PoE 3.22 | Freezing Pulse/Ice Spear Totems - Phoenix Showcase with endgame-ish gear

Pros: -Good map clear with Freezing Pulse, don't really have to swap to Ice Spear unless you wanna nuke a tanky boss/rare. -Can start clearing high-tier maps with a few divines invested and farm up all the currency for the endgame gear. -Can run all map mods, some of them are just a bit annoying to run. Ele Reflect is doable but you will have to resummon totems all the time. If you ever run a no-regen or like 80% reduced recovery map I recommend removing Arcane Cloak from your left-mouse button and swapping it back to move-only for that map. -Can probably do most uber bosses but you need way more skill to dodge everything since you're a glass-cannon.(I've done uber shaper but used all 6 portals to ball phase deaths, and I did uber cortex deathless, haven't tried any others) -Will most likely be a very good Sanctum farmer since you can melt bosses fast, ofc I haven't tried that yet but I will do lots of sanctum when the league launches to see just how good of a farmer it is for that content. Cons: -0 Defences and around 3000 life at most and 600 es or something from just random gear, so expect to die randomly in maps. Although freezing everything and blinding all enemies+Mark the Prey anointed help with survivability. You do also have about a 1k damage absorb from Arcane Cloak but that's not always up. Your only defence really is Mind Over Matter. -Atziri is a very annoying bossfight because you can't really tell your totems to attack the right clone, they will most likely kill themselves to reflect a LOT even if using Ice Spear, one of the most annoying fights to do on this build. Another annoying one is the unique Strand map boss, by the time you place a totem it runs away, it always takes ages to kill so I recommend doing it at the lowest possible map tier when you have decent gear and lvl21 freezing pulse. -This isn't a hardcore build, I've only played it in softcore trade. Its just a very bursty glass-cannon, I have 312 deaths in Crucible league where I did 40/40 with this build, but we all know how rippy the forge of the titans at lvl84 was. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Act 1 You will need to mule a Sniper's Mark from a ranger, so why not also get a second quicksilver flask while you're doing that! Make ranger, kill hillock, pick Galvanic Arrow for aoe, use your Burning Arrow on single-target. Rush to tidal island sidequest for quicksilver flask, get 3 eggs in mud flats and rush to the wall to click which opens up submerged passage, logout when you click wall and log back into ranger. Pick Sniper's Mark as quest reward, vendor all items the ranger has, maybe keep flasks to 3-to-1 them on your templar. Put Sniper's Mark and all currency+quicksilver and mana/life flasks in stash, delete ranger. Make templar, kill Hillock and vendor Elemental Proliferation and Glacial Hammer for scroll fragments. Take any quest reward from Hillock quest and vendor it too. Buy Freezing Pulse. This is just a me thing, but if you want to always check Targkleigh's shop for 10% movement speed boots, just type "move" in the search bar and look through his items, he has them pretty commonly. Link Freezing Pulse with Added Lightning Damage after you reach The Lower Prison and get the waypoint at the very start of that zone. Buy Holy Flame Totem and also buy a 2nd Added Lightning Damage to link it with. Use Frostblink early on, get Flame Dash and Clarity when you kill Brutus. Link Flame Dash to Arcane Surge.(also dont overlevel arcane surge, leave it at like lvl3 so your flame dash will proc it all the time) Also buy a Spell Totem and Ice Spear to level in some off-hand wands for later! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Act 2 You want to be looking for a R-B-B 3-link of any kind, maybe check vendors when you get to town and look on the ground. Also this is just a tip for the whole campaign, but always check every rare wand that drops, and dual-wield 2 wands. You can always find better wands and the dps increase really makes a difference, especially when you can craft on them with your bench later. You kill all bandits for 2 skill points in this act. After rescuing Helena and killing fidelitas for the baleful gem, pick Herald of Thunder as your quest reward and use it alongside Clarity. Also buy Wave of Conviction and hopefully you have that R-B-B 3-link item by now. Replace Holy Flame Totem with Wave of Conviction and link it with the Spell Totem you've been leveling until now. Your new 3-link should look like this: Spell Totem-Wave of Conviction-Added Lightning Damage. Use this alongside Freezing Pulse-Added Lightning Damage and you should have pretty good dps for random mobs and Sniper's Mark helps a lot on single-target. You can safely throw away/vendor Holy Flame Totem now since you wont be using it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Act 3 Go through the act normally, check Hargan's shop for a 4-linked B-B-G-R item, can be either gloves,boots,helm or chestpiece whatever suits your current gem setup. You can still buy a regular 4-link thats an int base(so pure energy shield) with a low intelligence requirement and use a few chromatics on it, should be fairly easy to get those colors. Or just check the items that drop while doing the act, you only need this 4-link right before going to Dominus and after you've done your first lab. Once you get to the Library do Siosa's quest to unlock a bunch of support gems in his shop, and pick Cold Penetration, put it somewhere in your gear so it can level up. When you've done everything else,unlocked normal lab and you have the Tower Key, I recommend blazing through normal lab and picking Pursuit of Faith when you ascend to a Hierophant.(the choices are also included in the leveling skill trees) Once you've done lab you can finally swap to your main 4-link totem setup, and THEN AND ONLY THEN do you take Ancestral Bond, the big keystone in the top left of the skill tree. Just make sure you save up a free point to take it when you swap to totems. So you can completely throw away your Wave of Conviction and Added Lightning Damage. Your new 4-link setup should look like this: Freezing Pulse-Added Lightning Damage-Cold Penetration-Spell Totem And now you can go and kill dominus and move onto act 4! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Act 4 This act is fairly simple and linear, when you do the first quest to get the banner and open the way to the mines, choose Summon Lightning Golem as your quest reward, put him anywhere in your gear and just manually summon him for more dps. At some point you'll get a quest reward with a bunch of support gems, pick Greater Multiple Projectiles and replace your Cold Penetration with it, now the build starts to feel really good with this aoe and single-target. You can safely throw away Cold Penetration since we won't be needing it anymore. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Act 5 Honestly not much to say here, just keep on the lookout on the ground for any wand upgrades, this is the most linear and short act of them all. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Act 6 When you get to act 6 first do Lilly Roth's sidequest to fully clear the Twilight Strand, once you complete this quest you can now buy any gem in the game from her, turn in div cards to her and even invite her to your hideout with all those services! So once Lilly has her whole shop open to you, buy an Eternal Blessing Support and a Zealotry aura from her, and put those 2 in a linked Blue-Red item. You can now throw away Clarity and Herald of Thunder and use Zealotry instead. Also buy Increased Critical Damage,Multiple Totems,Arcane Cloak,Hypothermia and Added Cold Damage from Lilly and slap them all in your offhand weapons to level alongside your Ice Spear that you've been leveling this whole time. Hypothermia is used wayy later when you get a 6-link Soul Mantle but still worth leveling in an off-hand along with 5 Ice Spear gems when you get to maps. And that's it! You can do the entire campaign up to Act 10 Kitava and the merciless labyrinth(I recommend doing it before Kitava himself) with this gem setup, all the leveling skill trees are in this pob and the order of ascendancy choices is included. Also I don't recommend swapping to Ice Spear for single-target until you're in maps with proper gear and a diamond flask, Freezing Pulse is plenty single-target even against act bosses. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Early Game Maps Well, you've gotten to maps. Now what? I recommend you either buy a random corrupted 6-linked chestpiece that has B-B-G-G-R-R or if you have the currency just buy a Tabula Rasa and use the 6-link setup shown in the "Early Maps" Skills setup. And remember just keep Ice Spear in a single socket somewhere in your gear to easily swap it with Freezing Pulse for bosses or tanky rares and so it can still level up. All the other support gems are the same, its very easy to swap between them. Also buy 5 Ice Spear gems from act 1 Nessa so they're lvl11 and put them in your off-hand along with your Hypothermia to level while in maps. I recommend buying the unique mana flask Lavianga's Spirit because without it having Arcane Cloak on left-click feels horrible and you keep running out of mana, the flask should be fairly cheap. And in my opinion a great starter weapon until you can swap to the endgame gear version is the unique staff Taryn's Shiver , doesn't need to be 6-linked or anything. You can just buy a staff and use jeweller's orbs on it later to make it 6-socket so you can fit all your gems in it.(the gems that go in the staff arent suuper important anyways, you just really want Arcane Cloak-Arcane Surge-Increased Duration. So even a 3-linked staff would work to get you started on mapping. Use whichever substitute falsk you want until you can get a Dying Sun. And getting a staff is so important because you get that one staff crit wheel and a staff mastery, Taryn's Shiver just so happens to be a great starter staff for this build and its fairly cheap a few days into a league. That's it, now you can start mapping. Obviously you dont have to buy the staff right away, you can just start maps with your 2 wands and a 5-link corrupted chestpiece or whatever 6-link you could get your hands on, and save up currency. If you only have enough currency for a 5-link chest, the gem you would drop is Added Cold Damage so your 5-link to start off maps would be B-B-G-R-R -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Midgame In my opinion the biggest single-target dps item you could save up for is the unique ring Anathema. It makes it so you can use 3 curses on an enemy AND your Sniper's Mark!(although I expect this ring to be expensive) The next items in priority imo are definetly Heatshiver and Dying Sun.(make sure you quality up the flask, and use an Enkindling Orb on it until you roll 60% increased effect, the range of it being 60-70 doesnt matter at all you just wanna hit that mod) That 60% effect on your Dying Sun basically makes it give you 1 extra projectile, which is a nice dps increase. You'll also want to buy the appropriate cluster jewels so you can actually start spending your skill points on them, since you'll be sitting on unallocated skill points for your early mapping till you can save up for cluster jewels. All 3 clusters are in the pob. And exalted orb slam all your cluster jewels until they have 4 mods each, if you hit resist on any of them that really helps with capping res later when using The Annihilating Light. And finally, you're gonna want to save up currency to first buy a nice cheap 5-linked Soul Mantle with these colors: G-G-B-B-R. And you simply move your 6-link Freezing Pulse setup into it and throw away Spell Totem, so now its a 5-link. To become immune to curses simply use 1 Kikazaru unique ring and 2 jewels with reduced effect of curses on you, you can put em anywhere in your tree or in your medium cluster jewels if you got them. Together with your new chestpiece you want to also buy a Self-Flagellation jewel.(will probably be expensive but its worth the damage increase) You'll also want rare alva temple gloves with the suffix "of Puhuarte" which gives "30-50% increased damage with hits against chilled enemies" and is coupled with some nice high cold resist. If you can also craft "+1 Level of Socketed Projectile Gems, Projectiles Pierce an additional target" on these gloves as shown in my pob gear. This is nice for bossfights that have adds, so that Ice Spear can at least pierce one enemy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Endgame First you're gonna want to buy a 6-link Soul Mantle with these colors: G-G-G-B-B-R and use the appropriate 6-link gem setup in the "Endgame" skills section. Then you want a Heavshiver with "Ice Spear fires an additional projectile" lab enchant. And finally, the final 2 items you'll want are The Annihilating Light WITH A "60% reduced elemental resistances" ROLL! This is very important to make it easier to cap our res, so look for a staff with this lowest possible roll on that mod. You can make it 6-socket easily yourself later, doesn't need to be 6-linked at all. Together with it we are also saving up divines for our Coward's Legacy unique belt, when we get it then and only then we take Pain Attunement on the skill tree. Getting that belt is usually cheaper if you have a tier 3 unique sacrifice room temple yourself and you just buy the vial and belt which upgrades into it and make it yourself, if you're lazy just buy an uncorrupted Coward's Legacy though. Ok, so you've bought these 2 items. Now what? You might notice your resists will plummet when you equip the staff, this is the time for you to use every single jewel slot you've taken on the skill tree. Buy jewels like mine with reduced effect of curses on you and double resistances. Ofc look for jewels that cover the resists you're missing. With 5 of these jewels + using upgraded Yugul minor pantheon power you should be immune to curses while wearing the belt! Beware, you are forced to use upgraded minor Yugul pantheon when wearing Coward's Legacy to be curse immune unless you buy expensive jewels with a perfect 30% reduced curse effect on you rolls and resists. Another way to get that extra bit of reduced curse effect is to path towards Steeped in the Profane on the skill tree, its gonna cost you 4 more points so you either have to be lvl98 or unspec some life nodes or those all res str,dex nodes to get that. So you can swap to a different minor pantheon power only if all 5 of your rare jewels have exactly 30% reduced effect of curses on you, since then you have exactly the 150% you need. And at the same time you can equip the staff and hopefully have 75% res on everything still.(I think you need about 190% in all 3 resistances before equipping the staff) Update: There is a tattoo from the new league mechanic that replaces int travel nodes with "6% reduced effect of curses on you" , we can replace all 21 of our int travel nodes with it to gain 126% reduced curse effect then just use only 1 25% jewel to reach curse immunity with Coward's Legacy on. This also means we can use any minor pantheon power we want instead of only using Yugul. That's all the gear I can think of that you can farm up, now with this staff you're gonna be dealing triple damage and even uber bosses should melt at a nice pace, ofc this build has 3k hp at best so its a complete glass-cannon. Which catalysts to use? Well imo you should get a Citrine Amulet,use 4 attribute catalysts on it while its normal-quality(white) and use Shrieking or Deafening essences of sorrow to hit high dex and good resists on it, this way you solve your entire dex requirement with 1 item and you aren't pressured to get more dex suffixes on other gear, which will make getting stuff like good alva temple gloves way easier. I personally put resist catalysts on my one rare ring. And finally on Coward's Legacy I used attribute catalysts because they're the most useful on it. Oh and the Anathema ring just has caster mod catalysts so it can give us more cast speed. The annoint I use(Mark the Prey) is on my amulet in the gear section. One last thing you could do if you want is buy a Bottled Faith to replace your Diamond Flask. Though I only recommend using this unique flask for bossing because Diamond Flask is just nicer uptime for regular mapping. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Min-Maxing The Build There are still a lot of things you could get to have even crazier dps numbers, but in my opinion everything I've listed above is achievable by the average player in softcore and the dps is very nice for most content. This section is just for the people who really wanna push this build and spend 60+ Divines(probably way more than that) to min-max the hell out of it, so let's list out some items. First you can six-link your staff(with 1500 fusings) or buy a 6-linked non-corrupted Annihilating Light with the 60% reduced ele resistances roll, make it B-B-B-G-G-R Move your whole Arcanist Brand curse setup+Punishment and a lvl4 Enhance support into the staff, you drop Cast on Death and rearrange your gems accordingly, you also drop Unbound Ailments from your Vaal Cold Snap and move that 2-link into the boots, then move Portal and your 3-linked Arcane Surge into the gloves. Ofc any of the 4-links can go in boots,gloves or helm just do whatever colors are easiest for you to make. You could save up to buy a Sublime Vision jewel with the Zealotry roll on it which makes you unaffected by curses while affected by that aura, meaning you can drop all your reduced curse effect rare jewels and get ones with resists,damage and life. The jewel drops from Uber Shaper so you could also try farming it yourself. You can also use a different minor pantheon power than Yugul when you get this jewel.(Or if you've replaced all 21 travel int nodes with reduced curse effect too) You can also spend lots of time and/or currency trying to craft a crazy +2 amulet, but it will be very annoying also trying to cap your resists at the same time as having those 2 prefixes, imo it's not worth most players time to go for an amulet like that. And when you've done all that? Well you can get a Rain of Splinters unique jewel for EVEN MORE PROJECTILES. Because we didn't have enough. You could also buy Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles but that's usually a veeery expensive gem. And finally, you can always experiment with Legion Jewels and see what crazy stats you can get wherever you place them, there is lots of potential in those jewels. A pob example of what a min-maxed version of this build would look like: https://pobb.in/Og8Abk0mbQqB -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Important Stuff to remember Alright, so the first thing to remember is that you don't take the keystone passive Pain Attunement until you have the Coward's Legacy unique belt, because only while wearing the belt you count as "low-life" and the keystone gives you damage. Another small yet important detail, you're probably gonna be using Freezing Pulse for even T16 map bosses once you have decent gear since it has good enough dps for that. Putting all your totems directly in melee of the boss is fine. But when you swap to Ice Spear for stuff like pinnacle atlas bosses you want to actually space out your totems slightly far away from the boss, but still close enough so they can all actually target the boss and cast Ice Spear. The reason for this is that Ice Spear has 2 stages, and it needs a bit of travel time to reach the 2nd stage where it does way more damage. A small tip for leveling your Awakened Added Cold Damage gem to level 5 super fast: Buy 4 Wild Brambleback beasts.(they were 20-30c in crucible league so I expect them to be around that price) These beasts give you a beastcraft recipe that raises the level of a non-corrupted awakened gem by 1, so you just use em 4 times on the gem and you got it to lvl5! Also there's no real point in corrupting it since lvl6 would only add like 1% damage. You're better off leaving the gem uncorrupted since if it bricks and goes -1 level then you're forced to grind exp for it to hit lvl5 again and gain back its +1 all cold gems stat. And if there's any confusion as to why you would switch from a normal 6-link chestpiece to a 5-link Soul Mantle,this is because the chest itself has a built-in lvl20 Spell Totem support. So you're actually still on a 6-link but you can use an extra gem instead of your old Spell Totem gem! And then when you buy a 6-linked Soul Mantle you're on a "7-link" because you get 6 gems+the Spell Totem in the chestpiece. I hope this answers any questions you might have had! Shameless plug: https://www.twitch.tv/xyton_98