A Cold Crit Witch Guide 2.0 (RE-DONE!) Check it out!

hey, i noticed you aren't talking at alla bout arctic breath, is it a bad skill to use ?
(honestly it sounds good, but i don't want to waste my reward, i'd get discipline if it's bad)
right now i'm on cruel and i fell kinda "lonely" with just Freezing pulse and ice spear, are there any other nice skills you would recommend ?

edit: is +25 mana per kill useless at high levels ? (i mean the ones in the tree)

raz0r why leave celestial walker out and not take that instead of the 6% elemental res?

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kalakrasia wrote:

raz0r why leave celestial walker out and not take that instead of the 6% elemental res?

Very good point, will adjust with that change! thanks for the tip, completely missed that one :D

edit: the reason for building in such a scattered way, i.e not completeing some paths before starting on others, is simply because different parts of the game require different amount of nodes..
For example, all resistance mods are taken around the beginning of merciless to cater for the res penalties that come with it..this goes for CI aswell...wich was taken around the start of A2 merciless...

This means that you will have to have a good deal of ES to be able to cater merciless without any life, but this really comes in play more in A2 than any other act since that's where most of the chaos damage is delt..
A1 is usually most fire/cold, a2 is chaos and a3 you add a the lightning...
This has worked fairly well for me.

i basically went through cruel with very few resistances and used my totem as much as possible..this is also why cast speed on both you and your totem is important, the more casts, the higher sucess rate of keeping stuff frozen.

Nice Guide, i played around with the Skill tree before reading this but i'm glad too seem i am on the right track.

Thanks for a good read(If you are still on the forum).

Overall i'm finding the Witch fun to play as at the moment and thought i would share my build that i was playing around with an hour ago. I love Ice as a main elements and decided to run it.
I will obviously amend it and take in the tips from other posts.
Forgive me if it seems stupid, i only started today and don't know the effects of some passives.

Build in question
http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMBAv4FQgVbD8QQaREPES8RlhRNFkAXVBpsHNwdFB8CIiYigSlPLJwtHy1HLagwlzQgNsU5ijrYO3w8BT1fQZZCw0NjRKtG10lRTdhQQlJTVa5WSlcrWPVaa1qmXcZd8mBtZp5tGXBScNVxTXvXf8aCEIKbgziFDoV9iEKIa4uMjDaMdo48j0aPpo_6kFWSwZMnlQSYrZrPnYCdo52uncSeoZ_fogCio6cIp1yus6-bsZC0DLQ4tQS297cxt9a4ysAawFHBxcHzw23VT9gk21ncx93z3nffhN-w4XPjhOQi5RnsGOw47SDvfPF28h379fyr

As far as i'm aware i lack some utility, DEX, Charge passives
Roughly ~30 points can probably be adjusted because i just felt like using all the points.

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berny wrote:

hey, i noticed you aren't talking at alla bout arctic breath, is it a bad skill to use ?
(honestly it sounds good, but i don't want to waste my reward, i'd get discipline if it's bad)
right now i'm on cruel and i fell kinda "lonely" with just Freezing pulse and ice spear, are there any other nice skills you would recommend ?

edit: is +25 mana per kill useless at high levels ? (i mean the ones in the tree)

Arctic breath is not useless, it's just way worse than a good ice spear..
The reason for wich arctic breath cannot compete with ice spear is that ice spear, in later gameplay (merciless and forward), you will have so much more crit chance that makes the spear more or less always crit, thus making everything FREEZE instead of chilling stuff as arctic will do..
Frozen = does not move, chilled do..
This also has great impact when dealing with necromancers...frozen enemies are gonna get shattered by your FP making em impossible to raise for the necromancers..

Yes, completely useless as you are almost certain going to end up with mana leech on you FP if you want to run auras, cast a highlevel FP with all the supports AND use a leveled totem..(the totem itself is around 200 mana with all supports)

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berny wrote:

hey, i noticed you aren't talking at alla bout arctic breath, is it a bad skill to use ?
(honestly it sounds good, but i don't want to waste my reward, i'd get discipline if it's bad)
right now i'm on cruel and i fell kinda "lonely" with just Freezing pulse and ice spear, are there any other nice skills you would recommend ?

Cold Snap is the daddy of the cold spells imo. Yes I am biased because I run with a guy who has a Conduit templar and I have a constant flow of Power Charges (so I can spam CS) but still. It's chance to Freeze is the highest of the Cold spells. I run it with

Cold Snap + Elemental Proliferation + Concentrated Effect + Cold Penetration

Hence it does the most damage of all my Cold spells (its DPS is 2500-odd), except perhaps a mob up close that takes all FP beams if I use that build. Although the chance to freeze is (on paper) about 45%, it feels to be more like 80 or 85%. This could be down to the Concentrated Effect and Penetration massively increasing its chance? Anyway, you can hit a bunch of targets with it anyway, so one usually Freezes, then the whole room Freezes. Because of the huge damage everything is frozen long enough that by the time they unfreeze, the CS cooldown is over and you just Freeze again.

I've tried Proliferation on all other possible combos (FP, IS etc) and Cold Snap wins the "freeze the room whenever you like award" hands down for me. It also has "unlimited" range. Fire it at the very edge of the screen and you can walk into the next area to a full screen of frozen bad guys waiting to be shattered.

i see, thanks for explainations.

razor, i got a look at your build, in the right part you can remove 10 int for 20% crit strike.

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Lachis wrote:

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GhostlightX wrote:

Nope. I'm saying I don't have a 20% FP, nor likely to in the near future.

Sigh. I will explain this to you again. 12% fp with faster casting > faster projectiles.

And I will counter-explain.....in the absence of a quality FP, the best gem to combine with FP is Faster Projectiles. Quality FP is extremely hard to get and expensive right now, even 12%; everyone wants one it seems. So, RULING THAT OUT, I feel the range you get from Faster Projectiles is > all. It extends your effective freeze range = you survive more. The difference it made to me compared to not having the range was astounding. I never die now.

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You also should re-consider using LMP.

I have. I am trying darn hard to get used to it. Thanks for the advice on that front.

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berny wrote:

i see, thanks for explainations.

razor, i got a look at your build, in the right part you can remove 10 int for 20% crit strike.

Again a good spotter, thanks :D
It's not particularly hard to miss small things like that ^^;

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berny wrote:

i see, thanks for explainations.

razor, i got a look at your build, in the right part you can remove 10 int for 20% crit strike.

Again a good spotter, thanks :D
It's not particularly hard to miss small things like that ^^;