Cold Snap Vortex Occultist Ascendancy, Bandits & Pantheon Powers
ASCENDANCY
The most optimal way to play this build leaves very little choices when it comes to the Ascendancy nodes, which I will cover in this section of the guide.
MY PREFERRED SET-UP
The ascendancy nodes are listed in order of importance (and tied to the way you need to travel to access them).
- Void Beacon
- Frigid Wake
- Vile Bastion
- Malediction
Void Beacon
Void Beacon is not very special; it makes enemies close to you have lowered Cold Resistance & 100% reduced Life regeneration.
Frigid Wake
Frigid Wake, besides the extra Cold Damage over Time multiplier, which is a multiplicative damage modifier, also renders you immune to both being Chilled as well as Frozen. This opens up other modifiers to use from your flasks. Besides this, it also Freezes nearby enemies in intervals, for a short duration, as well as making enemies that are Chilled near you deal less damage.
Vile Bastion
Vile Bastion is mainly taken as it makes us completely immune to stuns as long as we have Energy Shield; since we are CI, we would be dead if we don’t have ES. It also provides us with a juicy ES regeneration up to 10% of our ES pool if we’ve killed 10 enemies recently on top of the baseline 40 Energy Shield regenerated per second. This is an effective way for us to stay alive whilst clearing maps instead of waiting for us to “not take damage which starts the Energy Shield Recharge”, which is our main source of ES recharge/regeneration vs bosses thanks to Wicked Ward.
Malediction
Malediction allows us to apply an additional curse on enemies as well as having increased effect of our curses. Besides this this ascendancy node also applies the “Malediction” debuff on enemies making them both deal less damage as well as take increased damage.
BANDITS
You will kill all of the bandits, as they provide no significant gains worthy of losing the skill points for.
PANTHEON
As with most builds these comes down to a matter of personal taste. I for one, love adding the upgraded Lunaris Major God to avoid projectile damage.
I tend to lean towards the Abberath Minor God pantheon to mitigate Ignite Damage. Since, against end-game bosses, the the build focuses on not taking damage for around ~1 second to start the Energy Shield Recharge, we don’t want to be affected by any Fire Damage over time ground effects.
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