TbXie's Cold Dot Vortex Occultist Ascendancy, Bandits & Pantheon Powers (PoE Affliction)

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Ascendancy (Witch – Occultist)

Void Beacon

While mostly useful later on, Void Beacon definitely isn’t something to sniff at. Giving Enemies -20% Cold Resistance is a fairly significant damage boost (especially versus bosses) and making it so they can’t regenerate whatsoever also is a fairly powerful tool to increase your DoT’s effective DPS. More importantly, it enables you to get to the next node in Cruel Lab, which you will need to keep your damage up at that point!

Unholy Authority

Being able to cast multiple curses on enemies is always big since they’re such a big DPS increase. Therefore, we opted to go for this one second, so you can double curse bosses as fast as campaign.

Frigid Wake

This is the stronger early game option of the two you have at this point. Scaling some More Cold Damage is really nice and getting some extra Freezes while making enemies deal reduced damage with hits is extremely potent earlier on. While it eventually gets outscaled by Void Beacon, it definitely is a whole lot better in the early game!

Vile Bastion

Vile Bastion is a fairly strong Defensive part of the Occultist’s Ascendancy Tree. Since you have generally almost always killed at least a couple of monsters recently, you’re getting a decent chunk of % Regen here while also getting some flat regeneration unconditionally. While getting the Stun Immunity here is generally really nice, you already have obtained that through Presence of Chayula so that doesn’t really do much for you in this case. We’re all about the Energy Shield Regeneration here!

Bandits

There really only is one option here. You want to kill all to help Eramir for 2 Skill Points. None of the Bandit options are particularly useful to you for this build.

Pantheons

Major Gods

Soul of Lunaris is probably your best pick. No one has ever said no to some extra Physical Damage Reduction!

Minor Gods

I would recommend Soul of Abberath here as Burning Ground is incredibly annoying for Energy Shield based builds. It’s less annoying on this build cause of Wicked Ward, but it still stops your Energy Shield Recharge from starting all together so I feel like Abberath is a must for most Energy Shield builds.

Upgrading your Pantheons

Whilst upgrading your Pantheons never hurts you, it’s not that important for this character. If you have nothing else to do at some point, sure, why not, but it shouldn’t be something you focus on or spend a lot of time on.

Pantheon powers can be upgraded by using Divine Vessel in the Map Device while you are activating the particular Map that contains the boss you need. Once you’ve killed the boss and captured his soul, you can consume the Divine Vessel, which’ll show up filled in the map device, or deliver it to Sin in Oriath for extra dialogue relating to the game’s lore.

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