POB: https://pobb.in/oyjOW493V8nm

Hello friends, just sharing the Frostblink of Wintry Blast minutes build that I played to get to 40/40 this league. Before anyone asks “Isn’t this just hexblast with extra steps?” or “why not play hexblast?”. Yes, Hexblast is a better skill and if you want to play Hexblast instead, just play Hexblast. Otherwise, I love the visuals and sound effects of Frostblink with the wrangler MTX which makes the skill fun to play.

One nice addition to this league that makes this skill much more friendly to play is the combo spell damage + cast spell with 4s trigger mod that was introduced to temple weapons in this league. Using this to automate casting of Cold Snap to apply a 30% chill on enemies reduces a lot of the clunkiness of the skill/build.

Defensive layers:

• 100% spell suppression

• Permanent flasks, most importantly Progenesis

• Critical strike immunity via Enfeeble Balance of Terror

• Temp Chains + Enfeeble

• Sap via Leadership’s Price

• Stun immunity

• 82% max fire/lightning res, 90% max cold res and Taste of Hate to convert some fire/lightning damage to cold which has better maximum resistances

• MoM (via Precursor) + Eldritch Battery (via Replica Sorrow of the Divine) + Ghost Dance

• Strong instant life flask with lots of charge recovery that also recovers ES (via Tides of Time + Replica Sorrow of the Divine)

• Evasion via Grace + Items + Sabo blind effect

• 15% reduced damage taken via Sabo ascendency

• Freeze/Chill/Shock/Ignite immunity

• Decent life regen rate via Sabo ascendancy + consecrated ground rational doctrine

Offense:

• Frostblink gets a huge DPS increase from the chill effect on enemies. To apply that effect consistently on enemies, Cold Snap is triggered via the weapon mod which applies a chilled ground. Scaling chilled ground to 30% chill is achieved through support gems and passive tree points.

• Leadership’s price is used for a large DPS increase. Bomb Specialist from Saboteur helps to get maximum ailment effect for scorch/brittle/sap on tougher mobs/bosses.

• Mines are used to overcome the terrible cast speed of the skill as well as making the skill ranged since the mines will perform the Frostblink not you.

• Mana issues are solved by using Eldritch battery. Since we have MoM for additional EHP, life flasks that restore ES + Ghost Shrouds are used to make sure we always have enough energy shield to throw mines.

• Large negative enemy elemental resistances through Eye of Malice + Scorch + Frostbite + Elemental Weakness + exposure. Punishment also provides a large boost for low life enemies. Anathema’s + Vixens is used to up curse limit, as well as quickly trigger 5 curses on enemies.

Pros:

• Non-meta :)

• Excellent single target DPS, uber boss viable

• Reasonably tanky + chill/temp chains makes dodging boss abilities much easier

• Permanent quicksilver to make no movement speed on Ralakesh easier to deal with

• Amazing visuals and sounds

• Low amount of button presses for smooth gameplay. One button for movement, one button to cast all curses and one button for main dps skill.

Cons:

• Your life flask is the majority of your recovery so you have to be able to react quickly at times to heal back up to full. Using MoM + EB with life flasks is something that I wanted to test out as a defensive layer and it was decent but I think the build can be adapted to work without MoM on Precursors.

• A lot of defenses are “conditional” on being able to apply to enemies such as Enfeeble/Sap/Sabo blind effect. This means that the build is a lot less tanky against invulnerability phases like Exarch ball phase and a little bit with Shaper ball phase.

• No alt ailment immunity so this build is only okay for Simulacrum

• Very large base mana cost of the skill which means that a lot of investment into mana and mana reservation efficiency is required. If you don’t leave enough mana to be able to throw your limit + 1 mine, it can feel clunky when you walk around being unable to throw mines because you have hit the reservation limit. In my POB, I am stubborn and instead rely on 14 preloaded mines limit + 25% mine reactivation chance to cover this limitation while mapping/bossing because reactivated mines don’t reserve mana.

• Requires some minor amount of aiming at enemies since mines won’t trigger unless there are enemies close enough to blink to

• Requires some balancing of attributes to enable Leaderships price but tattoos with a shield attributes craft makes that not too hard to manage

• Have to be mindful of how you move around and use skills during boss fights because you dont want to trigger cold snap accidentally in a bad area because its a large portion of your damage.

• No freeze

• Capping elemental resistance is annoying because of the large amount of uniques used in the build

• Uncapped chaos resistance, I tried but couldn't get it to cap without giving too much in the build :(

Misc:

• New taste of hate isnt as good as old taste of hate but for a build that can’t scale to 90% maximum resistances, it's actually a decent defensive option to pair with spell suppression for mitigating elemental damage hits.