All Around Miner - Glacial Cascade Mines Saboteur Build Guide (The Forbidden Sanctum 3.20)

Out Of Date

April 2nd, 2023, 20:00

Due to the latest balancing changes, we do not recommend playing this build anymore, as it does not meet the high standards we apply to our guides in terms of fun and performance. We are leaving it up as a reference and it might be revived in a later patch.

Latest Update

This guide received an entire balance pass, going north of obscene DPS in optimal conditions now. Major changes include swapping away from wands into sceptres due to less intelligence being available, an entire passive tree adaptation to focus on more Life and some minor tweaks & edits.

Disclaimer

If a guide says it was updated for a specific challenge league, you can be assured it was actually passed through & adapted for that specific patch. You might encounter PoB’s which are outdated but that is either because you’re looking at a Path of Building that was released before the contributors of this program got around to patching it or leveling tree, which hasn’t changed. You can be assured that you can just follow that iteration of the Path of Building without any issues. However, should we wait to push our guides until the program received its final update, we’d never be able to get you this content before the league hit.

Introduction

Glacial Cascade and Miners have always walked hand in hand. Before its nerfs in 3.6 Synthesis League, it was always one of the strongest bossers in the game and often picked as a League-starter because of it. However, the nerfs that happened in Synthesis League did hurt the build quite a lot and the meta shifted more towards Arc or Ball Lightning mines instead. With the newfound buffs in 3.12 Heist League, the skill now finds itself completely fine again and is probably up there with the other best miner skills available damage-wise. In addition to that, Glacial Cascade got more coverage and thus better clear speed in this patch, whereas it already had superior clear to most other mining skills before. This made the build very much an all around viable build that packs a punch in almost every scenario.

While Glacial Cascade no longer is a build that vaporizes a boss in a matter of seconds, it still gets the job done rather quickly. In return, you get a build that still clears the entire screen at once while playing a fairly tanky miner build. The build gets to around 6,000 Health while maintaining very decent Evasion, Mitgiation and Spell Suppression. This effectively means you almost never get hit significantly and when you do so, there’s enough mitigation to push you over the magic thresholds of tanking a hit.

When I played this build, I pushed it to level 95 before deciding I wanted to play something else but many others have pushed this to 100 effortlessly so I’d say that is reasonably doable. In a Hardcore environment, though, I would recommend perhaps dropping some of the damage, the Cluster(s), and try to grab even more Life, as you would want to play it extra safe. Through clever use of Vaal Grace and Cast when Damage Taken Support on dangerous mechanics, you will hardly ever be in risky situations though!

Build Summary

Pros and Cons

Pros

+ Strong bosser with amazing clear
+ Requires no Uniques to function whatsoever
+ Therefore SSF & league-start viable
+ Loads of Regeneration & Suppression to make for a smooth playstyle
+ The build runs no awakened gems at all
+ Build no longer abuses detonation sequencing

Cons

– Miners do require you to use two buttons (to detonate)

Map Modifiers to be Avoided

No Regeneration is incredibly annoying to run, as you’re relying on Life Regeneration quite a bit. If you insist on doing it anyway, you need to bring an Enduring Mana Flask to fix your Mana Regeneration.

Playstyle, Mechanics & Strengths

Since Glacial Cascade can now overlap damage, it is effectively scaled by picking up Radius / Increased Area of Effect in the tree. In practice that actually makes the spell a lot stronger than many anticipated before trying it out. Through these mechanical changes on the skill, it now again is very viable in every scenario. Obviously, there are many ways to scale up the damage a lot higher, but this guide in particular focuses on being available to everyone on a rather average budget instead of going for a, for example, Low-Life option where the gearing process is far less obvious and easy.

Other than that, the Playstyle and Mechanics of the build are rather straightforward. While mapping, you just spam your GC and Detonate buttons and see everything around you evaporate. Whenever you come across something dangerous, such as Metamorphs, Abyss, Legions, and what not, you use your Vaal Grace to cap your character on Dodge and Spell Dodge. This will make you virtually immortal for the duration of the Vaal Aura to anything but one-shots. When you come across something that feels relatively tanky, you’re going to rely on a Cast when Damage taken setup to help you survive it. Other than using your Glacial Cascade and Detonate Mines, most things in this build are automated.

Through using Flame Dash you’re getting the Arcane Surge Support buff from Flame Dash making you deal more damage. The strength of the build, other than its damage mitigation and incredible throughput, is that it usually is able to stay at relative range. It doesn’t require you to be in the fray too much, as stuff will mostly die very far away from you.

Passive Skill Tree, PoB, and Gem Links

You can find an optimized Path of Building here. Every build I release will use the community fork of Path of Building, which is maintained and updated in a much more regular fashion than the original one. You can find PoB’s Fork, by LocalIdentity, here.

If you are not comfortable with Path of Building, we also have a PoePlanner for you. Do note that PoE Planner does not support Cluster Jewels and some specific unique jewels and it is highly recommended you install Path of Building to follow builds most optimally.

More information about the Passive Skill Tree, as well as all the Gem Links can be found on our dedicated page.

Passive Skill Tree, PoB & Gem Links

Ascendancy, Bandits, and Pantheons

Our Ascendancy, Bandit, and Pantheon Power page goes into detail about all the choices you need to make in these regards.

Ascendancy, Bandit & Pantheon Power Page

Gear Summary / TL;DR

A lot of this is explained more in depth in the Gear Page, however we will provide you with a basic idea of what gear you’re looking for in this short summary.

Gear Page

Our recommendation:

Item Slot	Item Name
Head	Crown of the Inward Eye
Amulet	The Pandemonius
Chest	Carcass Jack
Gloves	Incursion Gloves with Cold damage against Chilled Enemies, Life and Resistances
Boots	Atziri's Step
Belt	Stygian Vise with High Life and Resistances
Rings	Vermillion Ring with High Life and Resistances
Weapon	Rare with +1 to Physical Spells, Spell Crit and Elemental as Extra Chaos
Shield	Harmonic Spirit Shield with Life, Spell Suppression and 2 Damage Mods

Questions & Support

I made it a habit to check all comments in my guides on a daily basis. Obviously, there might be occurrences where getting a reply might take longer but I really do try to get back to you as soon as possible. I prefer you making remarks, suggestions or asking questions that way as it allows others to read through the comments, providing them with a potential answer to their question, without having to wait for me again. If I have somehow missed your question, you can try reaching me on our Discord.

If you enjoy my content to such an extent that you’d like to support me and my work, I have a Patreon you can check out. At no point should you feel pressured to contribute, but if you do, your support means more to me than you will ever imagine.

Leveling

Since we are very adamant about trying to give you a leveling experience that lies as close to your endgame playstyle as possible, we will set up you up with a leveling setup for Glacial Cascade miner. While this skill remains one of the more optimal ways to level up, there is always more information and different leveling tricks to be found in the following guides:

Our step-by-step leveling walkthrough, which allows even more experienced players to save time and speed through the leveling process.
Our guide to Unique Items for leveling, which helps you gear up your characters for the leveling process.
Our beginner leveling guide, which answers many of the questions new players might have and will set you on the right path.

Getting to Brutus & Merveil

For starters, create a Shadow in whichever league you want to start.

Pick up an Explosive Trap from the vendor to start your journey and go to kill Hailrake and clear Mud Flats. Set up the following links after Mud Flats:

Frost Bomb
###item:Onslaught-Support###

Explosive Trap

After killing Brutus, you will be adding an Added Lightning Damage Support to your Frost Bomb.

Level 12 and Onwards Setup

From level 12, after killing Merveil, you’ll be setting up for your road to level 28. You should be breezing through content at this point as miners are really strong while leveling.

Glacial Cascade

As soon as you’re level 28 you get to swap to Glacial Cascade mines. Try to include as much of your endgame setup as you have sockets for. Running things like Summon Skitterbots, Hatred Hatred, Arcane Surge Support, Assassin's Mark and Frost Bomb will help your leveling process by a lot.

Credits

A big thanks goes to Windz for letting me use the video that explained Mine Sequences & putting me up to speed with the mine-meta at the time.