Cold Spark Archmage MoM/EB/CI

I've been playing my own variant of the popular spark build lately and loving my updates. I'm curious if anyone else here is doing something similar, and/or has any thoughts on the build.

Quickly thrown together maxroll planner of roughly what I'm doing now.
https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/v813hw0v

Aside from the pretty obvious standard stuff on my tree, I'm using Call of the Brotherhood to get the cold damage so I can freeze enemies with spark. Archmage doesn't get converted to cold damage, but that's OK since it still applies my double shock. I currently have the ascension node so that the cold damage can apply shock as well, but I've been experimenting with that, or the increased exposure effect, or the elemental storm nodes for my 4th ascendency. Scaling multiple damage types can be weird, but I mostly focus on generic spell/elemental damage nodes and avoid specific damage type scaling nodes where I can.

For my jewels, other than the unique giving me 11% mana and 44% fire resistance, I've got a few sets I've been experimenting with. I've got a meta skills gain more energy set to trigger cast on Shock every shock on a boss; though this drains my mana super fast and can get a little hairy because of it. I've got another set focused on the increased freeze build up stat; I like this one a lot for mapping. I've also got a set with max ES and shock chance/magnitude which also feels good but the freeze utility is my favorite so far.

I've got a max vaaled Ghostwrithe that I can swap out if I want to trade my extra spirit for a ton of survivability.

For my spirit from my body armor, I've been experimenting between blasphemy and cast on shock. So far I like blasphemy with hypothermia for mapping; it just makes freezing monsters even more consistent if they get near me and maps feel safer. Plus with the cold node that ignores frozen enemy resists I rarely need to inflict exposure or curse with conductivity because everything except bosses pops super fast. Cast on Shock is nice for bosses though, I've been playing with Ball Lightning (lots of small hits) or Lightning Conduit (big chunky hits). Biggest problem with it is still mana sustain on beefy bosses even with ~625 mana regen per second. Also causes weird situations where I get my energy shield knocked out so I need my mana to stay alive while it recharges - but while I'm trying to let it recharge my old sparks are still shocking the boss and making me use my mana on the triggered skills. 😅

I've got several good gear pieces with near max mana that can fix my resists multiple ways. I've experimented with the unique gloves that let my Lightning damage shock. It was decent when my damage was low because bosses would get chain frozen then electruted and basically not move for 10 seconds. As I got stronger it's mattered less though and just having generically strong gloves is better. I've thought about testing the ring that let's all damage contribute to poison, but that may not be good enough either.

I know I could push max damage if I sacrifice the defense nodes and went pure lightning - I'll probably play with this more at some point. Even with my split damage and defense nodes though I'm able to run T15s and every boss I've tried with no difficulty and basically nothing can truly one-shot me.


Would love to hear input, criticism, advice, ideas, etc! If people are interested enough I might even make this a more proper guide.