[3.25] Ice Dancing Queen - Icestorm/Cyclone/CI - Viable For Everything

Hello, fellow Whispering Ice addicts!

It's been a while since GGG gave us anything new. PoE 2 EA was a massive disappointment for me. The lack of viable skills and build diversity, poor balance, bugs and exploits - playing this Early Beta got real boring real fast. There is no Whispering Ice! And they have now cancelled the new PoE 1 league TWICE to funnel all resources into PoE 2. That's just sad.

Anyway, we have an experimental league event coming up in a couple of days. It's a bunch of ideas GGG devs had that never made it into the actual leagues. And I can see why: some of that stuff looks totally OP and imbalanced. Then again, it's just for fun. So let's have some fun!

After the first announcement, I immediately liked the Surfcaster: you do more damage via the chill effect scaling, and even more via shock, and even more by overcapping Lightning resistance (especially with Helical rings). You get more safety as the chilled enemies do less damage to you. And anything that hits you also gets frozen for 1 sec. And you can still add one of the original Shadow ascendancies with Flesh/Flame jewels (Polymath, Soul Drinker, or Ambush & Assassinate).

Then they released more details, and now I'm not so sure. The sources of "damage taken" (shock, chill scaling) are additive with each other. The small nodes on the ascendancy tree are completely useless. And some of the classes that were released later just look sexier.

Next possibility: Scavenger. You get +5 skill points, 30% less phys damage taken from hits, 100% increased (not MORE) damage for 5 sec on kill (which you can trigger via The Writhing Jar), and EXPLOSIONS! Plus you can still get Trickster with the Flesh/Flame jewels (a partial combination of Polymath, Soul Drinker and One Step Ahead). Looks like a lot of fun!

And finally: Aristocrat. This is pure Int stacking. 30% increased Int. It's additive with all other Increased Int/Attr we get, so it won't just increase your Int by 30% compared to the base build. But it's still a LOT. And you get +11 skill points! All other big nodes are useless, so you just take all available small nodes instead. That should already result in a lot of damage. But the cherry on top of that cake is the 5th Ascendancy. You can choose from the Duelist pool, and you take something that was never meant for spell casters: War of Attrition. After the first 100 sec of an uber boss encounter you just deal 100% MORE damage until they die. Oh boy!

I'm going to play with PoB and see what the actual trees and numbers look like. But the main choice is this: do you want to be very safe and have a lot of fun while mapping (Scavenger), or do you want to do crazy amounts of damage and delete uber bosses (Aristocrat)?

"

Kelvynn#6607 เขียน:

I'm going to play with PoB and see what the actual trees and numbers look like. But the main choice is this: do you want to be very safe and have a lot of fun while mapping (Scavenger), or do you want to do crazy amounts of damage and delete uber bosses (Aristocrat)?

Thank you Kelvynn as always!

So, here's what I came up with in PoB:

Scavenger
Aristocrat

The special ascendancies are implemented in PoB as jewels. So you either replace one of your jewels, or just add an extra socket that's not going to be real in game. Scavenger fake jewel is missing the +5 skill points, so we just allocate 128 points. I edited the Aristocrat jewel and added extra skill points to it, for the total of 134 points.

Let's see what the numbers say...

The big thing: all of these special ascendancies are severely inferior to the Trickster. You lose Polymath, Soul Drinker, Escape Artist, One Step Ahead, Ambush & Assassinate - that's a LOT of damage, defense and sustain. You won't have nearly the same amount of ES, and you can forget about evasion. I guess crafting the body armour will be easier, just go with ES. You will once again suffer from slow, sand, petrify, etc stuff in uber content. No more overleech, beware of the burning/corrupted ground and heavy bleeding. And your crit chance won't be 100% anymore, half of that at best.

Scavenger

Fast clear with explosions and Adrenaline. Extra safety with Cloak of Flames and Trickster (flesh/flame).

Aristocrat

All of the extra skill points (and more) have to be spent on pathing from the Duelist start. You can end up with 3700 Int! And about 2k more ES than the Scavenger because of all that extra Int. However, you get none of the other safety/utility/clear speed. And half of your damage only applies to uber bosses. Outside of the uber boss situation, Aristocrat does about 16% more damage than Scavenger.

---

I think I'm going to play Scavenger. EXPLOSIONS! I miss the Occultist version a lot. And since we can't have the Trickster, may as well have fun mapping. This event is not about uber boss farming anyway. It's about the new Idols that replace the Atlas tree. And they drop from mapping. Faster mapping = profit.

Scavenger is also much easier to start with. In fact, starting as a Duelist and getting almost nothing as you path to the opposite side of the tree without any Fertile Mind jewels (they won't be available early) - sounds very painful.

And here's the Scavenger Leveling PoB.

Thanks for your work, Kelvynn. This confirms what I thought about the optimal way to spec those two classes. It's a shame that neither of them can really compete with Trickster and that Ice Storm won't be more overpowered this mini-league. I'll skip Uber Content this month :P

i think if its really only a one month event with my playstyle it would be much easyer to play. If you have not the time to play a lot, its much longer to get the perfect equip for trickster with all the great crafting. And with "normal" gear the event can be verry funny with the new ascendents.

That sucks. That's a lot of negatives with these ascendancies. I guess if we wanted to we could just follow the Settlers league Trickster version and be just fine.

"

RaGe0uS#2336 เขียน:

That sucks. That's a lot of negatives with these ascendancies. I guess if we wanted to we could just follow the Settlers league Trickster version and be just fine.

Nope. The regular 19 Ascendancy classes don't exist in Legacy of Phrecia. There is no Trickster.

"

Kelvynn#6607 เขียน:

"

RaGe0uS#2336 เขียน:

That sucks. That's a lot of negatives with these ascendancies. I guess if we wanted to we could just follow the Settlers league Trickster version and be just fine.

Nope. The regular 19 Ascendancy classes don't exist in Legacy of Phrecia. There is no Trickster.

(ó﹏ò｡)

Any thoughts on running this without cwc for clear on scavenger? Getting faster cast speed so manual cast would feel snappier for cast & run type of gameplay.
With scavenger explode, that can self-proc unconditionally (no need target cursed like occultist), we basically gonna need 1 cast per few screens in juiced maps, everything will explode.
Another thing is, with stampede we are not getting full value of adrenaline movement speed, as our speed is fixed.
It just feels like self cast paired with such big explode could feel good to play.
If so, what boots would you opt for, in place of stampedes?