[3.0] [HC] Chill and Breathe: An Arctic Breath Totem Build [VIDEO]

Pros
---Safe (Totem)
---Cheap to Start (Required Unique items can be had for under 10 chaos at base levesl).
---Low Budget Long-Term (5 Link, 6 Socket Sire of Shards is the only item that costs around 1 Exalted)
---Large Life Pool
---Lots of Life Regeneration
---Hardcore Viable with skilled totem play

Cons
---Flicker Strikers remain the bane of totem users.
---Can cause some FPS issues (especially in party play if there is another player with an intensive skill or a potato PC involved). This mostly will impact other party members. I haven't had a problem with it solo though.

High Level Skill Tree.

For Bandits, go 2 Passives.

I'm going to introduce you to the unique items you need for this build first. Most of them are quite cheap for the basis versions, so getting started shouldn't be a problem. Then I'll mention the stuff you'll want on your rare items.

Main Skill: Arctic Breath

Your main skill is Arctic Breath. It should be linked as follows:
4L: Arctic Breath - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - GMP or Fork
5L: Arctic Breath - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - GMP or Fork - 1 of Controlled Destruction / Cold Penetration / Iron Will / Hypothermia / Increased Area of Effect / GMP or Fork
6L: Arctic Breath - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - GMP or Fork - 2 of Controlled Destruction / Cold Penetration / Iron Will / Hypothermia / Increased Area of Effect / GMP or Fork

Once you get past your 4 link, you have some gem choices, all of which are good. I'm going to go through them here. You can honestly pick any combination of these gems with regards to your final two links and come up with something pretty solid.

Controlled Destruction: It's a MORE modifier, and will give you that MORE modifier without a condition, unlike Hypothermia. However, it reduces your critical strike chance. That's not a huge deal in this build and shouldn't prevent you from considering this gem as an option.

Cold Penetration: It penetrates resistance. Awesome, especially if you haven't gotten to the resistance penetration in your Ascendancy class yet. I highly recommend this gem in that event. Once you are penetrating resistances naturally, this becomes less crucial but still very useful.

Hypothermia: A MORE multiplier is great, especially tied to a condition we inflict constantly. The downside is a lot of bosses tend to be resistant to chill and freeze. When that happens, this gem does nothing for us. This, combined with Controlled Destruction, allows you to stack up MORE multipliers. It also gives 10% chance to freeze chilled enemies. This lets us freeze enemies easier even though we are not a crit-focused build.

Iron Will: This build gets upwards of 300 strength. This gem is surprisingly strong as a result and can really help push your DPS upwards.

Increased Area of Effect: This makes your splashes bigger. This is probably, in my opinion, the weakest option (I think the AOE you get in the tree is sufficient), but you may find a use for it over the other gems. I mention it here because it is a valid choice.




Auras and Buffs

These don't need to be linked. However, you cannot put them in Soul Mantle. Otherwise, you get totems casting these buffs, and that just won't help you. If you use pure armour gear (like I did), prepare to spend some chromatics coloring your sockets.

Purity of Elements (for Resistances)
Clarity (for Mana Regen)
Arctic Armour (Physical and Fire mitigation)

You can run without Clarity once you get enough mana regeneration on the tree. However, you won't be able to comfortably run maps with Reduced Life and Mana Regeneration without that aura.

This list changes if you choose to take Eldritch Battery in the tree instead of the Aura nodes. If you do that, you can drop Clarity and run Herald of Ice instead. If you are able to do that (you should have enough Energy Shield to cast your totems 3 times + mana left over to cast it once or twice), I recommend taking that option.

Utility Skill Links

4L: Cast When Damage Taken - Immortal Call - Summon Flame Golem - Increased Duration

This gives us some instant defense if we get hit with something hard (and serves as a warning bell). I found my golem dies a lot without a lot of minion supports, which is something we just don't do. Letting it be summoned when we take damage is one less thing you have to worry about and it's a tiny tradeoff in golem-boosted DPS. Totally a Quality of Life investment that I make every time.

Miscellaneous (Non-Soul Mantle)

Lightning Warp: You could use Leap Slam. I hate Leap Slam. This is a caster build. Lightning Warp or Flame Dash it is.

Flame Dash: You can use this instead of Lightning Warp. It works fine.

Frostbite: Your curse of choice. Elemental Weakness (for party play) or Projectile Weakness (for more enemy control via knockback) are also options.

Enduring Cry: Good for some fast mitigation or if you need to pull some enemies closer to you for some reason, like an Elreon mission. Plus, it is a red gem. That makes it easy to socket on your armour gear.

Soul Mantle Links

4L: I currently have Incinerate, Faster Casting, and Added Chaos Damage in a 4 link with Searing Bond slapped in there. I used it as an experiment for Elemental Equilibrium until I realized Searing Bond would be interesting too. Both have uses. You can experiment here. Just remember any spell you put in will be supported by Spell Totem.

2L: Abyssal Cry + Increased Area of Effect. This slows enemies even further and makes them explode on death. It's a nice utility, especially in parties if you're not the primary curse caster.

You can also put Leap Slam in your Soul Mantle and link it to Faster Attacks and Fortify if you like Leap Slam. I don't, but it's a very reasonable option that you should consider if you like that skill. I just hate the mechanic for the most part so I don't use it if I can avoid it.

You can do pretty much all map mods with the following two exceptions:

Blood Magic. You use enough auras and buffs that this is problematic and not worth it.

No Life or Mana Regeneration: This one is difficult. However, you can do it if you run enough Hybrid Flasks and are careful. I don't recommend doing it, but it is possible.

Maps with any type of curse on them, however, are wonderful and should be viewed as free IIR/IIQ on your maps.

With a 5 Link setup, you can get around 5,300 tooltip DPS.

Tooltip doesn't tell most of the story though. It doesn't take into account Cold Penetration (Frostbite + Tree + Gem). If you have Hypothermia linked, it doesn't take that into account. It also doesn't take into account overlappinng explosions. If you're looking for a Tooltip Warrior, this build isn't it. But the clear speed you'll experience, along with the safety of being a totem build, should be enough to convince you to ignore the tiny tooltip numbers.

The primary defensive mechanics of this build are:

1) High Life Pool
2) High Life Regeneration
3) Arctic Armor
4) Chilled and Frozen Enemies
5) Being a Totem build.

We take armour and hybrid armour/energy shield gear to have enough armour to survive pack ranged attacks (anything that shows up in Act 4 with high physical damage, for example). We do a small amount of armour scaling in the tree, but nothing to consider it a true focus of the build. Arctic Armour helps out in a big way here as well, as long as we're standing still. As a totem build, we should be standing still quite a bit.

Our high life pool and life regeneration gives us a very nice buffer and most degeneration effects have little to no effect on us. I have approximately 5,200 life and 500+ life regeneration at Level 91, which is plenty to handle most situations.

Being a totem build, we stand a bit back from enemies, so melee foes are less of a threat and ranged foes hopefully die to our totems quickly.

The chilled ground effect we put out plays into this. Enemies are slowed and it makes their approach to us easy to avoid. Frozen enemies, of course, are little threat and die fairly soon, making them no threat.

There is a lot going on behind the scenes in this build, so I'm going to break it down a little bit.

Flee the Fire! This build is inspired by Chill and Breathe. I put it together as an experiment with Chance to Flee that ended up working very well. If you like this build but are put off by possible FPS issues and party play, check this one out.

Volcano Map: I don't run Volcano maps often, so I'm a little slow, but it gives you an idea of the build in action.

Malformation Piety: Vulnerability (doesn't hurt us), Multiple Projectiles, 40% Reduced Regen? No problem.

I originally got the idea for making an Arctic Breath totem build from r4wb1rd. His guide is here. My build uses many of the same ideas but uses self-cursing for damage and life regeneration as core components of the build.

8/31/2016 - Removed Frostwall and Vaal Glacial Hammer suggestions for 2.4 patch. That interaction has been removed from the game.
9/03/2016 - Changed tree to a PoePlanner.com tree link. No actual tree changes.
9/04/2016 - Added Standard League setup (6 link gear, flask changes due to Eldritch Battery).
9/06/2016 - Put up Eldritch Battery version.
9/06/2016 - Updated FAQ with details on why not to use Hierophant. That post is located under this post.
9/07/2016 - Added a picture. Because all guides should have at least some picture, right?
9/10/2016 - Gave Ascendancy it's own section. Added in analysis and revised outlook of Hierophant for 2.4.
9/14/2016 - Added recommendation of considering the Fork gem for the skill link setup. Updated skill link setup to prioritize using either GMP or Fork as the 4th link in your setup. Demoted Controlled Destruction to optional. Added recommendation that Increased Area of Effect be considered as one of the final two links, albeit as the weakest of the recommendations.
9/21/2016 - Updated Variants section to link to my Fireball Chance to Flee version of this build.
9/23/2016 - I've had a few people message me and post saying they play this in HC and have had success. As a result, I've tagged this as Hardcore Viable, provided you're comfortable playing totem builds.

My first thought when making this was to go Thief's Torment. But the Kikazaru rings offer five excellent mods for our build. Thief's Torment only offers two, and only one of those is significantly better. You can certainly do it with the Thief's Torment, but I think Kikazaru is the better choice. Here are the two rings to compare and a breakdown of their positive and negative attributes as they relate to this build.



The Thief's Torment has multiple mods that don't really help us. Breaking them down:

--- Life Gain on Hit does nothing for this build.
--- Mana Gain on Hit does nothing for this build.
--- The Quantity bonus is nice, but we're not a MF build and aren't stacking IIR gear, so it isn't doing a ton for us.
--- Can't wear other rings means you're stuck with just this ring.
--- 16%-22% to all Elemental Resistances (for a total resistance bump of 48%-66%) is useful and technically better than Kikazaru, but only by a slight margin. Two Kikazaru rings get you 40%-60% Lightning Resistance though, so the total difference in resistance is quite small.
--- 50% Reduced Effect of Curses is 10% better than a pair of Kikazaru.

The Kikazaru has no wasted stats on it.

--- The implicit is 20-30% Lightning Resist. Two of them give you a total of 40-60% Resistances, a comparable number to the total amount of resistance a single Thief's Torment gives you.
--- +10-15 all Attributes on each ring does a lot of work in getting your Dexterity up.
--- 13-17 Life Regeneration doesn't sound great, but double that to 26-34 with two rings and that's sounding pretty nice for a Life Regeneration tank. To put that in perspective, I have 5190 life on my character and 506.9 life regeneration. If I was to remove the 0.8% Life Regen node, I drop down to 465.4 life regeneration. That is a 41.5 life regeneration difference for a 0.8 regeneration node (one of the best we get). At my level of life, 34 life regeneration is equal to a 0.65% life regeneration node. That is excellent, even at a high level.
--- 20%-40% Mana Regeneration is very, very useful. Two rings makes that 40-80%.
--- 20% Reduced Effect of Curses. Two of these gives you 40% Reduced Effect. This is the only spot that Thief's Torment is significantly better.

Another question I've been asked is why this build recommends Inquisitor over Hierophant. After all, 5 totems is better than 3, right? Well, you have to consider the 8% less damage per totem modifier that you get in the Hierophant tree when you take those extra two totems. Below is the math for two setups. The standard Chill and Breathe setup is three totems (Base 1 + Soul Mantle 1 + Ancestral Bond 1). The second setup is all of that plus the Hierophant's Ritual of Awakening node, which grants two more totems.

Standard Setup
3 Totems @ 100% Damage Each: 100% * 3 = 300% Total Damage.

Hierophant Setup
3 Totems @ 76% Damage Each: 76% * 3 = 228% Total Damage.
4 Totems @ 68% Damage Each: 68% * 4 = 272% Total Damage.
5 Totems @ 60% Damage Each: 60% * 5 = 300% Total Damage.

As you can see, you lose eight percent damage with each totem, so your five totems are only doing 60% damage each, which comes out to 300% damage. That is the same amount of damage as three totems without that node. That means you're spending Ascendancy points to do the same amount of damage but with a larger chance of not applying all that damage at once. The only argument for five totems is increased coverage, but you should find that three totems gives you more than enough map coverage in terms of projectiles.

In addition, you should be able to clearly see how 3 totems with Hierophant is significantly worse than 3 totems with Soul Mantle + Node with regards to damage. You would be doing 228% damage instead of 300% damage, for a 72% reduction in damage.

This is why Hierophant, for this built, is considered a trap Ascendancy and should be avoided.