Life Stacking Winter Orb Shaman, a love story

How I learned to love orb

BUDGET: LESS THAN 10 DIVINES.

Link to my profile

Hi, I just wanted to share my build for Phrecia, a life stacking worber shaman. Why winter orb? Because worb is a homie. Wanna shield charge blindly into a pack? Worb has your back. Wanna just... open a door? Worb has your back. Wanna run super fast* through spawning influence packs? Again, worb has your back. As long as you have charges on it, it'll freeze the first thing it sees. It's a little sniper that just sits on your back and keeps you safe(ish). More on defenses later.

Just a small disclaimer, this is my first "original" build, so I might have missed some pretty obvious things. I'd love to hear feedback.

So how does this build work? It's pretty simple, you charge your worb, run to a back, and if it's alive, you charge it. We don't really scale cast speed, so you'll need to stand and deliver to deal bigger damage. Herald of ice does a lot of the heavy lifting. Things get frozen, and pop in a very satisfying cascade.

How do we scale?

We have many ways to scale:

Offenses

1. We scale life, first and foremost. This fuels rathpith, giving us both crit and %spell damage. We use the bog shaman to scale crazy flat life on our armor by making large es numbers. Our tree also goes around to pick up as much easy life as possible. It also scales our defenses, because it's life.
2. Crit. This is a crit build.
3. Gem levels, since Worb is a spell. We use dragons flight as it's 30c right now. Hurry and buy before this build becomes meta :)
4. Void Beacon FB/FF. These cheap jewels (around a div each) gives us damage and crucially, reduced enemy regen, letting us chip down really tanky things.

Defenses

1. We're a low life build, using petrified blood. I guess Rathpith cares not for where the life goes, as long as you have it. You can reserve it to use more heralds and the damage stays the same. I'm sitting at ~10k life, so 5k with pet blood.
2. Armor, we use determ for our big aura.
3. Block. This is a marriage of convenience, since lots of life nodes exist by block stuff. We don't hit cap, but might be able to with jewels? I'm at 39% attack and 42% spell with tempest shield. We also annoint Testudo for easy block.
4. Auras. We use determ, tempest shield, pet blood, vitality with a leech watchers eye, and herald of ice. I'll share my pob a the bottom so you can see how I did it with reservation.
5. Enfeeble in Blasphemy. With the Vile imprecations ascendency node, this gives us almost 30 reduced damage taken from mobs nearby.

After trying other life stacking builds, I didn't like how they had no regen or other defensive layers. We aren't gonna hit 16k life with this build, or 200million dps, and that wasn't my goal. I wanted to be relatively tanky, and clear comfortably. Which leads me to the pro's and con's.

Pros

1. Worb is super comfy to play, just charge it
2. Herald of ice
3. decently tanky. We have an ehp of 59k, with phys max hit of 16 with endurance charges, which we get with enduring composure and enduring cry. We have 50k ele max hit.
4. It's probably only gonna be playable during phrecia, so might as well!

Cons

1. We don't do the most damage in the world currently. Tooltip is currently 10k, so I guess that's per proj? I can clear t16s on my alright gear.
2. We aren't the fastest. We're really just running around. We use shield charge and regular frost blink. We'd kill ourselves if we used trans FB, since Rathpith takes health with each cast.
3. Min maxing will be expensive. Those grand spectrums aren't cheap, but just getting going was fine with my limited budget.

If you still wanna play it, I'd highly encourage it. This is a temp league, and this might not be viable after. It's a blast!

Current character: https://pobb.in/cL9_CJOvgtVE