Good Morning Folks! When last I talked about my second build of the league, I was nearing the end of the campaign and it was still dominating. I had quite possibly the easiest time transitioning into maps that I have ever had, and after running a yellow map to test things out, I jumped straight into T16s. While I have taken a few deaths, largely because I did not have an anti-bleeding flask rolled yet at that point… I can pretty much rip through maps without any issue. I am now level 91 and the build is pretty closed to finished. Right now I am mostly just picking up those window dressing nodes to improve the damage as I go into power charge stacking and beef up my crit a bit more. The build is functional in its current state and will just continue to get better as I am able to spend more points.
If you are playing along at home, you can check out the POB here but I am not entirely certain how genuine its damage number is. I can reliably have up 18 traps at once, and if they ALL overlapped on a single target that would be around 8 million damage. And while that can happen due to the massive amount of area that the build has… it is also not super likely to happen and I am also never going to be standing perfectly still. Defensively I have 64% evasion rating which scales up to 74% when I have my flasks active, 100% spell suppression and in theory since I am hitting that naturally I should reclaim the point that is giving me lucky suppression. I am running Purity of Elements just so that I did not have to fuck with trying to fix elemental ailments and am not doing anything to increase base resistance over 75%. I have cast on damage taken immortal coil, stone stance, wicked ward, and the elementalist aegis all playing a part in keeping me alive and healthy when I do finally take damage. Given how fast I am moving through maps this feels really comfortable, and completely dominates the hive fortress encounters in the new breach league.
I am doing a few screwball things with jewels and pathing. Namely I am using an Unnatural Instinct to pick up a ton of nodes in the top part of the tree that are all mostly useful for what I am doing. I could not afford a version of the jewel that had corrupted blood immunity, but at some point I would love to replace it with one of those. I am also using Light of Meaning in an area of the tree where I am taking a bunch of nodes and it is collectively giving me +132% increased Cold Damage. Unfortunately I do not really have any great sources of MORE Cold Damage… so I am essentially having to rely pretty deeply on increased. I am however running with a level 28 Ice Trap gem which is giving me a ton of flat cold damage, which helps a bit. Occultist sadly is the only easy way to get More Cold, but then I would be losing all of the nice toys that the golems are giving me and my ability to ignite and shock with cold damage.
There are a lot of elements about this build that would be really cheap to assemble. Most of the gear I am wearing, could be crafted with the Tree Tree. However there is one element that is hard carrying how good it feels. I just happened into a dual explode Foulborn Berek’s Respite and have played with what happens to the build when I take it off. Essentially the Single Target damage is just fine, but the clear no longer feels anywhere near as good. This ring alone pushes the price point of the build up by a lot… this is essentially a headhunter level item as they are currently going for around 50 Divines. Even dropping down to a single explode version of this ring is noticeable, because I have an ignite only variant sitting in my bank and I could immediately tell the difference. I hate that this is what makes it feel so good while mapping, because this is going to push my variant of the build out of a lot of peoples price range. It works fine, and you can still clear pretty well… but it is like the difference between playing Righteous Fire with and without the Hinekora Chieftain node.
As far as gearing changes, I largely went with strong evasion and energy shield in every single slot. I swapped the Carcass Jack out for a well rolled rare chestpiece like I talked about in my last post. Sadly I need the chaos resistance from the Fugitive Boots or I would pick up eldritch implicits on that item as well. I did swap the Kongming out for a Jaws of Agony, because the whole blind thing did not really seem to be making that much difference. Jaws gives me quite a bit of trap damage, a decent chunk of life, and since it is a unique I was still able to keep my +2 minion gems corruption. The AOE gems does not do anything for this item, it just happened to be the cheapest +2 minions corrupt that I could buy. I need to spend some time rethinking this item slot however because I am sure there is something else that I could be using that would be more valuable. At the moment the 25% chance to gain a power charge on Jaws is making it so that I am pretty much always at max power charges.
I am extremely happy with this build right now. For the moment I am running a Freezing Tulgraft and a Flamecaller Xophgraft, the later mostly because it has +12 strength on it and I am needing more strength. I shield charge around the map quite a bit and Call of the Pyre itself has quite a lot of clear, which is pretty nice. I am totally open on these however and probably should optimize them a bit better. In theory I should probably swap over to a Hardening Uulgraft for Tender Embrace, which could come in handy when something does hit me. Unfortunately it cannot roll with strength on it, so I will need to figure out some other way of solving my strength problem. I basically need at least 100 Strength to run max level versions of Stone and Flame Golems… which I need for the buffs that they provide me, and also to keep them alive while mapping. Elementalist Golems self rez, but it is really noticeable when one of them dies and I would like to prevent that if at all possible.
At some point I am probably going to record some gameplay of the build so that yall can see it in action, but I would definitely all Freezy Boom 2.0 a rousing success. This is honestly good enough that I would be shocked if someone else does not realize its potential.
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