The Ailment Elementalist (Freezer / Shocker / Double Curser)

I'm currently leveling to execute this plan:



The goal is to have the right mix of damage, crit and speed to maximize the application of chilled/freezed/shocked ailments, while retaining decent survavibility. It tries to do a little more than your average crit build.

** Build features **

1. 25% shock on hit + 5% freeze on hit + freeze is followed by chill. Lengthened freeze and shock.

2. Double curses (probably Conductivity or Frostbite + Elemental Weakness). Combined with the lenghtened ailments on hit above, this defines the build as what I call the Ailment Elementalist. Chill them, freeze them, shock them, keep them that way. Of course the net ailment rate is much higher thanks to crits.

3. One totem casting Arc to apply shock.

4. Main attacks are Freezing Pulse, Ice Spear, Arctic Breath, Lightning Warp, Ice Nova or Shock Nova (I will have to test with end-game support gem combos).

5. Clarity aura.

6. Strong AOE (area + damage) for Artic Breath, novas, and curses.

7. A little bit of Str and Dex to support green/red gems regardless of gear, as well as a bit of resists including vs. chaos.


** Tradeoffs and aiming for something easy as first OB character **

What this leaves aside: double totems, summoning, any fire enhancement since ignite is less attractive, power charges since they're hard to maintain, any specific type of weapon so you can use anything that drops, or HC levels of survival.

Weapon-specific builds are best pursued on follow-up characters depending on what the first one collected, so I made this build as something viable for my first open beta character (I had a lvl 73 ranger and lvl 54 marauder last year) and which will hopefully remain a good farming and group support toon thanks to its crowd control/clearing abilities.

Edited to correct a mistake (attack speed does not work on spells) and add more chaos resist.

Anyone have feedback on this?
Id like to try this sort of build but I'm kind of clueless :P

@OP: how far have you come with the playthrough on this build?
Thanks for taking the effort to write stuff out :)

I stopped playing at lvl 55 somewhere in act 2 merciless. not because of this build in particular (which worked ok), but because I still find PoE's gameplay pretty rough. I want to like the game much more than I actually like it because being killed by desyncs means loss of XP means big waste of time / game too zoomed in means aiming at mobs off the edge of the screen / group play is a spamfest mixed with retarded looting.

PoE in its present state is a curious mix of a lot of really brilliant ideas with many deal-breaking, frustrating issues undermining the core concepts. I don't have the time to put up with its idio(tic)syncrasies.

I hope you eventually come back! Maybe you can find a few friends who would like to play with you. I have a small group that I play with, we have very minor loot issues, nobody likes pubs haha :p.

I think this build looks cool, I've been thinking of making an elementalist build. If I do, it won't be much like this one though.

i will not comment on the viability of the build itself.

but for any status alignment builds, especially with double curse, you need to have temporal chains on at all times for the extended alignment duration debuff.