Infernalist Infernal Flame Caster - aka Demon Form fixes waiting room

This is a thread for all the people who wanted to be a cool demon flying around casting spells at stuff, then found out Demon Form is terrible because it unequips your weapons, so now we're making do while waiting for GGG to address it. I'm going to post my elemental caster setup which is doing alright but I'd also like to hear people's experiences with making Infernalist caster work, especially post-campaign.


Infernal Flame Cold Caster

This is the Infernalist take on the Cast on Freeze/Comet based cold framework. CoF/Comet spam has a significant mana sustain challenge. Sorcs get Arcane Surge, and stack huge amounts of mana which also gives them benefits from Archmage and MoM. We, on the other hand, have to solve the mana issue by killing ourselves.

Pyromantic Pact is 'unlimited' mana but every time you fill the globe, you take 100% of your life+ES as fire damage (mitigated by resist). So you've replaced your mana sustain problem with a life/ES sustain problem. You can sort of muddle through with ES recharges between filling your flame but the best solution I've found is the Eternal Youth keystone which makes your life flask apply to ES, letting you pretty easily tank even rapid flame buildup.

Skills
Spoiler


* Self-cast freezer: Frostbolt OR Frostbolt + Eye of Winter. Eye of Winter is a higher damage ability and gets to stuff faster than Frostbolt, but Frostbolt just sort of travels forever so it's incredible on maps with long open sightlines. Try both and see what you like. For supports, Glaciation is mandatory, and Scattershot is needed on Frostbolt, otherwise there are a lot of options, even Mobility if your damage is fine and you just want to move faster.

* Cast on Freeze/Comet: Because we get the Dynamism passive group, we do NOT need the Impetus support to get 1 Comet per freeze, this is very good. My current supports here are Magnified Effect and Spell Echo. Biting Frost is also great damage but conflicts with Spell Echo. If you are having sustain problems, Inspiration is what you want.

* Elemental Invocation/Comet: You need 20 spirit on gear to run this, which is very easy to get. This is like Cast on Freeze, except you have to manually use it, but it stores up to 3 Comets and can be free targeted, which is extremely nice as you can instantly nuke troublesome enemies. Supports are the good ones you aren't using on CoF/Comet haha, currrently I'm running Considered Casting and Rising Tempest.

* Frost Wall: Ingenuity, Icicle and Arcane Tempo are what I'm running here. This is your best way to trigger freezes on any 'large' enemies or enemies that have a charge ability.

* Frost Bomb: Strip Away and whatever else, I'm using Spell Cascade to cover more area, but you may want Cascade on one of the Comet setups.

* Self cast Comet: This is actually useful vs bosses when they're frozen, it's the best DPS thing you can do in such a situation. Use Concentrated Effect and whatever decent DPS gems you have leftover.

* Hellhound: Just make this MF as tanky as possible. Meat Shield and Elemental Army.


Passives
Spoiler

My passives at 77
https://poe2db.tw/us/passive-skill-tree/AAAABgEAYxKDSZ0G26Ptx_BzPo3OVxK4ywjOOUolqgIF7mN-lD0CFX3hbiGon08tmEHNt42BnOttuEkheXzO2NOVwhSJ49nvDH8h1zDa7TRrAnZEjC1UQsBy4HyQhfx8Fcod4d2CfFbLhXiFuTmFwERTWPYIPme8Rv-dnIR_q_ZYtuPn4hTCcVHv66LF9NW12saA2ovyyX02Nf-aj5RW8xZLm9fS3Umj9OxjTfPOP7imzCTMfw5o0teB5tdASrVBQYc9AhdQxRD6Eac1nAAA

At a bit lower level, give up the branch over to Ingenuity unless you are desperate for Int. At much lower level when you are still using mana, give up that whole soujourn over to Eternal Youth.

For Acendancy, get the doggo first. There will be a period where you just sit on 2 ascendancy points because you aren't ready to swap to Pyromantic Pact. At 6 points we can get Bringer of Flame so we're also igniting everything, which charges Elemental Invocation faster. Grinning Immolation is an option but you're locked into a Dousing Charm and it's basically equivalent to 60% Increased Crit Damage in exchange for a huge burn on yourself, blech.


Gear
Spoiler

Once you swap to Pyromantic Pact, capped fire res is mandatory. There are also a couple uniques that give +5% max fire res, but I'm not sure if they're worth using because they are otherwise not helpful to us.

At least 20 spirit from something (chest, amulet, helmet, lots of options) is mandatory.

All the usual suspects are good. Life, mana, ES, resists. Damage/crit/cast speed on weapons/amulet/rings. Yes you still want mana, the slower that fire globe fills up the better for our health.

Flask note: Vitiating is by far the best life flask prefix because we don't have mana anymore.


When do I get Pyromantic Pact?
Certainly not as soon as you can. Mana works fine for quite a while. I committed to the switch at like lvl 68 or something (went back and forth testing throughout the 60's).
Last edited by aimlessgun#1443 on Dec 11, 2024, 3:10:45 PM
Last bumped on Dec 11, 2024, 2:44:11 PM

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