[3.16] Freeze Battlemage: Permanently Freeze (almost) Everything

I'm am very pleased to hear you are enjoying the build, thank you for sharing your feedback! :)

So the way to "jump" on the skill tree like that is to gain your "path of the shadow" ascendancy. It's something special that Scion's can do, after you've allocated that ascendancy point, you will then be able to jump across the tree like that.

I'm continuing to play this character even today, and I'm finding little things I can do to improve upon it. I'll update the POB later when I feel like there's enough tweaks to warrant making the update.

I updated the POB, refunded the passives down in the large/medium cluster jewel at the bottom and used those points to gain more spell suppression and evasion. Also purchased a watchers eye, and crafted a frostbite on hit ring. The next upgrades would be to get awakened support gems and perhaps experiment with alternate quality gems, or an amulet with +1 to cold gems and probably +1 to intelligence gems. Or perhaps with flat added physical or flat added cold.

Been running a lot of heists lately and the build has been great in heists since it's less about single target DPS and more about AOE clear or even just freezing enemies and walking right past them on your way out the door with your loot. Also posted an updated video, only 2 minutes long. Hope anyone who is following the build is enjoying it.

I'm really enjoying the low level part of this build, looking forward to it later on. Great fun, especially once you get hydrosphere :D

Edit: life pool seems low, but i guess nothing hits as it's frozen haha

2nd edit: going to run inward eye as the suggested helmet is 5ex at the moment. Should bring some more survivability.

you can put winter burial in the socket by the res node at scion start isn't much but might help a little for early clear

"

razlo11 wrote:

you can put winter burial in the socket by the res node at scion start isn't much but might help a little for early clear

Good to know, thank you!

"

Forcer_Josh wrote:

I'm really enjoying the low level part of this build, looking forward to it later on. Great fun, especially once you get hydrosphere :D

Edit: life pool seems low, but i guess nothing hits as it's frozen haha

2nd edit: going to run inward eye as the suggested helmet is 5ex at the moment. Should bring some more survivability.

Glad to hear you're enjoying it! :) Yeah the character is relatively squishy and relies on the freeze to stay alive. Certain enemies are a big threat to this build, like lightning mirage <-- even if you freeze enemies with this ability, they still summon lightning mirages and it *will* kill you if you stand still for too long (as happened in the first video I made on this character). Enemies with persistent effects that happen even when they are frozen can be a pain.

I've been tinkering around with different skills and decided to drop the holy relic + stone golem and instead run void sphere:



There's a lot of good situations to drop void sphere, like right before popping a harvest, or like when you're fighting metamorphs and they spawn those enemies around the edge of your screen. You can just drop a void sphere, it will freeze and pull everything in towards the center and cause their deaths to overlap AOE damage explosions and clean up the pack nice and easy.

Just in case anyone's interested, here's a clip of this character running a breach. I recommend teaming up with other players and running rotations if you intend to run breachstones. The biggest thing this character has to offer when running breaches is that you prevent players from dying during the boss fight at the end. All the breachlords get permafroze by this character, including pure chayula. Pure Chayla can be a scary boss and kill a lot of players, but with Freeze Battlemage in the party, Chayula isn't a threat. I haven't tried running the new "aspirational" breaches yet, so I'm not sure what to expect there.

https://youtu.be/6Wj30JAqE3Y

I gotta say I love how on the gear section you said "for the boots im running this" That was amazing pun.

Anyways, I really loved the mapping video and really wanted to make the build but i wanted for it to be able to do 'end game' bosses so i decided to go for crit



I'm using this ring with hydrosphere inside to get brittle and with all the non-damaging ailment effect its super easy to get 15% flat crit which makes hitting 100% crit chance super duper easy

Dude, that is a really neat idea!! I love it! I was thinking of ways to get more value out of the non-damaging ailments. Hmmm you just helped me a lot with my next iteration of a freeze character. Would you be willing to share your POB? I'm interested in how you made the character more viable for end game stuff.

This is a great idea! Looking forward to trying out something a little different. Thank you for the build.

is this build end game viable?

"

dmoniak wrote:

is this build end game viable?

Yes: for T16 maps, ilvl 83 grand heists, expeditions, rituals, harvest etc.

No: for Sirus, Shaper, Elder, Maven, etc. (not for me anyways, maybe you can succeed on them)

So it depends on what kind of end-game content you want to run. If you want to run end-game content that has a lot of enemies on the screen, this build will blow those enemies up eazy-peazy. If you want to run aspirational bosses, be aware that GGG has made those bosses IMMUNE TO FREEZE. So this build's biggest defense (freezing your enemies before they kill you) will not work on those end-game bosses, and you will not be gaining the benefits of overlapping AOE damage/explosions when fighting a single big tanky boss.

Another thing to point out is that Sirus in particular does a lot of physical based spell damage. This character (the way I've currently built it) has little phys damage mitigation, and maybe 4.5K total life + es. I have him ready but I have a sirus baked and ready to take out of the oven, but I've not felt confident taking him on with this build as of yet!

I'm still playing the build and have recently equipped it with a headhunter, which is a lot of fun and works well in party play because you have super-culling strike with glacial hammer and usually get the killing blow on rare mobs :)

I've also been doing more expeditions and this build is doing great on them. If you stack your expeditions with tons of damage, action speed, various immunities (except cold), chance to poison, chance to impale, etc... you just freeze them anyway, which makes it a lot safer for you and your allies.

I can understand why GGG has made aspirational bosses immune to freeze, it's kind of a tricky balancing issue.


Anyway here's the map mods I would be careful of:

No regen -Doable but it's tricky.
Elemental reflect - hard no. This will kill you (unless you've modified the build to take no reflect damage)
Monster's action speed cannot be reduced - Doable but I would avoid it.
Monsters have 70% chance to avoid elemental ailments - Doable but I would avoid it.
Beyond - Doable but frozen beyond bosses can still cast spells for some reason. They can't MOVE...but they can still cast spells? IDK they're weird.

Other then that there are specific enemies to be careful of: lightning mirage for example. I have seen many players die to lightning mirage. You can't freeze them and they blend into blue-ish environments.