An unnecessarily expensive Cold SST Champion.

About a week and a half ago I became enamored with the Spectral Shield Throw skill, but was told that it was hard to scale, the clear was mediocre, and that it was hard to build proper defenses while also scaling damage. I set out to prove all 3 of those things wrong....by investing a shit load of currency into the build. Yeah I know you can take almost any skill and make it good with investment, but I just wanted to share my own personal take on the skill and overall build.

I started with the idea that converting to Cold was the best course of action for the utility of freeze, and that since SST doesn't have the highest attack speed, it can chunk enemies for solidly high damage per hit and freeze a great many higher HP enemies outright. Of course to do that I would have to convert 100% physical to cold, which was accomplished with the Winter Spirit Cold Conversion Mastery, a Glove Craft, and a Hatred Watcher's Eye mod. For cheaper versions of the build, a pair of corrupted Hrimsorrow's with maybe + to levels of AoE Gems or Aura Gems to put your Auras in would be a good idea.

The next hurdle was scaling damage, and that was accomplished with the quad combo of Phantasmal SST, a 30% Quality Ashes of the Stars, an Emperor's Vigilance, and the Seething Fury unique jewel. Phantasmal SST's alt quality grants 1% crit multi per 100 energy shield on your shield per quality. With a 30% quality Ashes, this means 50 crit multi per 100 shield ES. Emperor's Vigilance's ES caps out in the 390s, meaning we get an additional 150% crit multi, which is nothing to scoff at. Seething Fury also grants crit multi per ES on your Shield, at 4% per 10 ES. At the aforementioned 390+ ES, we're getting another 156% crit multi for a total of 306% extra crit multi over normal. Seething Fury also grants .15% base off-hand crit chance per 10 ES on your Shield, for an additional 5.85%, raising our base crit to 10.85%, which is an incredibly high base crit chance to scale off of. SST itself also grants a hefty 203 to 304 base off-hand physical damage, and 5 to 7 extra physical damage per 10 armour on your shield, which with the 1870 of a max percentile Emperor's Vigilance amounts to 1,122 extra physical damage, or a total of 1,375.5 base physical damage, on a skill with a base crit of 10.85% and an additional crit multi of 306% from just the holy quartet of gems and items.

Additional damage is scaled everywhere with expensive jewels, awakened gems, and Eldritch implicits, but the above paragraph is the base framework for any good SST build in the current patch after Emperor's Vigilance's massive buff.

Next was defenses, and for that I chose Champion for his Fortify, easy access to tons of armour and evasion, and solid tree position for capping Spell Suppression. In the end I achieved about 90k armour, 90k evasion, Perma-Fortiy, 100% Spell Suppression, and 100% elemental ailment avoidance.

Next jump was to sustain, and for that I chose a controversial one, and that was going Vaal Pact for massive amounts of Leech per second. Instead of going for the even more expensive route of picking up Brutal Fervour Forbidden jewels, I went with the cheaper but almost as good route of Petrified Blood. For those not in the know, when you are below 50% HP, Petrified Blood essentially gives overleech, because leech only ends when your HP is full, which it never will be with Petrified Blood forcibly keeping you from recovering beyond low-life. There is an extra trick here however, and that is to reserve just below 50% of your lifepool, i.e reserving about 49.5% of your life and keeping 51.5% unreserved. This allows you to flask above 50% HP (the only way to go above low-life with PB), and then use any skill at all (which is granted a life cost with PB, but almost all of our skills except our main skill are on Lifetap anyway), which allows you to proc Adrenaline whenever you want for hefty extra damage, movement speed, attack and cast speed, and 10% extra physical damage reduction. Just hit your flask, and then use your skills, simple as. There is one caveat to not having regen and using Blood Rage though, is that when your overleech runs out and there are no mobs to leech from you will quickly degen. This is easily solved by having Blood Rage in either your weapon or Shield to simply weapon swap and turn it off.

Clear was the final step. SST has solid clear already, but I wanted to turn it up a notch. To achieve this I went for a pair of Elevated +2 Pierce Eldritch Implicit gloves, an Ewar's Mirage corrupted with 'Skills fire an additional Projectile' + Damage Penetrates 10% elemental resistance, and Awakened Fork Support instead of Hypothermia for pure clear scenarios. For bossing I swap back to Hypothermia and my Cold Stat-Stick which is visible in the PoB. How the skills and projectiles interact with Pierce, Chain and Fork here is as follows: The main shield can both Fork and Chain, it will Fork twice with Awakened Fork, producing a total of 4 shields per 1 shield hit on an enemy (assuming the initial forks also hit), producing 8 projectiles in a circle, all of which Pierce twice and then Chain once (from Ewar's Mirage). After forking, the main 4 Shield Projectiles will then Chain 4 times (once again an additional Chain from Ewar's Mirage), with each hit on an enemy also producing 8 more projectiles that pierce twice and then chain once. With all of these mechanics working together, the clear becomes very consistent and smooth, and is fantastic for clearing out dense packs and even Legions with little to no issue.

This is a lot of words, but how about some PoBs and videos?

Here's the final PoB of my character: https://pastebin.com/ysjNJe2i

And here's of videos showcasing a little of what the character can do:

275% Quant Twisted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efDZphm7u74

Dunes Map with Legion/Abyss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_3MQ7nDGUc

The character can also easily clear juiced 60% Delirious Maps, and I even managed to make it to Wave 30 on Simulacrum before accidentally dying to a Kosis slam, and then being completely unable to get back into the fight before being effectively 1 shot by 500 mobs crowding the portal. With smarter play I'm sure it could be done, but I'm not generally a Simulacrum guy.

Total investment in this character was about...hard gulp, 250-275 Divines. I know more specialized characters that are better than this one in certain departments can be made for far less, but this ended up being my pet project that I wanted to dump currency into to see how far I could personally push it while remaining a well-rounded character that was capable of doing most content in the game barring Uber-bosses, and effectively as well.

If you have any questions about the build, or SST in general, feel free to ask. I've quickly becomes quite knowledgeable about the skill's strengths and weaknesses, and how to effectively scale it.