Ice Ice Baby! - Cold Snap (HC Viable)

Still swinging my Geoffrey's, while leeaching of my brother's flame totem build, but I'm very close to the point where I can make the transition from leveling turd to Elsa.

So, I've been looking into gear and figured the best way to get the B-B-B-G is to get it on gloves. Gloves tend to not contribute that much to your armour pool relatively, so it's not that big a deal to get poorer armour stats on them (getting B-B-B-G on a good armour item is hell). Also, there isn't a specific unique I'm eyeballing for gloves.

That said, there seems to be a fair amount of B-B-B-G Aurseize's available, which might work quite well, and today I found this:



It has total crap stats and isn't worth anything really, but the guaranteed Temporal Chains on common hit could be something. With both Windscream and WoD, it might be a handy third curse, being also ridiculously easy to distribute.

What'd you think?

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CantripN wrote:

It's such a shame MoM is in the middle of nowhere. I'd use a 6L Thousand Ribbons if I could, or a Carcass Jack. As is, not dying is preferable.

Yes, MoM's location in the passives tree is a complete joke. I got it to work for my RoA Crit. Bow Witch, but that's an odd one of course.

Come to think of it, there are a lot of very strong mana nodes in or close to the Ranger area. I suspect the devs intended Rangers to be a much more mana reliant class than they usually tend to be in practise.

Those gloves can work just fine for this build in general. However, I'd get Geofri's Crest or some other +1 Gems 4L if you can't get a 5L just yet.

That said, a 5L is quite cheap, even if you can't afford a 5L CoD just yet.

I have a few questions. I'd actually built a coldsnap witch in the past and these are some of the issues I have with it. How did you resolve these?

1. Low damage. Compared with even the FP variant on the same skilltree (and the tree was optimised for coldsnap!) it was terrible. Thoughts on that?

2. Mana management. I couldn't sustain coldsnap on regen at all, needed mana leech linked to cast it continuously. Ish. This is with about 1.2k mana after Voll's. Of course, it was before the aura nodes, but do those make such a huge difference to clarity?

3. Cast speed. Blech. Again compared with FP, which is more reliable freeze in a larger area. This is post FP nerf too. How the hell did you get 2.3cps?

Been a while, not sure I have any more backups for the build/gear if you wanted to see it, but I tried so hard to make it work and it didn't.

1 - FP actually does less damage than Cold Snap for me. But even if it did a bit more (and it easily can at the same level), this build isn't about the DPS - you have enough to get by. I can see you were using a Voll's, so were crit build, so obviously FP was stronger for you, and Cold Snap weaker.
2 - Since you were using the Voll's, your mana was shit, and so was mana regen, obviously. Not to mention, all those Crit Chance / Power Charge nodes come at a price. I simply have more mana/aura effect/mana regen nodes. Yes, those matter a lot.
3 - Actually, I only have 12% Cast Speed from the tree, 13% from my ammy, and 10% from my Sceptre. The rest is just Faster Casting gem. When I don't use Faster Casting (in parties), it's slower, but then it doesn't matter, since I only need to freeze.

In short, crit-based Voll's Cold Snap doesn't work, this does. As for AoE, my Cold Snap with proliferation freezes more or less a screen in each direction.

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crit-based Voll's Cold Snap doesn't work, this does

Cool. At the time I tested it, there was no such thing as Romira's Banquet, so it was pretty much Voll's or bust. Thanks for the insight!

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CantripN wrote:

Those gloves can work just fine for this build in general. However, I'd get Geofri's Crest or some other +1 Gems 4L if you can't get a 5L just yet.

That said, a 5L is quite cheap, even if you can't afford a 5L CoD just yet.

I'm reserving my 5L slot for Glacial Cascade as you suggested.

I'll have:

Cold Snap + Cold Pen. + Elemental Proliferation + Concentrated Effect

with:

Glacial Cascade + Concentrated Effect + Faster Casting + Life Leech + Cold Pen(/Added Chaos)



The only difference between which skill I 5L will be the Life Leech, and it makes more sense to have that on my close range spam skill.

Today, I bought a good 4L Windscreams with Max Resistances for 4C. I also got a 4L Mind Spiral with Max Cold Damag and Max Resistances for 1C. The only problem is I was hoping to get my Mind Spiral to B-B-B-G so I've got my main skills set up for late-game, but that seems almost impossible to do. It just gobbled up 30-40 Chromatics. Needed only Chromatic to get the Windscreams to R-R-R-R though. Maybe I'll give the Chromatics another try on the Mind Spiral tomorrow, otherwise I'll have to settle on getting it on my gloves.

Next up is shopping for Romira's, and after that a 5L CoD as soon as I can afford it.

i have a six link carcass jack and would REALLY like to use it. with that being said how necessary is cloak of defiance since MoM isn't a possibility. how squishy would i be without it? i mostly solo, so of course i'd be the one to eat most of the damage.

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Seanj0 wrote:

i have a six link carcass jack and would REALLY like to use it. with that being said how necessary is cloak of defiance since MoM isn't a possibility. how squishy would i be without it? i mostly solo, so of course i'd be the one to eat most of the damage.

You can probably get away with not having MoM if you can get like 5K HP, but you'll need a lot more Life nodes. I'd just go and grab MoM and IR, though, since that would net you a bigger Life pool.

i was under the impression MoM was impossible to get.

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Seanj0 wrote:

i was under the impression MoM was impossible to get.

Of course it is. Not sure it's worth the points normally, but if you have a 6L Carcass, might as well. I can plan out a tree, if you want, but it's not so complicated, really - you just go right from Vaal Pact and grab IR (if you want), the 18% Life circle, and then MoM. I'd probably do this instead of the Templar's starting area for points, maybe even the Shadow's side.