not so great either. You tend to get quite a bit of this from the 'must have' passives plus your weapon and shield. This usually means average passive nodes for these like the nodes left of Mental acquity are relatively bad. Even many cold nodes are mediocre as pure cold witch, 6% additive effect when you already have quite a bit anyway often just buffs dps only by ~1.5%
- Remains that critical chance and critical damage are the best to maximize after taking the 'must have' passives basically. Critical damage is deceptively good later on because it buffs dps nicely and works very well with the freezing and armour mechanics. Especially if you use ice spear much this just get's really good. The throatseeker passive is underrated for example, especially as critical strike multiplier exists hardly in the passives (though do not rush it).
- Taking all that into account I think this is the framework you want for a cold based life witch:

From there you can then choose between casting speed, extra critical strike chance, spell bonusses or HP bonusses depending on your gear and needs. 'Elementalist' is a trap I think, the cold nodes there are bad and 10% elemental damage and 10 intelligence is mediocre, only suggested if you go for the power charge nodes.

Let's discuss a few gems for Freezing Pulse in general:
Faster casting. This grants 38% increased casting speed at lvl 18 which how casting speed multipliers work is also the cap for it. If you have other casting speed bonusses this only goes down. Casting speed however also has an effect on mana consumption. The gem already has a mana cost multiplier of 120% but 38% faster casting also increases mana consumption by at most 38% (same increase in mana consumption as in dps). So best case scenario for this gem is when you have no other casting speed bonusses where it gives 38% increased casting speed but 1.2 * 1.38 = 1.65 mana cost multiplier (assuming lvl 18 still). This is not so great generally especially as I think you should avoid having to use mana leech and there are better alternatives anyway. Just grab a few casting speed passives if you happen to have none on gear and can afford it manawise.

Cold penetration Also assuming level 18 this penetrates 33% cold resistance. How much that improves dps depends on the cold resistance of the mob, if they have 0 it improves it by 33% but by more or less depending on if they more or less resistances. Frostbite is a good reason they have less then 0 often but there are also many mobs with elemental or frost resistance which I think sort of evens out with the frostbite effect. In general for a 1.5 mana multiplier you get pretty good damage increase especially as it works best against the toughest opponents (In PvP this is by far the best gem it seems).

Increased critical strikes and Increased Critical damage These are both a bit underrated. They work fairly good for relatively low manacost multipliers. I would almost always run one of these to balance out Critical damage and Critical strike chance taking the one you lack on gear.

Increased projectile speed It's good on freezing pulse when you lack quality but the projectile damage buff is terrible. Great reason to get a quality FP gem and replace this with something better

Added chaos damage This is terrible, chaos damage doesn't benefit from elemental bonusses and the bonus damage is not even that good for a fairly hefty cost.

Added lightning damage Hard to judge since I don't know how often it procs shock. I feel it rarely does making it a bit mediocre though still better than added chaos damage probably.

Mana leech Feels like a wasted slot to me on a 5 link since with just taking critical strike/dmg bonusses instead of casting bonusses and clarity you should be fine without it. On a 6 link it might be different as a 6th non mana leech gem might be hard to run so you could run 6 with mana leech and then take more casting speed bonusses or mana intensive gems.


Overall setup for FP as 5 link i'd go with:
FP (20 quality), LMP, Cold penetration, Life leech, Increased critical strikes/damage (depending on what you have).

Anyway that's all, this turned out to be a rather long reply to Peon's tricky question but it's generally useful I hope.
For peon specifically i'd refund the passives left of mental acquity (5) and get Throatseeker and replace the faster casting gem with Cold penetration if he has chromatics to roll a second green slot. Otherwise just increased critical damage. The chaos damage on icespear could be replaced too I feel.