Introduction.

The intention behind this post, is to mostly make a guide for players with some experience that wish to dabble into build making, As such this post is not just about the build itself, but also about the process behind why I made the decisions behind it, to also help those that are somewhat scared to make builds. If you just want to pob and the tldr, there will be one at the end of this post.

Also, two things to keep in mind, I am not an experienced build maker, in fact this is my first time even doing an actually serious build guide, and second, I'm not an english native so I expect some mistakes here and there.

The basics of the build

The main skill of this build is Glacial Hammer, why am I bothering with a strike skill in 2023 poe? Well mainly because of these reasons.

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• It has some cool interactions with heatshiver and frostbreath.
• It makes ice shatter noises.
• I think it’s neat.

Glacial hammer also has two quirks, the first one its that it converts all physical damage to cold, and the second, and by far the most important, is that each third attack made with this build has a massive freeze multiplier, making it that even very small hits can actually freeze almost everything in the game. But seeing this interaction, we should look forward with things that synergize with this, making third hits bigger.

We can take advantage of this three hits bonus with two gem supports, multistrike and ruthless. Both of these gems synergize really well with glacial hammer. Considering that everything is working together we have a third hit that has 140% more damage, and that's freezing as if it made 400% more damage on top.

If you are somewhat lost with this interaction we can break a little bit how damage works in this game and how it calculates ailments. To freeze our target, we need to do enough damage to surpass his ailment threshold, this sounds fancy but it's just a number that usually is the mob maximum hp and in big bosses it's a fraction of its maximum hp. Usually, in normal conditions we would be almost unable to freeze the boss, since our damage is nowhere close to those thresholds, but since we are scaling so many multipliers on our third hits, we can easily surpass those thresholds. Just consider this, if we had a tiny hit of 100, we would then add a 140% extra damage on top, so it turns into 240 but then, glacial hammer quirk comes into play and we are almost doing 1000 damage when it comes to freeze calculation, that is a x10 increase in *freezing potential*^™

Also another thing to note, is that critical strikes, always apply any elemental ailment they possibly can on a crit. This means that we do not need to worry about freeze/chill/shock chances.

But why are we worrying so much about freezing

Well this is where build enabling uniques come into play. Heatshiver is by far, the most important item in this build, and without it we lose half of our damage. What this item does is grant a massive 100% EXTRA cold damage as fire if we are attacking a frozen enemy. Considering that we are hitting with 100% cold damage, this pretty much means that it doubles our damage as long as we hit something frozen., which again, it's made pretty easy thanks to how many things we have that multiplies our *freezing potential*^tm

But wait, we can get even freezier

By taking advantage of Frostbreath, which is a really cheap unique, we can also get a really good weapon for this build specifically. This weapon has a terrible damage profile, but it has a really nice trick, as long as the enemy is chilled, it will do double damage. On its own this does not justify using the weapon, but this also opens up a new road in which we can look for synergistic interactions.

Because the attacks with that weapon do double damage (as long as the enemy is chilled) that means that any added damage we add to our attacks, is effectively doubled. So as we did with the glacial hammer quirk with freeze, we now have to do the same and look for any good sources of added damage we can find.

One of the first that probably comes to mind is herald of ice since it grants us almost 100 added extra damage, thanks to the weapon that makes it 200. But we use many more, rings with added damage, jewels with added damage, you get it. This in the end, transforms a really bad weapon into an excellent weapon, that is hard to replace without massive investment into a rare weapon.

The more in depth look into the build.

Just with those three things that were mentioned earlier, the truth is that the build is made, and from here onwards it really comes to how you really want to define it. If you liked what you saw and think you are getting a good idea for it, I would personally recommend that you go and do it. Crunch those numbers and try different things until it works out, and if it does not, no worries you can come back here or maybe look at other sources of inspiration, poe.ninja or other creators have built guides about this skill, and most of them have alternative routes to make this build work.

--- ¿What about the rest of the gear?

Well, the rest of the gear is not that important to the build itself, and I am sure my build is not the most giga optimized of them all, but still, these are the rest of the gears that make the freezing machine work.

We need to keep in mind what ways do we want to scale our damage, for this build in particular, considering the items we are using already, added damage is the obvious choice, but critical strike is also one of the best ways to scale hit damage, so we also look for ways to increase critical chance and critical damage.

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1. Abyss jewels, these things can fit so much added damage inside that they are great fits for our build, they help a lot with our stats needs (mainly dex and int), and can even fit a bit of an extra critical damage multiplier. They are somewhat cheap too and not too hard to craft. But that's not all, since we benefit a lot by using these jewels we can put them with a Tecrod’s gaze, another unique that gives us 40% crit strike chance with our attacks per murderous abyss jewels, since we use 5 (including the unique) we get the maximum that jewel can give us, that is 200% increased crit chance, overall a very good combo. We can also take full advantage of an stygian vise in the belt slot, something that usually is a good item by itself, becomes even better thanks to our murderous jewel stacking shenanigans.
2. Yoke of suffering, honestly this is also a really good and cheap unique, but I think the build can work just as well with a good amulet. This amulet gives some resistances, and some attributes, both of which are nice additions, but the reason we use it are both of its extremely good modifiers: “all elemental damage can shock” and “Enemies take 5% increased damage for each ailment you have inflicted on them”. These two modifiers are amazing for the build, since we can shock reliably even pinnacle bosses for around ~20% effect thanks to the amulet, and also we can make them take 20% extra damage thanks to all the ailments we can apply. This ends up being a 40% increased damage taken in the end. A lot of extra damage, but it also has a big opportunity cost since amulets are really good gear pieces.
3. Mark of the elder is also a good item for this build for the reasons we stated just above, it grants a substantial amount of damage to our attacks, and has a really interesting modifier “Increased damage if your other ring is a shaper item”, if we put a shaper influenced ring, something that can be achieved pretty early in a league, we can get a really good item for our build, specially if we take into consideration its extra rarity and fill the other slot with a not so good/expensive ring.
4. The rest of the rest, just comes up with getting as much resists as possible in order to get our resistances capped, getting life and other defenses that will be explained a bit later. But really that's the gear part of the build completely covered

What about the tree?

I intentionally did leave this to the second half of this post because I think this is where the greater variety and customization comes into play, In my Pob I have a bunch of trees planned, but there are many and I mean, many ways you can do a tree for this build. Also I believe that it's easier to toy around in POB with the tree, than it is with gearing. I won’t go as in depth as I did with the gear because it would take forever and it's much easier to understand.

First of all, the ascendancy

I personally chose berserk, but I am aware that slayer and raider are widely played. I simply chose what I did because I love marauders and I would love to try the new chieftain build nodes with some forbidden jewels, but that is honestly a bit out of the scope of this guide.

Berserk gives us a lot of the stuff we like in this build. It gives us a lot of extra damage, attack speed and move speed, all of them are great for our build. Also for some endgame dream options we have some very good nodes for forbidden jewels, but again, we wont delve deep into that. Also it has a pretty good starting area for a melee strike build.

In the ascendancy itself we go for the rage nodes, and the blitz branch too. We could go for aspect of carnage, but honestly I don’t think this build needs more damage and it definitely cannot afford to lose more defenses. If you feel like you want that, its up to you really.

Okay, now lets really do the tree

It really its the same as with the gear, but it being much straight forward. You know what the build needs already so we just need to focus on that. We can get a lot of crit related clusters, elemental damage clusters and of course, defensive nodes.

If you want to see my tree, and the leveling routes they are in the Pob. But the main things to keep in mind is that we really need the accuracy nodes, the splash damage nodes and a really good mastery is the one that treats monster resistances as inverted 25% of the time. Thanks to that we can ditch an elemental curse and use assassin mark on bosses. But just take a look at Poe.ninja and see how different the trees can be.

The cluster in the build

I am not the biggest fan of cluster jewels, but this build just needs one, and should be one of the first things you focus on after getting a heatshiver and frost breath. Since there is no realistic way we can get enough mana regen to sustain our mana, we need to depend on leech, on the beginning we can path to the mana leech node just below the slayer starting point, but later we should refund those points and get a decent cluster with Fuel the Fight, since that node also gives us mana leech and that way we don’t need to take a suboptimal route. Clusters may seem a bit daunting at first, but in this case you can buy a large cluster jewel with 8 passive skills and try to craft it yourself, most of the notables you can get are good for the build, so as long as you get the one we are looking for, it should be fine. To get the node itself at the beginning, my best tip is to buy a large cluster jewel with 8 passive skills, and the “Added Small Passives Skills grant: increased Attack Damage”, IMPLICITS. If you don’t know what an implicit is, it's the text that appears above all the other modifiers, and that will be there even if it's a white item. Then you can spam alteration orbs on it until you get fuel the fight and another interesting mod, then regal it and pray. This has almost no cost, and you can repeat it many times. Then when the league develops it won’t be too hard to buy a cluster with 3 good notables. Of course you could craft it yourself, but honestly this post is already too long and we didnt even start speaking about defenses.

The Defenses of this build.

They are not good, there is no way to sugar coat it. If you hate dying this build probably isn’t your cup of tea. We have around 30k effective hit pool without berserk or potions active, so it's not a glass cannon, but it certainly is not a tank build by any metric.

Being a berserker it's pretty much impossible to get really good spell mitigation without making some major sacrifices, so that is the weakest part of the build. But still, we invest a little bit into defenses.

Since we are located in the bottom right of the tree we use mainly armour, using determination and taking some nodes in the tree to get a bit of armour. It is not a lot but it's at least something. Then later we can get a shield with reservation efficiency to also add a defiance banner.

We also can get a bit of block, at around 35%, but it's pretty mediocre really.

But let's not forget about the frozone

Our defenses on paper are bad, but in game, they are still bad, or more like mediocre. The fact that we pretty much chill/freeze everything we touch, means that we are harder to kill than what it may initially seem. It does not make this a magically tanky build of course, specially since a lot of mobs will be outside of our attacks and can still kill us, but it makes the build actually survive red maps with some consistency, and specially it makes one of the biggest setbacks of melee builds, having to hit the thing that can kill you from really close, much less of an issue. If I had to explain it, I would say that the freezes these build inflicts makes it so that the 30k effective hit pool it has, feels more like a 30k ehp ranged build rather than a 30k ehp melee build.

Also it helps a lot with bossing, since even though we cannot actually freeze them, we make them move slowly and that is very noticeable.

Some daydreaming about the new options for this coming league.

I think this new patch will help a lot with this build, since we might want to pick some of the new nodes of the reworked chieftain ascendancy, the ancestral call one might be very good for clearing maps, but the biggest reason is the tattoos. There was a guy in this same subreddit saying how op could be the “Red Dream” jewel with a fire resistance tattoo, and honestly for this build having its block chance capped would be an amazing addition.

Also if the new league mechanic has enemies that can actually be frozen, this build could potentially trivialize the content.

TLDR

This is just a not so ingenious or weird build, just slightly off meta, I wanted to make an in depth guide to the build and why it works.

- It is not a hardcore build, in fact it is a very softcore intended build, lots of zoom, just barely enough defenses.

- It uses frostbreath and heatshiver to scale damage.

- It still is a pure melee build and with a ramp to it, probably won’t be great at ubers.

- Has a lot of ice crunch sound effects, and that is why I mostly want to play it.

-> The POB: https://pobb.in/tpAb2DcwhT0P

Any sort of tips for the build are extremely appreciated too, Im sure some of the people in this subreddit have some ideas to improve it. Also don't hesitate to ask things if you don't get something, maybe something that I didn't explain is crucial for the build and I just skipped it.