I've been trying to narrow down my league starter for Heist the past couple of days. Somewhere along the line, I decided I want to do a cold DoT Occultist, more specifically a Wintertide Brand Occultist (SC-trade). I have a few reasons (that may or may not be valid, politely let me know).

Full reasoning summaries below, but TLDR: I think cold DoT Occultists will survive nerfing and might even be buffed by new Hexes. Wintertide brand also feels safe from nerfing, is non-meta, and there is always Vortex to fall back on. I may or may not be able to take advantage of new Hexes more easily. All the builds I could find were from mid-league and made use of OP harvest crafting, or unreasonable starting gear (like Shav's) so I decided to try making my own build for the first time(so be nice :). As I accumulate currency in the 1-3 weeks after start, it is very straight forward how to scale the build by going Low Life or CI.

Here is the POB: https://pastebin.com/EZmXijXg

This build is supposed to be rather meh, but viable. I used traditionally moderate, *non-Harvest-*gear. Some could be still hard to get (eg +1 cold gems, helm enchant), but they aren't required and I don't expect millions of DPS right away. No golden oils, hopefully no build limiting clusters or jewels, no multi-modding, no Tier1-2 mods, only spec'd to lvl 90 since I know I wont make 100, everything else is bonus. The 2-tone boots might be a stretch, but aren't even ilvl 86.

Heading to bed after a night playing POB; hopefully will wake up to some good replies. Thanks in advance!

**How it works:**I did a lot of reading on Wintertide Brand builds. We can proc EO with Orb of Storms for an easy 40% more, and this also allows us to benefit from lowered cold resistance by taking EE. Wintertide stages are debuff DoT damage and don't 'hit' like Vortex, so they won't proc EE ever. Should be easy to have near 100% up time of keystones. We want to build up to maximum brand stages as fast as is reasonable for single target, and apply 3 brands. So the 'DoT DPS' shown in the side bar of POB is the DPS at maximum stages for 1 brand, so multiply by 3 and we have 2mil DPS at max stages. However the brands are only at max stages for a portion of the duration (1.8s out of 4.4s), so that's not the real DPS (getting the real DPS requires a piece-wise function integral, too tired). We can increase this time at max stages by investing more in cast speed, but that comes at the cost of defensive passives/stats.

For clearing, we swap in Swiftbrand support. A handful of brand stages should be more than enough to kill mob packs, and it has AoE on kill/expiration. There is a slight delay though. Should do a good chunk of damage even on a 5-link.

We have to manually drop OOS to proc EO, and Arcane Surge is tied to Flame Dash with Phase Run and Increased Duration. We could think about putting OOS into a Trigger wand and dropping Increased Crit Strikes. I don't know if Trigger wands will work with a Curse on Hit-Ele Weakness set up though.

For debuffs, we have ele weakness on OOS hit. We run a Frostbite Skitterbot Aura with Profane Proxy and benefit from the Skitterbot shock ailment still. This is combined with Siphoning Trap for regen/leech. Both can be supported by Bonechill to increase Cold DoT taken by enemy. Skitterbots should re-arm the Siphon Trap? Thinking of putting this in trigger wand because manually managing the trap might be too clunky to work in the end, but then do the bots get triggered on and off lol? Not sure, will test. This could be the carpal tunnel build...

Defensively, I have CWDT tied to Immortal Call for damage taken reduction and Tempest Shield for the extra lightning hit and block chance. Both have Increased Duration support because I had no better ideas.

Flasks: Rumi's is always legit. My basic 'oh shit' Bubbling Flask. Quartz Flask for Dodge defense and Bleed, Basalt for Phys mitigation and curse immune, and Silver Flask for Onslaught to build brand stages quicker, with some MS. Missing Burn and am already Freeze immune.

Things I need direction on:

• What did I miss? Could it work? I'm sure there's something broken.
• Flasks check out?
• I have two free sockets in Helm. I don't have enough unreserved mana for another utility Aura though. I threw in VRF and stone golem because yolo, they can def be removed. Maybe Brand Recall for Utility? Idk how it works these days.
• Any uniques that will help out without putting a ton of strain on other gear? I came across Impresence Amulet (cold version), which historically nose-dives in price by end of first week, which could give me a free Frostbite-Blasphemy Aura. The added cold damage would probably mess up the EE though. Chaos version is more expensive, but I could get Despair for free there without messing up EE.
• Clear speed will probably be a problem. This is something I haven't found a solution to, but am willing to just work around it. The Holy Conquest notable along with swapping in Swiftbrand Support should help with this to a degree.

So, reasoning and logic behind the build:

1. I like casters/summoners best, but never played Occultist.
2. Risk management: Cold DoT Occultist is a strong build with a proven track record. Vortex Occultist is moderately meta. There's enough players on poe.ninja to make a good chunk, but not enough to attract serious attention from the nerf-hammers. It seems like one of the more properly balanced Ascendancies, where the currency investment scales reasonable with increased performance.
3. I also actually think Occultist will see some buffs to accompany the new Doom/Hex mechanic. Experimenting with brand new skills is always fun, and there's ever the chance that GGG overlooked something that makes the skill super OP.
4. That being said, I think Occultist will be poised to take advantage of the new Doom mechanic with only minor tweaking. I don't usually play more than 2 builds a league, since I prefer the endgame content. Having a base build that could potentially incorporate the new skill with minor/moderate changes means less time leveling and/or waiting for Youtube/reddit to tell me the latest meta build.
5. Why Wintertide and not Vortex? Well, I don't think WT brand will be nerfed since it was just introduced and very few players use it (0.5% on poeninja), though Vortex is probably not at risk either. Being slightly off meta can be fun (or horrible lol). I want to do an Occultist as stated before, and DoT build because I like to run/dodge/ etc from bosses. And I'm not 100% on this, but I think with Vortex, if a Boss is moving, they can move out of the AoE, so I would have to chase the boss instead of the other way around. Boss can't outmaneuver brands.
6. Last, I can always fall back to Vortex, and will probably level with it anyway. So there's some extra reliability there.
7. The build should do pretty good damage on a 5-link.
8. I am trying not to rely on Glancing Blows being accessible, since I think it is likely to be moved or nerfed. Also not relying on Intuitive Leap, or Thread of Hope because of early days cost. That said, I will try to snipe items like these with live searching, since I will be stockpiling ES gear for move to LL or CI later

​

EDIT: Thanks everyone! You've given me some things to think about, some more ideas, and made me happy that I felt like I understood some of the game mechanics enough to 'be a shitty Mathil', as /u/tingstodo puts it lol