[3.9] WINDS OF WINTER: Endgame Low Life Freezing Pulse Occultist | All Content | Magic Find | $$$$

Thanks.
Then i'm gonna get to know path of building more. :)

Btw, what says the in-game tool tip for dps?
I'm just curious about how the two are related.

"

fred741 wrote:

Thanks.
Then i'm gonna get to know path of building more. :)

Btw, what says the in-game tool tip for dps?
I'm just curious about how the two are related.

A little over 550k tooltip DPS in hideout (no flasks, just 9 power charges + arcane surge)

^

3.5 doesn't have major changes. Minor buff in form of void beacon + bonechill which you can use on a CWDT+cold snap setup. I'm testing some things and will eventually update the guide with a thorough edit of pretty much everything. Might be a few weeks or a couple months though.

Hi, first of all let me say I'm really looking forward to playing this build as it looks well crafted and FP is my favorite spell. However, I do have one question. How do you survive? Let me elaborate. You take ghost reaver (50% less ES recharge) but don't seem to have any other leach apart from boots enchants. Is it really worth it? Considering the boots enchant is unreliable on bosses, how do you stay alive when fighting Guardians / Shaper?

Cheers1

"

Zalantar wrote:

Hi, first of all let me say I'm really looking forward to playing this build as it looks well crafted and FP is my favorite spell. However, I do have one question. How do you survive? Let me elaborate. You take ghost reaver (50% less ES recharge) but don't seem to have any other leach apart from boots enchants. Is it really worth it? Considering the boots enchant is unreliable on bosses, how do you stay alive when fighting Guardians / Shaper?

Cheers1

The survivability on this build is down to a few things:
1) Against packs of enemies (e.g. normal mapping) you are leech capped at 0.6% leech from boots

2) Against bosses, you generally have enough ES to survive getting hit. Then, you just have to stay alive an additional 1.5 seconds after getting hit until your ES recharges. This is not a facetanking melee build; it relies on movement and ES recharge to stay alive. The Occultist is absurdly strong defensively in that you get uninterrupted ES recharge for 4 seconds once it starts.


The only problems I've had with survivability on this build are that every once in a while I'll die to porcupine spikes after they die in a map that has a "monsters have 90% chance to avoid ailments" map.

You can definitely still die to doing stupid shit (e.g. facetanking a shaper slam), but that's not the build's fault - and every build in PoE can die if you do stupid shit.

"

tackle70 wrote:

The survivability on this build is down to a few things:
1) Against packs of enemies (e.g. normal mapping) you are leech capped at 0.6% leech from boots

2) Against bosses, you generally have enough ES to survive getting hit. Then, you just have to stay alive an additional 1.5 seconds after getting hit until your ES recharges. This is not a facetanking melee build; it relies on movement and ES recharge to stay alive. The Occultist is absurdly strong defensively in that you get uninterrupted ES recharge for 4 seconds once it starts.


The only problems I've had with survivability on this build are that every once in a while I'll die to porcupine spikes after they die in a map that has a "monsters have 90% chance to avoid ailments" map.

You can definitely still die to doing stupid shit (e.g. facetanking a shaper slam), but that's not the build's fault - and every build in PoE can die if you do stupid shit.

Thank you very much for your answer. I understand that the build is not meant for facetanking, and I assume Ghost Reaver is worth it simply because 0.6% leach makes all the difference when mapping (in terms of clear speed as you dont have so wait for ES to start recharging every time you take damage). What are your takes on a life leach gem instead of empower? I ask because I'm playing a whispering ice build at the moment which uses one and, as damage doesn't seem to be an issue whatsoever with this build, perhaps a life leach gem could be an interesting alternative. Thoughts?

Cheers!

"

Zalantar wrote:

"

tackle70 wrote:

The survivability on this build is down to a few things:
1) Against packs of enemies (e.g. normal mapping) you are leech capped at 0.6% leech from boots

2) Against bosses, you generally have enough ES to survive getting hit. Then, you just have to stay alive an additional 1.5 seconds after getting hit until your ES recharges. This is not a facetanking melee build; it relies on movement and ES recharge to stay alive. The Occultist is absurdly strong defensively in that you get uninterrupted ES recharge for 4 seconds once it starts.


The only problems I've had with survivability on this build are that every once in a while I'll die to porcupine spikes after they die in a map that has a "monsters have 90% chance to avoid ailments" map.

You can definitely still die to doing stupid shit (e.g. facetanking a shaper slam), but that's not the build's fault - and every build in PoE can die if you do stupid shit.

Thank you very much for your answer. I understand that the build is not meant for facetanking, and I assume Ghost Reaver is worth it simply because 0.6% leach makes all the difference when mapping (in terms of clear speed as you dont have so wait for ES to start recharging every time you take damage). What are your takes on a life leach gem instead of empower? I ask because I'm playing a whispering ice build at the moment which uses one and, as damage doesn't seem to be an issue whatsoever with this build, perhaps a life leach gem could be an interesting alternative. Thoughts?

Cheers!

I'd say that if you are having survivability problems with the build, you do need to tweak something - rather that be your gear, your play style, your passive tree, or your gems. So, adding in life leech is an option if you are playing and find that you are dying for reasons other than playing poorly. It may be useful if you are on budget gear and still working to put the build together. A higher budget option to add leech if you feel that it's needed would be to drop Projectile Weakness and get a curse on hit Warlord's Mark ring and run that instead.

That said, I personally doubt the Life Leech gem would be much help if you have the boot enchant already and are somewhat well geared. It would basically just be useful for the 38% increased leech rate while mapping. At 9K ES that translates to about 600 more ES per second when leeching, or about 6.5% ES regen. I'd be more excited about things like Shavronne's Revelation or one of the Watcher's Eye mods that give ES recovery rate or flat ES regen instead, as it would give the same effect without sacrificing damage or (if in standard league) item quantity.

Against bosses, leech can be helpful, but I tend to find that killing the boss 30-40% faster (with Empower) is safer than killing the boss slower with slightly better leech. Again, your mileage may vary.


I died a lot in the early days of testing this build but it was mostly because I had never played a build like this that relies on a ranged/kiting play style before, and it took a while to adjust. Now that I've adjusted, the only survivability issue that I think is build-related which I don't know how to solve is the occasional porcupine death when the pack doesn't shatter. Most builds solve that with CWDT+Immortal Call but there's no convenient way to generate the charges for IC on this build... best you could hope for would be to get a curse on hit Warlord's Mark ring and run that.

So in addition to the porcupines, it looks like Incursion is going to require this build to adjust a bit as well. I've had several deaths in rippy maps opening incursions and getting almost immediately killed by dozens of vaal construct projectiles hitting at once.

Once I solve this problem, I will likely update the guide. I'd say in maps with hard mods there's a 10% chance of death within 2 seconds of opening an incursion with the build as it was in 3.4, which is unacceptable. Trying to fit a CWDT-Immortal Call setup into the build and see how much investment is necessary to make it effective.

Build has a new BiS ring as well:


--EDIT-- Initial testing seems like a simple swap of CWDT-Projectile Weakness-Frost Bomb to CWDT-Immortal Call-Increased Duration is a success. Going to run a couple hundred more maps to make sure...

bump

added a 3.5 update section because I don't know when I'll get the time to do a full pass over the guide and revamp it

Guide is fully edited and updated