3.17 - Hit Based Creeping Frost Occultist - A10 Pts+Lab - 3h26m40s
68Hit Based Creeping Frost run to A10 with all skill points and story labs in 3h26m40s. There was one death in A4 to a super juiced ghosted rare mob, but otherwise run felt relatively safe and was smooth all the way through. Overall, the build was very fun to play, but it can be somewhat button heavy and somewhat awkward to get off ground as you need to initially mule pierce and onslaught from ranger as pierce provides really good QoL and one additional AoE overlap ontop of whatever amount of projectiles you have. I really enjoyed the shot gunning aspect of the build, but please note that LMP or GMP is much, much preferred over volley or greater volley as you cannot really control the spread with the volley skill like you can with LMP/GMP which makes a huge difference in ability to shotgun. This tree focuses on being pretty compact and efficient in the witch/templar region of tree for campaign speed leveling. Please note that this build does have mana issues so clarity or mana reduction nodes are needed. After campaign, I do not have much experience playing the build, so I cannot really make recommendations, but I believe Jungroan has a video about an end game Creeping Frost Inquisitor which would be a good resource to check out to see what a hit based creeping frost tree might look like for mapping/endgame.
PoB at end of run: https://pobb.in/2raNa1wvAo33
Regex used:
A1 and A2: b-g|g-b|b-b|b-.-b|g-.-g|nn
Late A3 and Beyond (for anything with 4 sockets or more than 3links): "sockets: .-.-.|([rgbw][ -.]){3}"
Some Questions and Answers
Do I really have to mule ranger to hailrake?
No. At a minimum, you should pick up onslaught from scion. However, pierce (which witch doesn't also get.... please fix) provides massive QoL and an additional shotgun for creeping frost. I would highly, highly recommend. We do the mule on ranger because ranger starts with pierce and gets onslaught from Hailrake. Getting a second QS and the extra currency/potential check at vendor is nice as you with the white/normal QS you can avoid poor rng (ie Den QS frequently rolls less duration, which is pain... trade off is that you also potentially lose out on beneficial mods).
When should I start shield charging?
A6 is the best place as you'll have picked up some attack speed nodes. Doing library to start shield charging in A3 is not worth as the damage fall off from 1 craft is significant. By Act 6 losing the extra wand craft is not that big of a deal as you have more damage nodes. The runs where I swapped early (ie at library) to shield charging were like 10 minutes slower at end of A5.
What curse should I use?
Whatever color you have available slot a curse in. Here, I used frostbite until I no longer had an open blue socket. At that point, I swapped to punishment because I had an open red. If you have an open green, but nothing else, sniper's mark is an option but it doesn't play as well with your supplemental damage skills.
What about cold snap?
Cold snap is a good gem, but (1) most runs I don't have a place to fit it due to socket pressure, and (2) I don't want to extra overhead and opportunity cost of adding another damage source into rotation
What about tornado?
Tornado is excellent single target supplement would recommend if you have spare green socket. I did not here
Where should I place onslaught?
You can place onslaught on frostbomb or creeping frost. However, I found the run to be much smoother when I kept the creeping frost 3L as creeping frost - LMP - pierce and used frost bomb as an onslaught proccer. Once you get a 4L you can definitely swap onslaught onto creeping frost and just use frost bomb as exposure or as a linked up single target supplement. I kept frostbomb as my onslaught proccer throughout run as I'm very comfortable with its setup and preferred having a stronger damage source on my creeping frost.
What about gem link preference?
There are three major ones:
First, you should have creeping frost linked to LMP/GMP and pierce (B-G-G), the 4th link can be any color. Cruelty/Inspiration for red, Added Cold/Hypo for green, Ele Focus/Controlled/Arcane Surge for blue.
Second, Vortex - Bonechill (B-B) then linked with whatever else supports it with preference to links that can support both portions of skill
Third, frost bomb - onslaught (B-G) with additional colors being whatever damage link you can reasonable fit.
Table of Contents:
0:00 - Act 1 and Hailrake Mule
22:51 - Act 2
43:00 - Act 3 and Normal Lab
1:12:40 - Act 4
1:31:21 - Act 5
1:47:57 - Act 6
2:09:39 - Act 7 and Cruel Lab
2:32:38 - Act 8
2:51:52 - Act 9
3:09:19 - Act 10 and Merciless Lab
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