(3.21 Path Of Exile: Crucible) Creeping Frost MACHINEGUN Trickster!

**Update** I realized I still had the projectile pierce glove implicit and not my Cold exposure implicit; this is updated in the PoB but the footage you are seeing is all done without any exposure being applied to mobs LUL

PoB: https://pobb.in/Sw06Xl4m4ecf
Current PoB(Ashes + Upgrades): https://pobb.in/ivZGizcxX-t5

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Hey Reddit i'm back again, and hopefully this time you all can SEE the content!

Explanation of the build below:

I wanted to build my creeping frost Hiero, but I need ashes of the stars and it’s around 35 div for a decent one right now.

Really wanted to get out of my league starter since I had not invested much in to it, it was feeling underpowered for the content I was trying to push at this point in the league.

Decided to respec in to Creeping frost early, but on Trickster. My idea was that I would make a nice smooth mapper capable of clearing all content including all bosses(Ubers excluded) with only the gear in my stash.

I didn’t have many of the goodies Creeping Frost calls for like Woke Spell Echo, Dialla’s, Ashes of the stars, Oriath’s end etc.. but they will come!

Creeping Frost is really nice since it has shotgunning capability which we take full advantage of using Pinpoint + Greater Volley;I ran the build with Intensity linked as well for a long while yesterday; the damage is still good but the cast speed takes a big hit vs Spell echo so I don’t think it’s worth running intensity.. Greater Volley works better than GMP in that it allows shotgunning from virtually anywhere on your screen vs having to be right on top of your target.

Another great thing about Creeping Frost is the leftover chilling DoT it leaves when you fire it - this takes care of stragglers that could be left behind and also chills anything that touches it.

The Offense of the build consists of just a few things

We use Pinpoint + Greater volley for shotgunning potential - Pinpoint adds 20% More damage per intensity, multiply this by 6 overlapping proj and you are gaining 360% more damage from a single support gem

The downside to Intensity stacks is that they fall off quickly when you move, and will lose ALL stacks if you use a mobility skill.

To get around this we use Apex mode - it allows you to gain an intensity stack every half second if you have gained intensity recently. With this jewel, we maintain max intensity stacks after just a single cast if we have cast our main ability recently. It is also easy to pick up nice corruptions on them for cheap.

We use greater volley instead of GMP because of it’s consistency with overlapping. You have no choice but to be directly on top of your single target to deal max damage with GMP; with Greater volley, it doesn’t really seem to matter where you are most of the time.

Woke Spell echo gives us a repeat on every cast; we cast just shy of 10 times/sec with our buffs up at the moment meaning we are hitting our target nearly 20 times/sec/projectile; it also gives a juicy 20% double damage.

Lastly we maintain INT as our highest attribute to gain Profane ground on crit from Rational Doctrine. This gives us increased chance to crit our enemies and lowers their resistance by 10%

As for the Defenses

We achieve Full Ele. Ailment immunity through our shield, boots and the Thick Skin wheel

Not perma, but very nice flask uptime through use of Traitor keystone w/ Alchemists genius. I’m beginning to feel like CaptainLance with how much I use this Keystone in my builds. It’s just SO GOOD!

100% Stun avoidance through Flask mod, Brutal restraint mod on Quickstep + Survivalist

Near perma uptime on phasing from quartz flask

EB+MOM w/ Trickster ES overleech

Ghost Dance

10% Instant leech through mastery wheel + Doryani’s Lesson + Vitality Life gain on hit watcher’s eye

100% Spell suppression + 72% Chance to evade/23% Chance to block

90% MS without onslaught and our action speed cannot be lowered from 108%

All of this combines for an incredibly smooth blaster that I can’t WAIT to take to the next stages. IF you were ever hoping to try out Creeping frost shotgun but afraid you wouldn’t have fun without ashes and all the other goodies, give this a spin. The price of this setup would currently sit around 35ish divines, but this can easily change with Rational Doctrine being an Uber boss drop.

It is still a work in progress as I have not worked in ashes/diallas/empower etc yet..Am poor right now but I’ll fix that over the next few days with some good ol’ fashion farming and crafting. - Quick side note, the Loathing craft on the helm is not needed at this current moment; I used it in preparation of grabbing my Ashes soon and will be adding an additional point to one of my small reservation clusters to run Haste full time.