Theorycrafting help: Hailstorm Rounds Chronomancer.

So I'm working on leveling a sorcerer so I can give this a full go with Chronomancer, but I've been playtesting a bit on my Pathfinder and have been enjoying the concept.


Basic concept of the build is a Chronomancer with two similar crossbows in each weapon slot. As long as they are both set to it, both crossbows will build a separate stack of Bolts for Hailstorm Rounds, letting us pop one off followed by another.


Toss in Emergency Reload, which reloads both stacks, and Chronomancer's shenanigans letting us use Time Snap to reset Emergency Reload; all the while Now and Again could reset the CD on both Emergency Reload or Time Snap. Only other skills I've got planned would be a Herald of Ice, and Cast on Freeze + Frost Wall


Minimum in one rotation with a 20/20 Hailstorm Rounds let's us drop a total of 180 Bolts on top of the enemy in quick succession.


Some notes with scaling Hailstorm Rounds: Other than the obvious of AoE, Projectile, and Cold to scale damage; it also scales really well with Projectile Speed. Attack Speed didn't seem to do anything noticeable. However, since I'm going Chrono and focusing more on cooldown and resets, I'm not sure if its worth stacking Reload Speed, as it would only really help during the offtimes when we don't get resets, but that could be counted by enough cooldown recovery instead.


Here's a Maxroll and PoB link for what I'm playing around with so far with the following paragraph in mind.


Where I need help with is deciding in what direction to take the build. My first thought was using Maligaro's Virtuosity and Beacon of Azis; we'd ignore ele resist on crit, and would just have to focus on getting crit chance instead of scaling multi. We're already focusing on scaling our damage, projectile speed, and cooldown reduction; adding crit chance on top of that might be a bit much, but I figured with the sheer number of attacks going out, it might make it worthwhile.

We could instead just go non crit, focus on scaling our cold, and grab some penetration instead. If we sacrifice a single ring instead we could also convert to lightning damage.. but at that point might as well just grab HoWA and suddenly this is just another HoWA build, which stat stacking isn't the most appealing to me.


Apologies for the wall of text, but I would absolutely love with some help and feedback. I'm absolutely horrible with finding the best pathing through the tree. I've also not given my defenses all too much thought just yet. We'll need a decent amount of Str and Dex for Crossbow; but I was just planning to go hybrid Evasion/energy shield since we'll need some decent Int for skills as well.

Well, finally hit 41 on my sorceress I've been leveling when I can and switched over to Hailstorm Rounds. I'm still missing Time Snap (am in chaos trials as I write this lol); but so far feels pretty good. It's definitely not amazing right off the rip, but it's fun.


Couple of notes:

Emergency Reload sadly only reloads the stack of hailstorm rounds for whichever crossbow is equipped at the time; I had copied some info from an old reddit post when I fist knocked this together. This means when we're spamming we just need to make sure it's on our stronger of the two crossbows; and that the payload for a single unload isn't quite as high. 120 projectiles instead of 180; but we can still at least increase that a bit with increased levels to Hailstorm Rounds.

Mana was definitely an issue at first as well. Hailstorm Rounds costs the same mana regardless of how many bolts you're firing; so while leveling in between Emergency Reload cooldowns it's been pretty hefty to spam it, but a single mana regen node was enough to handle it.



https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/l1h480dh Here's my skill tree so far; I played around with rushing straight to the Instant Reload node, but damage was lacking a bit too much. Instead I grabbed the herald, maim, and projectile nodes shown and damage seems fine for now; and now I'm rushing for the reload nodes.