[3.25] ❄️ Icicle Mines Deadeye ❄️ Cheap / League Starter / Fast Mapper / 1st Day T16

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Yeah me too and finally found this league starter for my taste. Did even a test run to A3, which I normally don’t do.

100% agree. I did a run of this and locus mines. Took the advice of others on reddit and stayed away from Hexblast due to the potential cost & rarity of sandstorm.

Between this and locus mines I will tell you that locus mines is pretty powerful on no gear. But tight layouts, entering doors, etc. are not very friendly to that build. I did an act 1 -> yellow maps run through the past 4 days to test. I also did a test run of this build a month or so ago with similar gear to simulate.

Loved the experience with this build. Can't speak for the highest levels of scaling, but you will be able to get to maps fast and you will have an enjoyable experience for league start.

If any of you out there are having last second indecision between these 2 builds I would tell you to go with this one. Locus mines is getting a lot of hype and the playstyle isn't horrible once you get used to it. But it will piss you off at times and you will die if you are not being very careful. I'd rather go with the safe & reliable option instead.

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jddc78 wrote:

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Yeah me too and finally found this league starter for my taste. Did even a test run to A3, which I normally don’t do.

100% agree. I did a run of this and locus mines. Took the advice of others on reddit and stayed away from Hexblast due to the potential cost & rarity of sandstorm.

Between this and locus mines I will tell you that locus mines is pretty powerful on no gear. But tight layouts, entering doors, etc. are not very friendly to that build. I did an act 1 -> yellow maps run through the past 4 days to test. I also did a test run of this build a month or so ago with similar gear to simulate.

Loved the experience with this build. Can't speak for the highest levels of scaling, but you will be able to get to maps fast and you will have an enjoyable experience for league start.

If any of you out there are having last second indecision between these 2 builds I would tell you to go with this one. Locus mines is getting a lot of hype and the playstyle isn't horrible once you get used to it. But it will piss you off at times and you will die if you are not being very careful. I'd rather go with the safe & reliable option instead.

Thanks for sharing!

That is the best and easiest league starter I have had. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Abyss OP



It dropped from a lich.

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jddc78 wrote:

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Yeah me too and finally found this league starter for my taste. Did even a test run to A3, which I normally don’t do.

100% agree. I did a run of this and locus mines. Took the advice of others on reddit and stayed away from Hexblast due to the potential cost & rarity of sandstorm.

Between this and locus mines I will tell you that locus mines is pretty powerful on no gear. But tight layouts, entering doors, etc. are not very friendly to that build. I did an act 1 -> yellow maps run through the past 4 days to test. I also did a test run of this build a month or so ago with similar gear to simulate.

Loved the experience with this build. Can't speak for the highest levels of scaling, but you will be able to get to maps fast and you will have an enjoyable experience for league start.

If any of you out there are having last second indecision between these 2 builds I would tell you to go with this one. Locus mines is getting a lot of hype and the playstyle isn't horrible once you get used to it. But it will piss you off at times and you will die if you are not being very careful. I'd rather go with the safe & reliable option instead.

I'm doing locus mines as we speak and I agree, I kinda regret not going icicle deadeye instead to be honest.

I will finish my atlas and maybe try this instead.

My league start experience, writing this between days 2-3. Hopefully, my experience may give some better expectations for others trying to play this build at league start.

TL;DR - 8.5/10 for this league, probably 9/10 in any other league. Absolutely solid if you discount my own luck with some minor (miner?) jank involving miner playstyle.

Disclaimer: I normally play extremely leisurely. I would finish the acts at around 10 hours, get first voidstones around day 5, finish atlas in roughly a week. I take frequent breaks (IRL obligations) and spend a bit of time analyzing what popular content creators are doing or talking with friends to see how their experiences are going. I did not follow this guide to the letter and made a few changes to fit my preferences.

League start was fine, nothing extraordinary but definitely could have been better. Leveling with a 2-link Caustic Arrow - Volley and Shrapnel Ballista - Chance to Poison instead of using Mirage Archer or Puncture. It just felt a bit better personally. Swapped to Pconc - Volley as soon as I could, adding Chance to Poison as a third link instead of Lesser Multiple Projectiles.

Big change was that in the passive tree, I pathed to Heart of Oak > Replenishing Remedies > Finesse > Field Medicine for the first 20 or so passive points. I read some tech somewhere that having both Replenish Remedies AND Field Medicine would smooth out the flask charges to keep the DPS for Pconc higher and more consistent. I found this to be quite comfortable.

Got extremely lucky and dropped an early Meginord's Gridle and Crest of Perandus in act 2 and that covered most of my gear and survivability until the latter half of the campaign. I chose to help Kraityn for the movement speed instead of Alira for the elemental resistances; I fixed it easily with crafted resistances after saving Helena and gaining access to the crafting bench. Herald of Agony helped a lot of DPS as well as upgrading life flasks. I also forgot to pick up Summon Skitterbots here and picked it up much later in act 6.

Act 3 - Ended up with Pconc - Volley - Chance to Poison - Unbound Ailments as my 4-link due to sockets. I began to notice some mana problems so I threw in a Clarity and kept it at level 1 to help with mana regen. I probably should have leveled it a bit to 4 or 5 to smooth things out a bit more. Picked up Haste but I didn't use it and instead opted to use Purity of Elements for the ailment immunity as well as cap my resistances without having to worry too much about them for the reminder of the campaign. I was going to skip the library sidequest entirely but really wanted to get Purity of Elements.
Completed the first ascendancy and took Gathering Winds first.

Act 4 and 5 - picked up Despair and slotted in Greater Volley to the main Pconc links. Nothing special to note.

Act 6 - Icicle Mine swap. At this point, I had picked up about 2 chaos off the ground and went ahead to buy a Mutewind Whispersteps. Massive, massive DPS upgrade at this point and I was extremely happy with how the build was performing. I dropped anything related to poison or chaos damage from gems and the passive tree and went into the crit and mine passives.

QUICK NOTE: the Settlers league mechanic allows you to respec your passive tree for a bit of gold. The amount of gold required, especially during the campaign, is extremely cheap. I think around this point, it cost around 20 gold per passive point. Highly recommend any late league starters to go to Kingsmarch and get access to Faustus and invite him to your hideout around act 7-ish, which is probably when you may consider tinkering with your passive points. Keep in mind that the Faustus NPC in the Rogue Harbour and the Faustus NPC in Kingsmarch (and your hideout) are two separate NPCs, meaning you cannot use the option to respec in the Rogue Harbour.

Act 7 - 10 - Now, here is where I got massively sidetracked and lost a few hours. As soon as I hit level 58, I noticed it was about 7-8 hours from league start. I took a risk and jumped into the Rogue Harbour. Usually, the harbour would be insanely crowd with hundreds of people idling around with all of their MTX out. This would lag the absolutely tits out of my PC and zoning in would take upwards to minutes at a time so I have skipped anything to do with Heist for the past 7 or so leagues.

This paid off massively as I got up to level 65 without issues and managed to farm better gear and do the chaos recipe for a small profit. I dropped a high mana reservation roll Ventor's Gamble and sold it for 20c immediately. I turned that into an overpriced Bitterdream (I bought mine for about 12c at the time) and went back to the campaign. Completed my 2nd and 3rd ascendancies without too much issue; I took Richochet and Endless Munitions.

Ended day 1 with the campaign completed around 12 hours from league start with all passive points (except bandits) and three ascendancies done. I'm currently level 89 and just hit red maps with 69 (nice) map completion. I'm not going to go into the shenanigans I encountered on day 2 going into maps since this post is already getting pretty long.

Hopefully, my experiences this league start may help some people out.

Thanks for sharing. I'm doing this build to start as well but finding it incredibly squishy in red maps. Anyone has suggestions for tankiness?

Side note I got an atziri's foiable in act 6 which sold quickly for 1d, Isla's auto mapping gave me a div from a t2 map and I got a raw div in a t6 map so I'm looking to move into the rathpith+dissolution set up soon. Is that any better in terms of survivability?

Any value in a Sire Of Shards version?

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TwilightArchon wrote:

Thanks for sharing. I'm doing this build to start as well but finding it incredibly squishy in red maps. Anyone has suggestions for tankiness?

Side note I got an atziri's foiable in act 6 which sold quickly for 1d, Isla's auto mapping gave me a div from a t2 map and I got a raw div in a t6 map so I'm looking to move into the rathpith+dissolution set up soon. Is that any better in terms of survivability?

thanks to CoD+Portal you dont lose too much time. I find projectil speed and no. of projectiles very important for survivability (quality on gem)

Is far shot now better than +2 proj???