[3.1] The Blinding Blizzard - Whispering Ice Berserker - Viable for Most Everything

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Keyen wrote:

I was thinking of another mean to get lifeleech: Fire leech while affected by anger (Watcher eye).

It's another point in favour of the trickster, since Anger increases the damage, while doing the ice leech with hatred means you are using hatred purely for that.

But you will need Grace already. I guess with Enlighten you can run Grace and Anger, but that leaves no mana for any Purity for the bosses, and those things are life savers.

Maybe some Grace-related Eye will work better. But those things won't happen for a while, and not for everybody. I'm currently not using that jewel in my Elementalist pre-testing.

BTW, I looked at your idea in PoB and I don't think it's going to be enough. 5k life (6k with Kaom's)
and 1300 INT. If they nerf double dipping, it will only gain 85% extra damage which will still put it behind the 3.1 Berserker, and this is with Despair which you probably won't be able to afford.

The only way I see it working is if GGG really fails at balance and lets the double dipping continue. We'll see any day now.

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nel0angel0 wrote:

So you insist on Elementalist over Chieftain for example. Hmmm ok.

Is there any possibility that the build works on Scion? Shouldnt we wait for scion reveal?

Ele > Chief damage for sure, and likely in survivability vs endgame too. Scion should be revealed later today, no point in guessing until then.

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Kelvynn wrote:

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Keyen wrote:

I was thinking of another mean to get lifeleech: Fire leech while affected by anger (Watcher eye).

It's another point in favour of the trickster, since Anger increases the damage, while doing the ice leech with hatred means you are using hatred purely for that.

But you will need Grace already. I guess with Enlighten you can run Grace and Anger, but that leaves no mana for any Purity for the bosses, and those things are life savers.

Actually, you can manage without Enlighten, since you don't use mana at all (neither for wither nor for leap slam), and you can use the golem using the ES from EB. So, the only thing lost are the purity.


However, you are not wrong on the life. I will see if an ES build would be possible. It would free a ring slot (since you won't use the elreon ring combo), and the ES on chest may be useful this time.

Edit: Something like that
https://pastebin.com/BKheXsiL

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Kelvynn wrote:

Ele > Chief damage for sure, and likely in survivability vs endgame too.

Hey man, once you are working on elementalist, would it be possible to go crit? (pure cold)

Also, how are you dealing with stun? Berserker had a solution for that in the ascendancy.

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nel0angel0 wrote:

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Kelvynn wrote:

Ele > Chief damage for sure, and likely in survivability vs endgame too.

Hey man, once you are working on elementalist, would it be possible to go crit? (pure cold)

Also, how are you dealing with stun? Berserker had a solution for that in the ascendancy.

Any character now can deal with stun, by OpieOpie Pantheon :)

I mean, not entirely stun, but atleast with stunlock which most dangerous thing.

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nel0angel0 wrote:

Hey man, once you are working on elementalist, would it be possible to go crit? (pure cold)

Also, how are you dealing with stun? Berserker had a solution for that in the ascendancy.

A crit WI build has been attempted a few times, but it was always too hard to get enough crit chance/dmg without trading too much Int for it. You can scale Icestorm damage with Int a lot better than with crit nodes, plus Int gives extra ES.

Stun has been taken care of since 3.0 - the Brine King covers stun, chill and freeze. Just make sure to fully upgrade it.

Reading through reddit and the (quite toxic) forum on this site, you seem to be the only one liking the new Elementalist, Kelvynn :)

I like the not-jumping-on-the-bandwagon attitude and will give it a shot in 3.2. The zerker version has been so much fun in this league.

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Guerre74 wrote:

Reading through reddit and the (quite toxic) forum on this site, you seem to be the only one liking the new Elementalist, Kelvynn :)

I like the not-jumping-on-the-bandwagon attitude and will give it a shot in 3.2. The zerker version has been so much fun in this league.

I'm not as much excited about the new changes as I'm glad that it hasn't been ruined. It's mostly the same class, with some things becoming slightly better and others slightly worse. It was the best class for WI before 3.0, and then we were forced to abandon it when ES leech was nerfed. Now we can try it again.

The reason everybody is saying that Inquisitor is better for elemental caster builds than Elementalist is that they all mean glass cannon crit builds. They just omit those words by default because in their world elemental caster equals dodging all damage and critting all the time.

But this build is totally different. It tanks, it doesn't do large hits, and it scales better with no crits and no power charges. Icestorm is a unique spell, it's nothing like what everybody else uses (Firestorm uses the same mechanic but different damage scaling). None of that reasoning behind 'Inq > Ele' applies here.

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Kelvynn wrote:

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Guerre74 wrote:

Reading through reddit and the (quite toxic) forum on this site, you seem to be the only one liking the new Elementalist, Kelvynn :)

I like the not-jumping-on-the-bandwagon attitude and will give it a shot in 3.2. The zerker version has been so much fun in this league.

I'm not as much excited about the new changes as I'm glad that it hasn't been ruined. It's mostly the same class, with some things becoming slightly better and others slightly worse. It was the best class for WI before 3.0, and then we were forced to abandon it when ES leech was nerfed. Now we can try it again.

The reason everybody is saying that Inquisitor is better for elemental caster builds than Elementalist is that they all mean glass cannon crit builds. They just omit those words by default because in their world elemental caster equals dodging all damage and critting all the time.

But this build is totally different. It tanks, it doesn't do large hits, and it scales better with no crits and no power charges. Icestorm is a unique spell, it's nothing like what everybody else uses (Firestorm uses the same mechanic but different damage scaling). None of that reasoning behind 'Inq > Ele' applies here.

Hi Kelvynn. Now that the Scion Ascendant revamp is out and the elementalist part seems decent, do you think a mix of the classes may work better than Zerker?

Hi, I've been planning and looking forward to trying this as CI in the next league, but the changes to Rite of Ruin from making you tanky to making you die faster got me worried. Do you think Rite of Ruin is still a good pick for this build?

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Juri wrote:

Hi Kelvynn. Now that the Scion Ascendant revamp is out and the elementalist part taking no ele reflect is a thing, do you think a mix of the classes may work better than Zerker?

Scion 3.2 has been revealed and it's a big disappointment. It lost everything that could be useful for WI. It gained reflect immunity, but that's not a big deal. There is no reason to use Scion with WI.

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Hollysword2 wrote:

Hi, I've been planning and looking forward to trying this as CI in the next league, but the changes to Rite of Ruin from making you tanky to making you die faster got me worried. Do you think Rite of Ruin is still a good pick for this build?

This class is no longer good for spell caster builds. Pain Reaver was nerfed and only works with attacks in 3.2. We are currently only discussing which other class to use.


In other news, I've tried to simulate Elementalist 3.2 in Standard the best I could. It's definitely viable. Life Leech will be needed for most targets, so that's 1 gem less than Berserker. I don't really like the changes and I think the class was better without them. It feels like a small nerf overall.

I went ahead and cleared T16 and killed the Shaper with my old lv 92 Elementalist wearing the items from my Abyss league Berserker. It went fine, but it feels overall slightly less powerful. Then again, I can't take advantage of the new Heralds and golems yet. And I was not using Watcher's Eye. And 3 levels lower. Still trying different things there too.

Getting more curious about the broken Trickster though. Only 3 days left before the release of 3.2 and still no word from GGG on the double dipping or that OP chaos damage node. If it really gets released that way, I'm all for trying it :)