Whispering ice Poison assassin THEORYCRAFT

Here's the idea:

- Whispering ice so i can stack INT and not worry about anything else

- Volkuur's guidance to let my cold poison

- Poison chance from Lesser poison and Assassin's Noxious strike

- Blasphemy Temporal chains so the poison duration isn't as short from volkuurs + great defensively

- Blasphemy Despair so i get the extra chaos damage and DOT increase

- CWC Wither for 90% increased chaos damage taken

- CI with Ghost reaver for ridiculous ES leech

POB


Any ideas/Improvements?

reserver

just 1 very sad point: stacking int increases ur spell's dmg, which is great for ice storm, BUT it wont increase your poison dmg at all, cause poison is ailment dmg and not spell dmg :/

however isn't poison damaged based off the spell's damage tho

ye, problems are

1. hit rate - ice storm ain't that great
2. as mentioned - int scaling won't increase ailment or poison dmg

It would make more sense to actually go for Firestorm Volkuur as that way you can scale generic fire/ele dmg which will work on poison and won't be limiting yourself for Int scaling.

CWC vs Totem for support channeling
- With Wither on CWC, you can better maintain stacks, however aiming is necessary. Totem autotargets
Would make maybe more sense to go for Blight + CWC , and have Wither Totem as extra, as mentioned with Firestorm as the main skill.

Could make sense to go for The Consuming Dark as MH which solves all "poisoning"

But this is completely different build :)
Biggest disadvantage is the int dmg scaling

"

Eviscerix wrote:

Here's the idea:

Any ideas/Improvements?

Yeah!
Ditch Assassin and possibly the gloves.


Trickster can add chaos dmg to your build allowing a way to still poison without reduced poison duration 25%, 15% and 5%. No matter how you look at it. The reduced duration of poison will make you do about same dmg with poison but the Trickster will actually do more dmg because it get chaos dmg.

Going assassin for crit and poison require perfect agony which at that point is already hard enough and leave no room for your int stacking.

Here the simple problem you cannot solve with Whispering Ice.
You either go crit multi without a crit chance/multi weapon and that make int stacking very bad or you int stack and get elemental overload because the spell hit so much that it will get a crit once a while anyway.

By using Volk glove you miss the opportunity for a lot of dmg.

Just random gloves that would give better results for utility and dmg.


And while those glove have decent int. With luck, you can get more intel like on these boots.
Or this helm.

"

petitcrabe1 wrote:

"

Eviscerix wrote:

Here's the idea:

Any ideas/Improvements?

Yeah!
Ditch Assassin ...

the basic of assassin is "5% increased Poison Duration for each Poison you have inflicted Recently"

and if you look at a lot of poison build, u don't give a shit about basic dmg.
the only concern is need to hit a lot so you "leech" a lot with torment thieve ring and apply hundred of poison stack fast.


due to noxious strike (assassin) 2-3 sec canneling give you poison with 15-20 sec duration ...so way more dmg than initial hit BUT in time ...

in your gem
wither - cwc ok

then
life leech - lesser poison - deadly ailments - vile toxin.

only deadly ailment do not benefit ice storm but greatly increased your poison where concentrated effect only buff ice storm not poison ...
so basycally rly depend on what you want to do.

1 - ice storm + poison as small buff
2 - poison build that use ice storm to apply it ?

"

macenno wrote:

the basic of assassin is "5% increased Poison Duration for each Poison you have inflicted Recently"

and if you look at a lot of poison build, u don't give a shit about basic dmg.
the only concern is need to hit a lot so you "leech" a lot with torment thieve ring and apply hundred of poison stack fast.


due to noxious strike (assassin) 2-3 sec canneling give you poison with 15-20 sec duration ...so way more dmg than initial hit BUT in time ...

No. Simply no.
1. How is 5% increased relevant when he use GLOVES that have 50% LESS DURATION of his poison ?
IN short, the way LESS work = reverse of MORE. Meaning his poison last 1 second and each 5% increase actually represent nothing...

[Base poison duration * {1 +(Bonus * recent stack)}] * Less

Base duration = 2
Bonus = 0.05
Recent stack lets do 0 and then 10 and then 20!
Less = 50% or 0.5
Recent stack refer to last 4 seconds.

A) No poison stack on enemy.
First poison duration:
[2 * {1 +(0 * 0.05)}] * 0.5 = 1 second poison duration

I hope he stack them fast to gain some duration to get more poison stacks.. But here, look whats about to happen!

At 10 stacks
[2 * {1 +(10 * 0.05)}] * 0.5 = 1.5 seconds poison duration of the stack #10

at 20 stacks
[2 * {1 +(20 * 0.05)}] * 0.5 = 2 seconds poison duration of the stack #20

at 50 stacks!
[2 * {1 +(50 * 0.05)}] * 0.5 = 3.5 seconds poison duration of the stack #50

Wait!
at 200 stacks!
[2 * {1 +(200 * 0.05)}] * 0.5 = 11 seconds poison duration of the stack #200

You said 15-20 sec duration ?

Lets see with 300 stacks of poison!
[2 * {1 +(300 * 0.05)}] * 0.5 = 16 seconds poison duration of the stack #300!

Now, remember that to get even to 50 stacks the target need to stand still a lot and the first stacks are LONG gone meaning that you most likely applied over 100 stack just to get to 50 active stacks on the target. Boom... Monster use a movement skills.. Out of the icestorm 3.5 seconds.. Shit.. Poison is gone and will now last 1 second again. Time to ramp up! (A few hours later!) Still ramping up! Pls stand still target!

"

macenno wrote:

in your gem
wither - cwc ok

then
life leech - lesser poison - deadly ailments - vile toxin.

only deadly ailment do not benefit ice storm but greatly increased your poison where concentrated effect only buff ice storm not poison ...
so basically rly depend on what you want to do.

Lesser poison, deadly ailments AND vile toxins does not benefit Icestorm.
In fact:

Lesser poison = is a meager added chaos* dmg that does not benefit icestorm
*Side note: Icestorm Damage Effectiveness= 30%. So that nothing added as chaos become nothing x 0.3. None of the gems even help wither which in turn doesnt even help icestorm. Hell, Wither is reduced in area by concentrated effect!

Deadly ailments = 10% LESS dmg (Not to be confused with reduced)

Vile Toxins = 9% more dmg with hits against something poison
Wither give no dmg to icestorm.

You just turned one of the most epic 7 link into a 2-3 link with a Less Dmg attached.

Your icestorm will be doing about 2k-3k dmg vs the 50k-70k dmg per crystal to get poison dmg on it that need 300 stacks to last 16 seconds ?

First of all, where is the monster that stay in place to get the around 600 stack of continuous poison ? After all, untill you reach about 100 stack they will expire so fast that you will be fighting to climb the stack numbers.

Second, How does poison work again ?
20% of the hit is the damage per second!

You do realize how many stacks of 200 dps poison you need to stack just to get to a whispering ice build dmg for 1 CRYSTAL? NOT DPS!!!
You will need to have 50000 / (2000 * 0.2) = 125 stacks of poison to generate the dmg of 1 crystal vs the lowest of the lowest geared Whispering Ice build!

Meanwhile the normal whispering Ice build is hitting with about 10-40 crystals easy per seconds! 1 shard per cast drop every .1 seconds and you can easily stack 2-3 cast if not 4 when boss little less mobile. To deal that amount of dmg with the poison you would need to have between 1250 and 5000 stacks of poison just to come to the dmg of the 80c budget build whispering ice. Yes yes... You can lower the stack because the 2k dmg crystals do hit. Which bring you still to poison stacks requirement between 1187.5 and 4750 stacks to be == to typical poor man whispering ice build. <--- What a feat! So go ahead! At least you got wither which should reduce the stack needed a bit more! Thank god! Go use more points outside of intel to get more poison dmg right ? That will reduce even more your base dmg, spell dmg, spell duration to end up with even less icestorm dmg and in turn, less poison dmg that scale even more poorly from it's increases. Lets not forget how much ES you lose by removing intel!

Remember you get 33% increased intel! 76 intel become 101.08! for 2 items..
76 intel become 101.08! We aint even talking about 6% int corruptions yet on rings and belt or 12% intel shaper plate!! 100 intel on a whispering build = 20% increased ES, 10-30 base dmg. 10% spell dmg and 0.15 seconds additional Base Duration.


Conclusion ?

"

macenno wrote:

1 - ice storm + poison as small buff
2 - poison build that use ice storm to apply it ?

Crapstorm with cute ticklish poison that probably cant even do past 2nd lab because it cant even leech properly because it just doesnt work with poison and the damage is so bad that it just cant do anything useful because like he said "Ghost reaver for ridiculous ES leech" <---- Just not the ridiculous side of the coin he think.

Trust me, Icestorm is my favorite skill in this game. I tried many variations, made my own and wanted to do self cast(meh), crit(bad), to poison(terribly cool idea but terrible)...

So let me explain in short:

Poison gems dont make the spell stronger at all bit. Only less <--- (total dmg after increases is reduced). Making the spell deal terrible dmg and the poison in turn = 20% of terrible. <--- We will need to find a politically correct word to describe that one and in case of a poison assassin.. Well, poison doesnt scale with crit... Only base dmg! Unless you take Perfect Agony but man.. Less int or a terrible flask option. Either way. Even less dmg and if you take crit multi to make it work. Even less intel! Poison + crit + crit multi on tree = terrible intel.

Crit cannot take Ele overloard(bye bye "more dmg") and will be chasing crit/crit multi nodes to compensate at the expense of intel which in turn lower ice storm duration, lower icestorm base dmg, lower spell dmg increase and lower ES!


Self cast is the most playable of the 3 and require so much investment to come to CwC speed that you lose on dmg because mana cost is so high that you simply cannot run as many aura/heralds. Since you lose on Scorching Ray pen you either have to still use convert fire + Avatar of fire while still using Combustion orb of storm or go even more clunky with Frost bomb.

The only really viable ways to play Whispering Ice are: CwC(clunky), Totems(Very Clunky), Traps(Super Clunky) , Self cast(Least clunky aside Frost bomb and require spell echo that is somewhat clunky as well. Also lowest dmg or not enough mana).