PoB

Sister post in PoE forums, good for looking at my current gear

This post is a follow-up to my previous post at leaguestart.

Every league I try to take an off-meta skill or mechanic to 40/40 with a single character. I'm not usually successful, but Frost Blades of Katabasis turned out to be very viable, especially with the surprise 20% more base damage buff it received this league.

For the uninitiated, Frost Blades of Katabasis is a transfigured version of Frost Blades which is essentially a completely different skill: on a successful hit on a mob, a chilling area is dropped beneath the mob that deals heavy damage over time.

The skill does have a couple of annoying properties:

1. Neither spell nor attack damage apply to the damage of the chilling area, limiting a lot of the usual scaling options. My initial plan was to use The Adorned to add DoT multiplier to the tree, but I ultimately found better jewels and scaling sources to compensate.

2. The chilling area doesn't always come out, as it seems you need a direct rectangle of uninterrupted ground from the player to the mob being hit. This means that ledges, corners, and even adjacent walls can prevent your chilling area. This is ultimately not a problem as boss arenas are clean and you can just avoid running bad maps.

Those aside, the absurd added weapon range (+6 meters at 20q) and lingering chilling areas make mapping a breeze, while the mechanics of the skill itself make a lot of negative mods on T17 maps, Ultimatum encounters, Expedition encounters, etc. totally irrelevant.

Furthermore, the off-meta state of cold DoT makes trading for most gear extremely cheap. The godlike Nebulis I ended up using was purchased for a single divine.

As mentioned, we cannot scale the damage from Frost Blades of Katabasis through spell or attack damage. Instead, we focus primarily on the following:

1. Gem levels
2. Effect of non-damaging ailments
3. More/increased cold damage, elemental damage, and elemental damage with attacks
4. -#% resistances on enemies

We use a hybrid Armour/ES setup with high block to trivialize most hits:

1. Aegis Aurora, Determination, and block
2. Melding of the Flesh
3. Effect of non-damaging ailments part 2
4. Pantheon for DoT

More specifics can be found in the PoB and the forum post.