[2.6] CI FrostBlades Raider/Pathfinder [Permafreeze T15 bosses, 4:17 Shaper Run, 1:49 Chayula timer]

Is it possible to run this build with a dagger instead? I realize there's a lot of points used to path down to Vitality Void though, but I happen to have a 380 pdps dagger.

And how would you compare this to your HoWA Spec Throw you played for a bit last league? Am having trouble deciding which one I'd like to try - they both look amazing!

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TheFrequency wrote:

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Invalesco wrote:

took the leap and re-specced to pathfinder (although I haven't respecced my merci bandits +1 frenzy charge yet). Can confirm, pathfinder dishes out more reliable boss dps with the 100% flasks uptime. The movement speed and attack speed are much slower though, so that will translate in a slower map clear speed.

Shaper vid in original post.

How much slower? I'm following this guide now and usually prefer pathfinder over raider for the utility.

The difference is largely due to the move speed bonus from one flask: Rotgut. Its a 2 in 1 flask for Raider. Onslaught + Quicksilver. It doesn't give me onslaught as Pathfinder so I ended up removing it. If you're ok with not having Onslaught for fights, using rotgut will give you higher movement speed compared to raider.

With regards to that, you can have a look at my character's movement speed in the vaal temple map run vid and compare that to the movement speed in the shaper run vid.

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Nephalim wrote:

Insanely well itemized gear. You have 1 million dps against a guardian or shaper target not factoring in totem or frost bomb.

The single target still feels very weak even with all the gear. If you used a stronger ST skill, would the end game bosses be much faster?

Thanks! It took a while to think thru the kind of gear I needed and even longer to go about obtaining it so I'm relatively pleased with how it turned out! I honestly think ST would be weaker simply because of the lack of the triple melee multipliers. Even blade flurry will be slightly weaker for this particular setup because of the lack of full cold damage conversion. At that point, if you were going to use blade flurry, you might as well go phys dps + poison and then it'll be better as an assassin.

I personally actually felt that the 3rd phase of shaper was quite strong all things considered. The first 2 phases were somewhat slower because i was effectively only using a 5L for those two.

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timgod wrote:

well written guide, i like that you included gear progression

it looks like both your skill trees though use raider ascendancy, where is the pathfinder version? or did you just forget to change the ascendancy on the pathfinder tree

Thanks! I forgot to change it actually, sorry! Will do so.

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roachoneonetiming wrote:

Is it possible to run this build with a dagger instead? I realize there's a lot of points used to path down to Vitality Void though, but I happen to have a 380 pdps dagger.

And how would you compare this to your HoWA Spec Throw you played for a bit last league? Am having trouble deciding which one I'd like to try - they both look amazing!

It would be possible run this build with a dagger, and I have theorycrafted it as well, but you're right that it would take so many points to get to vitality void that you would be better off as a claw user in the end.

I personally feel HoWA is way stronger for bosses and is pretty much a master of all kind of build. Frost Blades is comparable to HoWA with regards to map clear speed but is weapon dependent if you want good single target dps. I am personally having alot of fun with Frost Blades because of its freezing potential.

the crit dagger man lives :)

I originally heard about your build on Reddit, then after seeing the shaper kill, I hoped to find a guide on your build, which brought me here.
I came for the build, but I was more impressed about the informative lesson on Elemental penetration.
I will probably try out the build later in the league, but thanks for posting more than just the build guide :)

!!!!!! bump for invalesco !!!!

i really think your build is more informative and better than mathil... you should be more popular on youtube

I started with mathil's FB pathfinder but after watching your video I decided to respec to your version. I'm not very convinced about the power charge generation though, I'm having trouble with OoS + PCoC due to low base crit chance (15% for OoS, against 42% for FB), so the generation is very unreliable at the moment (I still have to level PCoC and OoS though, they're only lvl 11 and 16 respcetively, right now). Will things be much better with PCoC at higher lvl?

Thanks for sharing your build !

Nice to see claws getting some love and gave me a decent starting point for what I am going for on my Frost Blades claw build. Also going Raider, which is quite fun, though my gear isn't as optimized as yours and I'm doing a slightly different setup. For comparison, here's what I have right now:

Current Gear


Passive Tree


Please excuse gems and flasks and the like as I'm still experimenting with them. Biggest difference as you can see is that I am dual-wielding The Scourge claws, which means I have less ES overall. However, the build is only level 86, so quite a few levels left until I hit 95 or so, which is about as high as I'll want to push it given the level grind is not to my tastes.

Also, passive tree will need some tweaking, but in the end I should be able to get a bit above 8,000 ES, potentially more with more optimized gear, like a Vaal Regalia. Probably the biggest thing for me is the gem setup for Frost Blades...I'm scaling a lot on my gear with Elemental Damage over physical damage to see how that works since I'm doing a full conversion to cold. With that in mind, I'm thinking I might try and drop MDoFL and throw in ICD since my crit rating is already pretty high and will be higher once I put a few more points to getting Twin Terrors. Not sure how that will work out for DPS overall, but I'm thinking it'll be a nice gain overall.

Still, pretty heavy into testing and seeing what works the best for me. One thing I love about The Scourge claws are all the wolf 'meat shields' you get from it. Really does help from keeping stuff off you, even bosses.

What's the leveling build like for this? I've never really leveled a physical-based character before.

Hi, i decided to go for a CI version of frost blades and i am loving your build, just have one doubt now. If i respec to pathfinder, where is the frenzy source for frenzy charges, if any at all. right now i am ranger but willing to go pathfinder for easier time with shaper/guardians.

Again, very nice guide