3.18 - Wintertide Brand Inquisitor - A10 Pts+Lab - 3h29m24s

Deathless A10 All Skill Points and Story Labs run using Wintertide Brand on Inquisitor in 3h29m24s. Wintertide brand is extremely easy and efficient leveling and would highly recommend for its convenience and QoL. This was one of the most comfortable A10 runs I have ever done and it was very enjoyable to play.

PoBs: Gear/Tree At End of Run: https://pobb.in/Nvi_A5PHEfXY PoB with Some Leveling Notes, Leveling Trees, and Gem Acquisition: https://pobb.in/B6HK47BLuvDQ

Vendor Regex Used: Act 1 until Level 23: b-.|.-b|sceptre|nn Level 24 and Beyond (Four Links/Four Sockets): "sockets: .-.-.|([rgbw][ -.]){3}"

Some Questions and Answers:

Why Inquisitor? Inquisitor (or any templar really) can get wintertide brand rolling extremely quickly as the pathing from templar start to the brand nodes is efficient and strong. Inquisitor also has some nice synergy with wintertide brand during the campaign and because you will be in melee range for vortex anyways, you can get the increased damage effect from conc ground on bosses pretty easily. Moreover, inquisitor regen is super comfy. If you take this build past campaign, there really isn't a great 4th ascendancy node however. This can also be used solely to level before swapping to another inquisitor build as you can swap out from the brand/dot portion with the respecs you get from campaign alone.

Can I use cold snap? Absolutely! I don't use cold snap in the run only because I did not want to extra overhead of including another button to rotate through and I wanted to ensure I had a consistent onslaught source through frost bomb. In A4 after you get dark arts, you can drop the onslaught setup for frost bomb and just use it for exposure. When doing this you can now fit cold snap into build. While you will lose some traversal speed by dropping onslaught, cold snap will provide more single target and can generate frenzies while clearing which somewhat compensates for no onslaught. The one downside is that cold snap's cast speed is kind of a pain because its pretty slow. I have not tried cold snap also doubling as the onslaught source, so I cannot speak to whether its a viable strategy for proccing onslaught via the hit portion of cold snap while traversing zones, but on paper I could see it working.

I don't need to extra resistance from the elemental mastery, where do I invest the point instead? So, you might end up with a lot of extra resistance depending on your gear RNG, if that is the case the 15% all elemental resistance mastery might be overkill. If that is the case, simply swap the mastery to the 40% effect of non-damaging ailments or at least 18% exposure mastery instead. One thing to note is with all the various archnemesis weaver mods being overcapped on res during campaign is significantly more valuable than it used to be

Should I take EO? So because this build is primarily DoT based, EO is not as relevant. Nonetheless, I will still take it as a one pointer during the run, so I can occasionally get boosted frostbomb or vortex damage as I path right by the node anyways. EO uptime will not be consistent at all, but it is still worth the point in my opinion.

What level should my arcane surge be? So I like having arcane surge on my vortex so its consistently up. I try to make that arcane surge is leveled so that every 2 casts of vortex will proc it meaning that with the length of arcane surge buff and CD of vortex, I will have 100% uptime on arcane surge. If you don't have the colors to put arcane surge on vortex, you can place a low level arcane surge on frost bomb instead.

Why do you swap malevolence for skitterbots? To be able to comfortably fit determination in along with some damage aura. Determination and Malevolence together with only Sovereignty and the reservation mastery can result in a pretty tight mana pool. It is definitely doable to run both together, but it makes mana management annoying especially since it gets harder to fit clarity. As a result, I swap to skitters instead for the shock and by the time I swap (A7), I have enough cast speed/activation speed/duration on wintertide to still result in a high level of stages without needing the additional duration from malevolence.

Why do you do flat ele crafts if this is a DoT build? Flat ele crafts are super powerful even if this is a DoT build for the portions of the skills that have a hit component such as vortex and frostbomb. If you don't do flat crafts, frostbomb is pretty pointless outside of an exposure source. Moreover, flat crafts are super reliable relative to other sceptre setups. If you want you can swap out of the flat craft sceptres to % spell damage sceptres once you get the second tier of spell damage crafts in Shavronne's Tower in A6.

Table of Contents:

0:00 - Act 1 23:29 - Act 2 42:05 - Act 3 and Normal Lab 1:12:12 - Act 4 1:31:49 - Act 5 1:49:07 - Act 6 2:11:16 - Act 7 and Cruel Lab 2:33:59 - Act 8 2:53:26 - Act 9 3:11:17 - Act 10 and Merciless Lab