PoB: https://pobb.in/LV4iFZl1jaQW

Pretty late in the league so this probably won't get much traction, but I wanted to post this anyways as this is one of the most fun builds I've ever played. I won't claim there's anything super unique here as the core is just a pretty bog-standard power charge stacker, but I am surprised at how relatively underused CSoP is cause this thing hits like a truck (albeit a smaller truck than Penance Brand I guess lol). Pros and cons first and then I'll go into a little more detail about some interesting aspects.

Pros

- Insane, screen-wide AoE from charge scaling

- Very high single-target (wisp'd T16s are no problem) even though my setup is geared for mapping, a little more on this later

- Do you like Herald of Ice shatter chains and that beautiful mtx? This is one of the best implementations of it I've seen outside of dedicated HoI builds which are really more of a gimmick

- Speaking of shatters, you'll be freezing just about everything on screen and a bit beyond it. A great extra defensive layer.

- Surprisingly sturdy, at least with a softcore mindset. Again, wisp'd T16s are no problem and I have not bricked a map a single time this league with a fairly sparse regex

- CI is starting to claw back into relevance imo as Chaos damage has become more and more common the last several leagues. Not only does it negate any big chaos hits and phys as extra chaos mods, but it feels like a half or more of the annoying ground degens you encounter while mapping are chaos and getting to completely ignore those feels great

- Evade cap + juiced up Elusive pulls a lot of weight. I'm relying on this too much for defense to consider this HC viable, but it feels great for SC. Mistwalker crit immunity has been huge this league as well whereas it's often kind of an afterthought in other leagues.

- Move speed. +192% of base on average, actually. MB+QS flask+Onslaugh flask+big Elusive from Badge means you move very fast. So much so that I dropped my shield charge a while back cause it felt uneccessary

Cons

- My setup is expensive, at least by my standards. I'd estimate somewhere close to 2 mirrors, although more than half of that is in just the PC ring. Good news is the build felt totally fine (albeit less damage) with two damage-oriented Precursor rings instead.

- Defense, kinda. I only play SC and don't mind a death every few maps or so. You're immune to Chaos, and Incandescent Heart beefs up the Ele max hit nicely (like the equivalent of ~80 max res I think?), but big phys hits are gonna pop ya occasionally. This could probably be fixed somehow with some sacrifices, but I haven't felt the need.

- Visual clarity is bad. You will occasionally die to those monster elemental explodes cause you can't see them, especially on -max res maps. I personally don't mind this at all cause I have a baby brain that's mesmerized by the shimmer of Cold Snap and HoI explosions

- Bossing? Maybe? I did all my bossing when I was playing Penance still cause it was trivial. I suspect this build as-is has enough damage to do Ubers, but I haven't tried. If I really wanted to boss, I'd probably drop the HoI setup and scale AoE up to the 5 overlap breakpoint (more on this later too). But I built this for mapping. Just use Penance if you want to boss.

- Eater Altar downsides can be rough. At this point I skip all three if they pop up. Minus defenses per frenzy is totally out cause it nukes your ES and evasion, minus crit multi per power charge nukes your damage and makes maps a slog, and minus recovery per endurance charge is technically runnable but turns maps into no regen which is agonizing. The endurance charge one is technically doable if I dropped a max endurance charge from the tree or my boots, but eh, I'd rather just skip. Similarly, the map mod that lets monsters steal charges on hit is kinda annoying, I'll be regexing that one out in the future, but it doesn't brick the map by any means.

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So that's the long TLDR. Now for some rambling about the build.

I league started Penance Trickster very early and got carried basically through the entire game with that. The build/gear was actually pretty similar to what I have on now. I swapped to Assassin eventually for more damage once I felt beefy enough. That was all well and good, but what I really wanted was better clear and explosions. Penance wasn't bad, but watching Tuna's BV explode build left me wanting more.

I tried a variety of ways to incorporate more AoE/explode into a Penance setup, but it never felt like enough. Even though it was easy to scale the AoE, it didn't seem to do much for Penance itself, and I never felt like I could get my explode chance high enough to feel truly satisfying, even with a synth explode scepter and other sources.

Once I decided to stop trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, I realized if I was gonna scale AoE, I should use a skill that actually kinda scales damage with that too. Enter Cold Snap of Power. The numbers on this skill are crazy. Ten percent base crit means it's trivial to overcap crit when stacking power charges, and the base damage is very good. Where it truly gets crazy, though, is overlaps. Based on what I've read and seen, I estimate I get around 3 overlaps typically. I think I've read that if I scaled AoE up to around a 4.7m radius I'd get the full 5, but that hasn't felt necessary for mapping at all. As mentioned above, I probably would scale AoE up more if I wanted to do Ubers in order to hit that breakpoint.

With shifting to CSoP, I was able to also free up enough gear pressure to fit in my favorite skill of all time - Herald of Ice. But it's not just HoI, it's got links to really get the shatter chains going. Crit strikes support helps to "cap" crit in a sense, which is necessary for HoI to always freeze in order to propagate shatters. It's not truly crit capped, but with Assassin's Ambush and Assassinate node, it effectively is for mapping purposes as HoI extends off-screen beyond Cold Snap. On top of that, the quality got changed this league to give base radius per qual, so Enhance goes a long way to helping make each HoI explosion huge. This has resulted in the most satisfying implementation of HoI I've ever played and this thing maps like a dream. Everything on screen gets nuked by CSoP and then HoI/Oriath explosions chain off of it.

And lastly some misc thoughts on gear/building that I thought were worth mentioning:

- Mistwalker is huge this league, maybe one of the best defensive nodes in the game for wisp'd mapping. Big elusive is a lot of avoidance, the move speed feels so good, and crit immunity is insane

- CI + Incandescent Heart isn't new tech, but man does it feel really good right now

- Hitting evade cap is a huge reduction in incoming damage but is very hard to do with evasion alone. We get there with ~30k evasion between gear/tree/flasks, plus blind from TWWT jewel, plus the really cool Dread Banner + Generosity combo

- I'll mention the HoI setup again. It's so pretty. I love this skill so much, but it's a shame it's usually one of the worst herald skills numerically

- Idk how viable this build will be next league. Woods ascendancies will be gone I'm assuming, and we don't know how charge stacking will look

- Don't read too much in the EHP number in PoB. I don't have a source of Endurance Charge gen but immortal call is still assuming it's consuming them I think. Just take my word that the build "feels" tanky enough for even the most extreme extents of mapping

- Speaking of maps, the only stuff I've thrown out with regex up to this point is ele reflect, no regen, aura effect, and no leech. Tbh I could probably run no leech but I haven't tried yet. With a more strict regex, you could get the build cost way down by not stacking multiple monster defense mods. But with my setup it runs over all of them

- On the subject of leech, it's my "main" recovery source, which actually doesn't feel too bad with Ghost Reaver. In reality, the vast majority of my recovery comes from Polymath jewels. That's one of the best map sustain ascendancies in the game.

And that's all I can think of right now. Feel free to shoot me any questions if y'all have any. If you love Herald of Ice, you owe it to yourself to try this out before the league's over. I'd post a video showcase, but I have no idea how to easily do that and am unsure if my machine could even do it justice.