Cold Chronomancer Megathread. All content cleared. Leveling guide added.

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PaintMaster#2396 wrote:

Yeah, that change shouldn't affect this build much if at all.

Plus even if it works, it still cost a lot of mana so you can't like cast non stop, you cast frost wall + frost bomb, it cast comets that eat all mana, use temporal rift and repeat, so i'm sure build will be fine.

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Casia#1093 wrote:

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PaintMaster#2396 wrote:

Yeah, that change shouldn't affect this build much if at all.

Plus even if it works, it still cost a lot of mana so you can't like cast non stop, you cast frost wall + frost bomb, it cast comets that eat all mana, use temporal rift and repeat, so i'm sure build will be fine.

"costs a lot of mana"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqx8C2J2UB8

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chobi0ne#5028 wrote:

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Kenshi2263#8330 wrote:

@chobi0ne#5028

Are you able to share your items/gems setup via maxroll?
I'm curious to see what it looks like

Here: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/ilq1o0v9
I'll also copy the explanation notes from it here.

The idea of this build is to combine very strong and easy laidback 1-button clearing with even stronger bossing.

Clearing explanation:
This part comes from my initial CoF Frost Wall build: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/fw13f401

Spam Frostbolt to freeze everything and trigger Cast on Freeze with Frost Wall (Spell Cascade). This quickly fills the area with Frost Wall.

Snakepit causes all your Frostbolt projectiles to fork and explode Frost Wall immediately. This alone deals massive damage and should clear 99% of the current end-game content, including 8/8 breaches, deliriums and so on. However, it doesn't stop here.

All the damage we dealt so far crits and triggers Cast on Critical with Comet - this will clear all the fat rares which didn't die by now.

Several Sapphire jewels with +2% Mana on Kill are required to provide mana sustain.

In some rare occasions you can help yourself with manual Frost Wall and Frost Bomb, especially if you are running a map with increased ailment threshold on monsters and increased elemental resistances.

For defenses you have high ES (up to 8.2k in my case), high Mana pool and several "oh sh&*" buttons: Temporal Rift, Time Freeze and Blink (optional). Besides that you have passive protection coming from very powerful slows: Apex of the Moment, Zone of Control, Master of Hexes, Blasphemy with Temporal Chains. In fact, this is what makes you nearly unkillable as long as you move around.


Bossing explanation:
This part is heavily inspired by Cold Slowmancer build made by Monik390.

We utilize second weapon set with some minions and special passives which increase our spell and offering duration. This is needed only for two abilities: Soul Offering and Time Freeze.

Soul Offering is pretty self explanatory: you just swap to your 2nd weapon set, sacrifice minions, get extra damage for ~16 seconds.

Then you cast Time Freeze on the boss to freeze it for ~16 seconds.

Then you swap to your first weapon set, cast Frost Bomb and Frost Wall. If the boss is large size, then Frost Wall will explode on it and deal damage immediately. All this will trigger Cast on Critical Comet multiple times, which will drain all your mana pool (4.1k in my case) immediately. So you have to use Temporal Rift to recover your mana and repeat your rotation. With enough damage you will kill max difficulty Xesht during first Time Freeze. If not - then you have 2nd Time Freeze and also your strongest burst window once you manage to actually freeze the boss.

As for regular map bosses - all of them usually die even before you Temporal Rift. Usually you don't even need to Time Freeze them, so for regular mapping you can even opt-out from Time Freeze for Quicksand Hourglass.


Some Notes:
There are some known tips and tricks, caveats, bugs and issues, which I will mention here:
- You can use Prism of Belief with +1-3 to Frostbolt (for clearing) or Comet (for uber bossing). This jewel works, but requires you to change location or relog in order to take effect.
- +1 Level from Corruption seems to be bugged and currently doesn't seem to work at all. Don't waste your currency trying to get Lv20 Gem with +1 Lv Corruption.
- Spells triggered from meta skills will also consume charges of the same self-cast spell. In my build it's Frost Wall, so sometimes we have 0 charges at our disposal due to this. However, usually when it happens, we don't really need to manually self-cast Frost Wall anyway.
- Archmage breakpoint for +9% damage starts at Level 21. So make sure to get Lv 20 gem and use Lightning Mastery, it's worth it. When GGG will fix +1 Lv from Corruption it will be easier/cheaper to acquire it.
- I hate natural ES recovery mechanic and prefer to "refill" it myself with Life Flasks, so I have Eternal Youth. You can drop it if you like, in this case maybe you can drop Dynamism (or anoint it on your amulet).
- I probably have quite some overkill ES. If you feel like making it a bit lower - you can opt-out from ES passives and get more damage (crit) passives instead.

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Madlancer#7814 wrote:

Since the patch is live now, anyone noticing that just casting Frost Wall on mobs kills them now? Or was this always the case and I never noticed before.

Previously I was manually blowing em up with pointblank frost orbs to try and trigger comets to clear my screen.

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Bakokang#3499 wrote:

Tested the new patch before leaving for work. CoC self-cast Comet on walls still works! Haven't checked yet the change in energy gained via the icon on the top left. But it still summons the same amount of Comets and depletes all my mana with my current set-up (no Impetus, with the cluster nodes for meta gain at 3 o'clock on the tree). I guess what was happening before is that, Comet hits so hard + the shattering of the multiple walls gain so much energy that it overflows and casts multiple Comets instead of just one after one combo. I had thought that the other Comets were caused by the "summoned" Comets shattering more walls.

Bad news is, Considered Casting no longer works on CoC. I wonder where to put this gem now, and what to replace it with on my CoC?

For others that already tried it, does it still work on bosses? If it doesn't anymore, that's fine as it was very OP anyway.