Cold Snap of Power Occultist - Mapping & Uber Boss Showcase - 3.23 Affliction

POB: https://pobb.in/ClQry6ukJ4UT

A bit late to the party with the Affliction league being over but wanted to share my Cold Snap of Power build that I used to get 40/40 in the league.

This isn’t a full build guide but happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Defensive layers: The primary focus was to stack as much mitigation as possible such that anything any hit that doesn’t one shot me will not lower my hp because of bloodnotch + immutable force + recoup. To achieve that I got:

• 75% of elemental damage taken as chaos, with 90% max chaos res and 78% max elemental res

• Enfeeble with crit immunity via balance of terror

• Shock and freeze immunity

• Bloodnotch + Immutable Force combo + recoup

• Determination + granite flask for armor which also lets us use CWDT + Molten Shell as well as scaling damage reduction to chaos hits via mastery and elemental hits via charms

• Instant leech via charm

• Overleech via petrified blood

Offense:

Cold Snap of Power was one of the new transfigured gems released in this league and I saw that it had great numbers on the gem. Main thing that I wasn’t sure about was if you could get multiple overlaps with Awakened Spell Cascade. The answer is yes, it can.

• From my testing, it seems like the threshold to get 5 overlaps on pinnacle bosses is 4.9m in radius.

• For rares it felt like you needed to get 5m in radius since they had smaller hitboxes. Don’t take this number for a fact and I suggest testing it for yourself

• Like many other people I did power charge stacking with the new Ralakesh boots + void battery + badge of the brotherhood. This helped to get the AOE in combination with charms and TWWT jewel to get to the 4.9m threshold.

• Anathema for additional curses

• I opted to use Arn’s Anguish for more damage instead of Mageblood because I’m a hipster and think Mageblood is an anti fun item

• I generate brutal charges via the precursors emblem mod

• I use forbidden rite in a weapon swap before a boss to trigger brutal charge generation

Pros:

• Pretty tanky and in my opinion much tankier than the other Occultist Cold Snap variants that I saw on poe.ninja

• Excellent single target dps, uber boss viable

• Good mapping clear speed

• Mostly non meta

Cons:

• A lot of button presses with utility skills like enfeeble, arcanist brand, divine blessing, etc.

• Expensive to min max though you can say this about most builds

• If you can’t get to 4.9m radius then you have to settle for 3 overlaps which requires having to aim the skill to avoid dead zones. Otherwise with 5 overlaps you can just namelock the boss

• Kind of weak to dots even with overleech

Misc:

• The build was nerfed for Necropolis league with the following changes:

• Bloodnotch combo mastery removal

• Ralakesh MS removal

• Removal of AOE charms which was used to get to 4.9m AOE radius which will make getting the necessary AOE to hit the breakpoint much harder

• With that said, I think it can still be viable in the next league, just not as strong as in Affliction. I haven’t spent any time trying to create a new PoB for 3.24

• I got pretty lucky with the shield craft

• Unrelated to the build but Frostblink of Wintry Blast + Spell Echo is great for being able to move around the map quickly. Not sure why it works this way but if you hold down left click while you use the skill you get all the benefits of the more cast speed modifier of spell echo without triggering the skill twice awkwardly

• MTX is delirious cold snap