[EA] 100% cold converted Freezing Spark Stormweaver - Mana Stacking Archmage MoM+CI

Oh boy.

This build seems to struggle a bit in the early stages, mainly with single target - which is a problem when GGG have decided to make this game so heavily centred around boss gated power.

It's not too bad though, and you can get around it with a bit of the ol' grinding and by tailoring your equipment for the boss' dmg type with charms etc.

Levelling skills:

(Early Game)

You basically want to go for the wombo combo of Spark, flame wall and orb of storms.

Spark - pierce - unleash/arcane tempo - wildshards

This is our main skill and you'll be spamming it all day, every day. Use unleash if you feel like the boss dps windows are low and you're spending most of your time dodging, but arcfane tempo is great for speeding up our casts and getting more lightning on the floor. If you manage to find an ex, immediately go on trade chat and try to buy an uncut support gem III for wildshards - it gives us a 20% chance to fire off 8 more sparks each cast, with the downside being they come out in a circle (not a downside for us, as sparks go where they please in any case and there's no point aiming them.)

Orb of Storms - overabundance - controlled destruction

Overabundance lets us get 2 OOS out and double it's dps, with the downside not mattering, because they expire from shooting all their bolts out long b efore the timer expires. Controlled destruction makers em hit harder - you wont crit all that much early game anyway. It's a bit annoying trying to stay in the circles, but it still fires off, even if you don't.

Flame Wall - Fortress

Any spark that goes through youre flame wall adds a decent chunk of fire damage. Every. Spark. Early game before you've honed in on boosting lightning damage on your gear/tree, this is a significant dmg boost and easy to sustain.

(Mid)

Arctic Armor - Clarity

strictly speaking, it's not a great defensive layer, but you wont get another spirit gem for a while, so it's the best choice we can make. You can use grim feast for ES, but early on you probably wont have much es anyway, and I don't like having to do the D4 "run around collecting orbs" style gameplay. If you have extra spirit, whack clarity on there to avoid mana issues. As soon as you can though, replace it with...

Cast on shock - Arc - Chain

As soon as you get a lvl 8 spirit gem, replace artic armor with this baby and watch the damage soar.

Conductivity - Heightened curse - Persistence

goes without saying. We want it staying on as long as possible, because the mana cost is high, and we want it to make the bosses as vulnerable as possible.

Other considerations:

I've seen a few people suggesting Arc, Ember fusillade, sun orb and SRS - I tried out EF and sun orb, but didn't feel like they did much more than spamming spark with OOS up. Same with Arc, although Arc is more consistent over distance, as less sparks will hit the further you are away. I also found EF had targetting issues at a distance. Spark is actually really deadly to bosses though, if you can get right up next to them+a wall and go ham.

SRS flamewall is an interesting one though, as I've played with a few people who were levelling with it and got decent results, even without any minion nodes on the tree, but I didn't get another spirit gem drop til act 3, so by then it wasn't useful.

Early Game

We rush the dmg nodes and the 4% dmg taken from mana first, with the least amount of points wasted on travel nodes. We'll need to respec this later, but it's worth tjhe gold to not feel completely gimped early game.

Mid

Ok, we got ourselves an ascendancy or two, which means 24/7 arcane surge. You may/may not have a few mana issues, depending on your gear, so you can be a bit flexy with the mana regen nodes. the key here is to set ourselves up to get ready for MoM, while also moving our tree around to get those crucial multi projectile casts, cast speed and proj speed.

End Game shock

MoM works really well with CI, especially because we're surrounded by ES nodes. This is a heavy work in progress. This is an older tree for the shock only variant

End Game Cold

This is where it's at - plenty of very cool nodes thar do things like ignore resists for frozen enemies while bringing them the pain. A fair few nodes are in there just to give ample frost buildup, so that we can hopefully maintain near permafreeze on many bosses.

Spark - pierce - Wildshards - arcane tempo - acceleration - unleash (multi target)

Archmage - Clarity

enfeeble + conductivity - heightened curse+duration on one, cursed groud+hexboom on the other

Cast on shock - ball lightning - lightning pen - scattershot - controlled destruction - overcharge (boss killing)

INSTEAD of Ball lightning, FOR NOW WE USE:

Cast of shock - comet - impetus - spell cascade - magnified effect - controlled destruction (not sure how long comet will be unnerfed, but so far it is absultely smashing out damage, even without any cold nodes on the tree)

Orb of storms - lightning exposure - conduction - coursing current/chain - Mana font - strip away (basically an AoE exposure delivery system. you can use chain instead of aoe shock or eletrocute, depending on how reliable it feels. I'll need to test this.)

If mana isn't an issue:

Mana Tempest - inspiration - premedetation - murderous intent

Thanks to X3n for this one. Gives a good damage boost at will with culling strike being super helpful and inspiration cutting down on the devasating mana drain.

Spark - pierce - Wildshards - arcane tempo - acceleration - lightning penetration

Archmage - Clarity

Cast of freeze - comet - impetus - spell cascade - magnified effect - controlled destruction

Mana Tempest - inspiration - premedetation - murderous intent

Hypothermia - heightened curse - duration + enfeeble - hexbloom

Frost bomb - strip away - fast forward - considered casting

Orb of storms - mana font - magnified effect - blind (honestly not sure how to fit this one in atm, it really just a vehicle for mana font to help mana regen)

frost wall - ingenuity - icicle - spell echo (boss killer)

8 + 9 are mandatory to get archmage and MoM feeling consistent.

shock build
- I'm very interested in testing out 4+5 to give us chill buildup on every single attack - it'll pretty much be like permanent temp chains on our enemies.

Cold build
- 6 + 7. Shock's back on the menu, boys! Best of both worlds right here. before you get the 4th ascendancy, run 1 instead then respec.

weapons
Get a weapon with +1/2/3/4/5/6 to lightning/all skill gems asap - This will be our biggest dmg boost. Next, look for high rolls of spell/cold/ele dmg. After that, cast speed is always nice for spark. Since we're mana stacking, extra mana/regen helps too. It doesn't matter whether it's a wand or staff, but keep in mind wand allows us to run a shield with +1/2 skill gems and some extra affixes, so it is heavily preferred. It also allows you to run a scpeter in your offhand if you need extra spirit.

I had lots of luck checking vendors after every level up and also gambling for these

Armor
early game, just go for life + resists

Once you get MoM, you can move from +life affixes to +mana (and es) instead in preparation for CI. Mid game, run a life/es hybrid build, aiming for 1k each.

try to get boots with 10%+ movespeed, it's very important in PoE2 now that we don't have movement skills

Jewellery
Again, early just go for life+resists. Keep in mind you can get a spirit roll on amulets which will allow you to run clarity early/maybe even a skelly or two for meat shielding.

Go for a +1/2 all spell skill gems amulet for more boosts and try to get a decent 80+ mana roll on it.



Uniques

Call of the Brotherhood unique ring - This is what enables us to go 100% cold conversion. It wasn't the cheapest bit of gear I bought; at the time I wrote this guide it was 8ex, but this will go down over time. (thank you to tjunker!)

The Three Dragons helm allows all our shocks to freeze, then we can use cast on freeze+comet+impetus+spell cascade+magnified effect - this thing absolutely destroys in clear and has the added benefits of freeze safety. It's a cheap helm, so this is a budget friendly way to gear up towards a pseudo cold conversion(Thank you to Rakujan!)

I'll add more/uniques later as we discover more. I would hazard a guess and say the class goldrim/lifesprig/wanderlusts will prbably be greeat early on if you're lucky enough to find em.