[1.3]Two Dragons build (crit arc: freeze everything+high dps, 1.3.0 buff! )

I've finally made a unique build that works! As far as I can tell it hasn't been done before (as of august 2014).

EDIT: I have since seen a few similar builds, but they got their theory-crafting wrong. This is still the best :P

New Video!
76 rare crematorium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR8VE18bTtw

1.3.0 changes:
Cons:
Pros:

Overall, 1.3 shaped this build into a whole 'nother beast. Took a bit of rethinking, but it was worth it.

Stats w/o assassin's mark or ele weakness

Arc:

Flame Totem:


IGN: CCSoEasy if you wanna talk!

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1. Theory

2. Build
- Skill Tree
- Bandits
- Gear
- Gems

3. Summary
- DPS Calculations
- Pros
- Cons

4. Videos!

1. Theory



2. Build

- Skill Tree



- Bandits

Normal - Help Oak
Cruel - Kill All
Merciless - Help Alira

- Gear



- Gems



3. Summary

The following Calcs are wrong (not by much) and I will fix them when I get home.
- DPS Calculations


- Pros
-Cheap! This a very effective cheapish build. talking 5-10ex. More for 6L :P
-High damage (Tooltips lie for this build. They say 20k arc and 6k flame totem, but they aren't great at accounting for crit,shock stacks,ele weakness,crit weakness so it's waaaay above that)

-Freeze everything (ALL bosses except atziri)

-Shock stack everything

-Survivability through freeze (high pseudo max effective health. if you get hit, you're doing something wrong :P)

- Cons
-Low life (ish) 3.3k
-No real armour/eva means burst phys hurts

4. Videos:

Please leave me comments/critiques! This is my first guide so I'd appreciate the help! Vids should be on their way once I figure out a good way to do that...

Thanks!

a) drop faster casting in your arc setup and move it literally anywhere else because
b) +1 fire gems in infernal mantle. Flame totem level 21, and it gives you the option of adding added chaos for more raw flat damage.
c) it'd be funny to add discharge here somehow.

Im confused. Anyways. Trying to figure this idea out in a new shell. Infernal mantle without slotting your fire spell in there is weird. I would do the following:

Three Dragons and Infernal mantle are good options for crit with flames shockin and lightning freezing. But. Why not use a higher base crit spell? Which benefits from the +1. Im looking at discharge.

How to get charges?

Go dual wands, or single wand. Doesnt really matter. Use either frenzy or power siphon, first is recommended. Use Frenzy - Gmp - Chain - Pcoc to generate charges quick enough to discharge.

How to get shock stacks?

A fire totem. choices:

Firestorm
Flame surge
Fire ball
Flame totem

Or. Pyre with a cold totem.

Ice spear.
Arctic breath
Ice nova.

In these choices, Arctic breath hits the hardest apart from flame surge, but then we need ignite. We will choose Arctic breath.

We get as links:

Arctic breath - Cold pen - Spell totem - Prolif (no we dont need/want Lmp/Gmp. The AoE will help already, plus, we want single hard hits for prolif. As long as it crits it applies a general (longer lasting) shockstack to the pack. Its also better for bosses.

For Discharge:

Discharge - Elemental Prolif - Conc Effect - Inc AoE - Crit multi (We only get effects when we crit, so we want more dmg mainly when we crit, so crit multi)

Im not saying its a bad idea to do it as you do, but its kind of ineffective. Of course, using Arc instead of discharge is kind of faster, but in my experience, using frenzy is pretty fast. Discharge should be able to happen within 2 seconds.

For the tree. Picking up Fire/cold individual dmg is ineffective. Pick up spell dps. Ele dps. Crit chance and crit multi. Thats all. In either case.

Sidenote: Going for wands enables you to throw 30-40 ex for dual voidbattery. For more fun.

EDIT: try this tree: 100 point tree with life

More life, less ineffective dmg. Ditched inner force and influence, since your not an auramancer. Also. Try to drop PoF. You want to stay in high mana for as much as possible. You might even go as far as not using AA. Infernal mantle is a burden for Non-BM builds with high mana cost. Id run Clarity + Discipline myself. With reduced mana that should leave enough room. EA should support enough of your Res, combined with your totems. Also. Endgame dmg has been removed, because life goes first. Without surviving there is no dmg.

The idea here is not what has the highest crit chance, it's how many crits per second can you get. So faster casting is necessary.

Arc instead of flame totem in infernal mantle i can see as debatable. But Since Flame totem only needs a 4L, i decided to put arc there.

Discharge wouldn't work well as the cast speed would be horrible, it's not auto target, and it would have fairly unreliable damage given cheap gear. Arc is by far the best choice here. Just try it out and you'll see :P

Isn't the fire to chaos conversion on infernal mantel detrimental to shocking with flame totem?

Also have you considered the freeze/shock duration nodes near Static Blows and Breath of Rime? Back when I was looking at shock duration those increased duration nodes were almost like a more multiplier on your DPS with respect to how it's used for shocking/freezing.

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MatrixFactor wrote:

Isn't the fire to chaos conversion on infernal mantel detrimental to shocking with flame totem?

Also have you considered the freeze/shock duration nodes near Static Blows and Breath of Rime? Back when I was looking at shock duration those increased duration nodes were almost like a more multiplier on your DPS with respect to how it's used for shocking/freezing.

For a support prolif build, the actual dmg of flame totem is less important, as long as your totem is continously hitting. Besides, that's where quality added lightning damage comes into play for flame totem: any shock chance you'd lose by slotting it in Infernal is mitigated by the 10% off ALD and Static Blows.

Same goes for arc, by the way. Echo more than makes up for dropping faster casting. I built an arc character before echo was released, and honestly adding FCR is overkill on the cast speed, for the purposes of just proliferating shock (or in this case, freeze) stacks.

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perkar wrote:

The idea here is not what has the highest crit chance, it's how many crits per second can you get. So faster casting is necessary.

Arc instead of flame totem in infernal mantle i can see as debatable. But Since Flame totem only needs a 4L, i decided to put arc there.

Discharge wouldn't work well as the cast speed would be horrible, it's not auto target, and it would have fairly unreliable damage given cheap gear. Arc is by far the best choice here. Just try it out and you'll see :P

Cast speed isnt everything. For Arc it is. But why freeze with arc, if you could shock with it (trust me, shocking with arc is OP) and could actually use a totem to freeze instead. No need for Three dragons that way, meaning you can use geofri's crest for arc, and dont need to use Infernal mantle since you can get enough crit ez anyways, or could use cold snap.

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Also have you considered the freeze/shock duration nodes near Static Blows and Breath of Rime?

With the cast speed of arc/flame totem, duration doesn't matter. If it can be shocked/frozen, it will be permanently, if not, you need to do more damage. Since shock/freeze chance is based on the percentage of the mobs max health you took in one hit.

EDIT:I am wrong, Matrix is right :P

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Echo more than makes up for dropping faster casting.

So the reason I don't want to get rid of faster casting, and why spell echo would not be enough on it's own, is again, crits per second. Spell echo determines crit for both casts on the first roll. So for a build with a fairly low crit chance, chances to crit per second becomes realy important. Spell echo actually slightly decreases chance to crit per second, but sort of makes up for it in burst crits. Faster casting is perfect for it.

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But why freeze with arc, if you could shock with it (trust me, shocking with arc is OP) and could actually use a totem to freeze instead.

If I weren't to use Three Dragons, of course Arc would be the goto for spreading shock stacks, but there isn't a good way of sreading (i mean cover the screen) with freeze. Also freezing bosses would become much harder.

One of the great benefits to using Arc to freeze is the distance it can travel. You can literally cover three screens in freeze if it jumps over there. It takes care of jumpers, problem casters, archers, exiles, anything else that might be dangerous that you don't know about off screen. Arc gives everyone in your party a lot of pseudo max effective health because of the same reasons it's good for stacking shock.

If you watch the second video I posted, you'll see multiple instances where a room is frozen before I go into it, and crucially, before I'm done clearing the current room! You can imagine how good it is on an open map :)

Well shock and freeze duration are based on what percentage of a targets life you hit for. The formula is 276ms * Dmg / (Life/100) * (1+Dur). If you have 5k damage per crit hit and no duration the most HP that you can shock is a target with Dmg*276ms/300ms/0.01=460k HP. If you have 4.5k damage per crit hit but 25% increased shock duration the highest HP is 500k HP. (I was doing the equations in my head, may be mistakes, but I believe this is the idea).

Sorry, I was assuming freeze duration was applied after chance to freeze was calculated, but it turns out you're right. Freeze duration would lower the percent of dmg needed in one hit to freeze. I'll take a look at them nodes now... :P

EDIT: Any suggestions on what nodes to give up to travel to the freeze duration nodes? I'm having a hard time finding nodes It would be ok to substitute :/ Maybe the inner force nodes?

EDIT 2: I'll try this out next: Hopefully the trade-off is worth it :)