I have been playing a lot of Path of Exile lately. My current character is running the freezing pulse skill gem because they added a unique jewel that buffs it and I had fun with it years ago. The goal of the build is to do a bunch of cold damage and inflict the 'freeze' debuff on all of the enemies. This means they can't take actions, which means they can't do damage, which means I get to be invincible! Mwahaha!
The theory turns out to be better than the practice, however. I can absolutely crush trash monsters but I've been having trouble with bosses. I've been trying to straddle a line of being able to still deal with bosses that aren't frozen so I've ended up with a mishmash of a build where I have some survivability and some freezability but not really enough of either. I will be getting more of both with more levels (both in terms of getting more passive points in the tree and in terms of leveling up my skill gems) but I'm starting to feel like I need to really go all in on one or the other. Running a bunch of curses and instant leech and the like is fine if enemies aren't frozen but if they are then it's not really doing anything for me and maybe I'll be better off without 4 item slots dedicated to doing all my cursing.
Alternatively maybe I'm better off doing all the cursing and leeching without worrying about freezing at all. If I'm building up to being able to leech tank bosses I can do the same for all the trash too and I'd be better off without all the freeze related points in the tree. At that point I may even be better off just using a different spell entirely!
So I think the way to proceed is to work out what I could do to go all in on freezing. See if I think that'd be good enough to freeze some bosses. If so, great! If not, well, probably start a new dude.
Ok, so, freezing... What are the specific mechanics behind freezing enemies? For our purposes only cold damage can freeze and a hit of cold damage will freeze if two conditions are met:
- The hit is a crit OR an inate 'chance to freeze' roll succeeds.
- The hit does enough damage to freeze the enemy for .3 seconds, which at base means doing 5% of the enemy's max health in cold damage.
The first condition is relatively easy to meet. In my current setup I have a 19% chance to crit, 20% chance to freeze, 20% chance to freeze a chilled enemy, 13% chance to freeze a frostbiten enemy, and somewhere from 0-25% chance to freeze based on distance from my character. So while not every hit will meet this check a significant number of them will. If bosses were getting frozen some but not all of the time I would worry more about working on this condition, but they aren't, so I won't.
The second condition is the one I'm getting stuck on. Having to hit a boss for 5% of their health in order to freeze them actually seems a little silly. If I only need to hit them 20 times in order to kill them I don't think I care that they're not frozen. I can kite and/or use flasks for the 7 seconds it'll take to burn them down! Fortunately damage isn't the only way to work on this condition. You can also work to extend the duration of your freezes so that smaller amounts of damage are good enough to hit the .3 second threshold. If you had 100% freeze duration you'd only need to hit them for 2.5% of their max health. 400% freeze duration would mean you only need to hit them for 1% of their max health. I'm not quite sure that would be good enough, and I really doubt I could get that much freeze duration anyway, but I might as well look into it.
Currently I have 60% increased freeze duration, which is every freeze duration node in the tree. There is one 10% ailment duration node which probably also applies, but I don't have. Other potential sources of freeze duration would be:
- jewels which can add up to 16% freeze duration each
- 20%+ freeze duration from quality on a frostbite gem (and maybe more if my curse nodes impact the quality boost)
- elemental proliferation support gem would be up to ~29% freeze duration (and 20% chance to freeze)
- The Halcyon unique amulet has 30% freeze duration (and 10% chance to freeze, and potentially 80% cold damage)
- Southbound unique gloves have 25% freeze duration
- Rashkaldor's Patience unique amulet had 20% elemental ailment duration
And that is all. The last two unique items don't feel very good while The Halcyon runs over 150 chaos to buy. I do have that much, and I suspect I can flip the amulet back if I don't like it, so possibly that is what I need to do if I'm going forward. I can probably grab jewel sockets to get 3 of those jewels, and I can easily get a quality frostbite gem. I currently need my amulet for life and resists, so switching to The Halcyon hurts my health to the point where I probably need to give up on the Kitava's Thirst 4-curse plan. I also _might_ be able to stretch my tree to get that last 10% ailment node at the assassin start location.
All told I can probably get my freeze duration up to 164% without elemental proliferation and 203% with it. That's almost twice what I'm currently sitting at (303 compared to 160) which almost certainly gets me a little closer to freezing some bosses. That's enough that it's probably worth working on...
On top of that, I can also work on doing more cold damage. With all the freeze duration I can manage I only need to do enough damage to hit for 1.7% of the enemy's max health. I'm still not sure if that is good enough... That's 60 hits to kill them, and I attack almost 3 times per second, so it's probably trivializing a fight that would be lasting 25 seconds otherwise? That's actually a lot of dodging... I don't think I can facetank a lot of these fights for 25 seconds with my current setup, so it is probably worth trying. But let's max out our damage too...
Initially my thinking was that if I'm doing a perma-freeze plan I don't want to be relying on the swings involved in crits. So I've taken the node that makes me do 40% more damage if I've crit in the last 8 seconds. This is way better for consistent damage and it saves me taking crit nodes but it's entirely possible I could be freezing some of the time with crits instead of the current none of the time. At this point I'm really committed to this line I think (I'd want a different bandit reward and probably an entirely different class for critting) but maybe I want to create a different character to do crit freezing pulse...
Anyway, with crits totally abstracted away there are really 4 ways to boost the damage of my spell. I can increase the base cold damage of the spell with flat damage (including leveling the gem itself), I can add to the 'increased damage' multiplier in a variety of ways, I can get extra 'more damage' multipliers, and I can lower the enemy cold resistance.
There are so many ways to change all of those things so I went and built a spreadsheet. It was a little surprising to me in some ways, in particular that a level 4 empower gem isn't really worth using. I suspect that's because of how much flat damage I'm adding to the spell via herald of ice? It means there isn't a red gem worth using which makes me sad... I'm going to have to spend a bunch of chromatics to change my 6 link away from BBGGGR into BBBGGG. (I only have a level 2 empower gem anyway...)
At any rate, here's the support gem ordering for different criteria:
30 cold resist (standard boss), freeze duration - controlled destruction > hypothermia > ice bite > slower projectiles > empower (4) > cold penetration > unbounded ailments > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > elemental proliferation > iron will > empower (2) > faster projectiles > faster casting > spell echo
30 cold resist (standard boss), DPS - spell echo > controlled destruction > ice bite > hypothermia > faster casting > slower projectiles > empower (4) > cold penetration > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > iron will > faster projectiles > empower (2) > elemental proliferation = unbounded ailments
85 cold resist (cold boss), freeze duration - controlled destruction > hypothermia > cold penetration > ice bite > slower
projectiles > empower (4) > unbounded
ailments > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower
(3) > elemental proliferation > iron will > empower (2) >
faster projectiles > faster casting > spell echo
85 cold resist (cold boss), DPS - spell echo > controlled destruction > ice bite > hypothermia > cold
penetration > faster
casting > slower projectiles > empower (4) > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy >
empower (3) > iron will > faster projectiles > empower (2) >
elemental proliferation = unbounded ailments
Basically it seems I have enough spell penetration that unless a boss is overcapped it barely isn't worth using the cold pen gem. This is only true if frost bomb is up, and that's not a given.
The spreadsheet wants me to use slower projectiles, but the spreadsheet don't understand that freezing pulse loses damage the longer it travels so slower projectiles has an invisible less damage multiplier in it. This depends on how close I get to the enemies, and it really hurts my trash clear because the size of my attack is based on how fast it travels. Similarly the faster projectiles damage is better than it seems here (but it still seems quite bad).
Spell echo is the best for doing damage, but it's actively bad at freezing a boss. This means I may want to carry one around to swap in on bosses I can't freeze? I suspect I'd rather have faster casting instead for mobility reasons if I can't freeze the boss? Hard to say.
Ice bite looks good, but that's because it's a way to get frenzy charges. If I can get the charges up then it is worth using. If I can't then it's trash. You get them for killing frozen enemies, which will happen all the time on trash and on boss fights with tons of adds but never on a standalone boss.
I think what I'm ultimately going to want to run is controlled destruction, hypothermia, ice bite, cold penetration, and faster casting. It feels like a good setup for trash with a reasonable shot at freezing most bosses. I can swap in a slower projectiles for the ice bite when I can't keep up the frenzy charges and just get right up in the single boss' face. Either way I do want my colours to be BBBGGG so I should get on that.
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