Frozen Guardian - Frost Templar

The Frost Templar ranks among one of the most commonly played templar builds, and for a good reason. It boasts an extremely high amount of area damage, while maximizing aura usage due to its proximity to Inner Force and Eldritch Battery.


Current Build: (Level 47 - 56 Points Used)


Future Build: (90 Points Used)


Skills

Ice Nova/b] - Increased Area of Effect, Item Rarity (Future: Faster Casting, Cold Penetration, Life Leech/Mana Leech)
- When leveling this templar, you will have troubles utilizing the full potential of support gems. Eldritch Battery will solve these problems.

Ice Spear - Increased Critical Damage
- I currently combine Ice Spear and Power Siphon for single-target damage. I have seen others use Freezing Pulse or Glacial Hammer. It's up to the individual's preference.

Decoy Totem
- Adds a great deal of survivability to this build, a must-have.

Cold Snap - Elemental Proliferation, Life Gain on Hit/Life Leech
- I primarily use this spell for nuking or for chilling/freezing multiple targets. Not a necessity, but surely help in the early game.


Auras

Clarity - Reduced Mana
- The bread and butter of the early game Frost Templar. Currently, a huge chunk of my mana is devoted to a level 9 clarity, which allows me to ignore mana potions.

Determination - Reduced Mana
- Recommended for survivability, despite its high cost.


Gear
- Before obtaining Eldritch Battery, there are various pieces of equipment that may be used efficiently with this build. Early Cruel difficulty I was using a Duel Wand build, but quickly switched to Wand+Shield once I found the suitable gear. With a high elemental resist shield, survivability is greatly increased. Also, the nodes near the templar tree can be used to further boost Armor/ES on equipped shield.

Some problems to note:
- Survivability is largely dependent on Chill/Freeze + Decoy Totem

- Build may be item cost dependent - I have had few problems with current gear, occasionally shelling out an alch or two for a good piece

- Lack of spell critical nodes - unsure if these will add a decent amount of damage to Frost Nova

- Unsure if I wish to grab all of the various armor/energy shield nodes. Definitely helpful, but I'll make a decision when I reach eldritch battery and look at my survivability. (Usage of energy shield as a mana buffer will definitely impact survivability to make this node extremely useful)


Current Status of the Build:
- When I began this build, ten levels ago, I intended on reaching Eldritch Battery by level 45. However, this is no longer a priority. It's an amazing node that will certainly define this build, but I won't be focusing solely on this until I am confident in obtaining the required gear (Especially with links for reduced mana to auras), and will reach it around level 60.

I'm starting a similar build and I think you made some mistakes.

1) You took weapon elemental nodes they don't really do anything for your build.
2) You missed some of the better life nodes and took some mediocre ones.


This is my build it has more life and more resists and more crit it has lower cold damage but the crit more than makes up for that (also in the version I'm going to use I'll be taking power charges since I'm going to use the Voll's Protector unique chest.

While I was leveling with this build, I noticed that the Weapon Elemental damage actually increased my DPS, so I placed those points with little other information than that, so thanks for the clarification.

I was planning on taking those health nodes as well, but I was unsure if I wanted to spend the extra point or two when I needed quick survivability.

I've never been a huge fan of charges, especially power charges. With my current usage of Wand+Elemental Resist shield, I'll be needing a decent 4-5l chest, and I have a feeling the unique chest won't cut it. I'll be experimenting with the spell critical damage, however.

Thanks for the feedback :)

Updated current build and future build. Also updated gear section - gear is outdated for level but working well. Beginning to work on auras and support gem usage.

I like the frost Templar.
But I wouldn't take "convert all energy shield to mana" and you took alot +mana and +manareg passives. I don't belive you realy need them later and they are realy far away from Templar start point.
I'd rather take some of the cold damage, spell damage or cast speed passives.

Maybe some equip/gem improvements:
- there are shields with +x% spelldamage if you don't need the resist all
- a fast-cast suport gem might help your frost nova
- a spell totem with another (frost nova + fast cast gem + radius gem) should be a great addition (expensive as you need 4 linked sockets (r+4b))
- there is a curse spell which increase frozen/chill changs and lowers frost resis
- there is a suport gem with frost resi penetration

Good start with space for improvements ;).

PS: sugested passives with less mana but more cold damage

The core of this build is the keystone Eldritch Battery, allowing me to stack several auras (I'll be running around 5 auras soon).

I've used Spell Damage shields in the past, but I hardly see myself dropping 30% resistances for about 50% spell damage. When using Ice Nova, you are in the middle of fight, and will drop quickly without these resistances.

I've begun to use Cold Penetration and Frostbite, but the added frost penetration isn't a gamechanger. Instead, I'll do a little extra damage, but definitely not necessary.

With you tree, I see that you grab quite a few Critical Chance nodes, but you can easily achieve 75% or so chance with Critical Chance support gem.

Also, you miss Inner Force within your build, one of the best nodes that is relatively close to the Templar tree, which combines with Eldritch Battery to complete my build.