[3.8] What a Shocking Tri-Element Trapper! [Fire/Ice Trap build][UberAtziri/Shaper Video]

Update 06.03.2019

Been a while, eh? Well, 3.8 did bring quite a lot of nice stuff for this build, indeed.

Fire Trap was boosted yet even more, which is real lovely. The AOE was also increased. Very nice.
More AOE for Ice Trap. Double Nice.
A new skill gem in the form of SKitterbugs. When I first read over their description, I thought "Why do I need these with Chain Reaction?". Then I found out they apply Shock, and now ol' Shock Nova sadly became obsolete. So long, my old friend, who was with me during the time Vaal Construct was the final boss in the beta. I will miss you!

Still need to see how I deal with the Skilltree. I see no great need to change it thus far, but I'll see what I do. I might experiment around with the free Gem slots now that Shock Nova is gone. Perhaps get some use out of Lightning Spire Trap, finally.

Fire Trap + Trap And Mine Damage + Concentrated Effect + Elemental Focus + Controlled Destruction + Increased Critical Damage/Increased Critical Strikes/Fire Penetration/Level 4 Empower

Your main skill for single targets, so basically bosses, and follow-ups on groups that don't die by Ice Trap. It may seem kinda weak at first, but as you level it up, this skill melts bosses in no time! Since 3.0, Ignite on this is neglectable, hence you should use Elemental Focus. The Burning Ground, however, gets also boosted by this, turning it quite powerful, actually! Use Increased Critical Damage/Increased Critical Strikes for map clearing while Fire Penetration against Guardians/The Shaper, due to their high elemental resistances. For Budget, get yourself a Level 4 Empower. It will be better than any choice for the 6th slot, but is also the most expensive choice.


Ice Trap + Trap And Mine Damage + Cluster Trap + Added Cold Damage/Concentrated Effect/Elemental Focus

This one you use for groups of Trash mobs. Often, they die by this skill alone! Pretty darn powerful, these traps. Get Concentrated Effect if you want a lot bigger punch behind them with the fear of possibly not hitting a target more than once or Elemental Focus if you want more damage than Added Cold Damage (though not as much as Concentrated Effect) while keeping a good splash with the downside of not chilling or Freezing anybody. Elemental Focus is straight up better than Added Cold Damage for any single target damage, and even Concentrated Effect works out a lot better for that. Decide which you prefer.


Shock Nova + Trap(if you don't have Deerstalker yet) + Cluster Trap/Increased Area of Effect + Trap and Mine Damage + Charged Traps

This is the skill you always use at the very start of everything! With Cluster Trap, you make sure to spread it out as much as possible to Shock as many enemies as you can. Combine it with Charged Traps, as well. With this support gem, you are ensured to always get plenty Power and Frenzy Charges up!
Retired

Summon Skitterbots

A new skill with 3.8, and what a blessing for this build! This here skill summons 2 li'l, immortal bots that rush around, activating any Trap that hasn't blown yet. Very useful when you don't have Chain Reaction yet! Bombs they activate explode harder and get set once more, albeit relying merely on them to set a specific trap can be awfully bothersome, so just enjoy it as an extra amount of damage whenever they manage to set one up!

More importantly, one of these bots applies chill (quite nice for slowing enemies down) and the other applies Shock! This means Shock Nova is no more needed and... Well, the Tri in this build sorta died. But screw it, I keep the title. Vaal Lightning Trap just replaced it now.

Vaal Lightning Trap + Charged Traps + Advanced Traps/Cluster Traps

This here trap is generally used at the very beginning of combat (if you got some charges) to apply an instant Shock to enemies and to gather some much needed Power and Frenzy Charges through Charged Traps. Don't be shy to use plenty of these, or otherwise your charges may run out. Advanced Traps is here to increase the duration of the Shock Ground while Cluster Trap is if you want to throw all your charges at once for faster Power/Frenzy Charges. Careful, though, since you will waste all your charges at once this way.

Siphoning Trap + Increased Duration/Advanced Traps

Sadly, this Trap does not stick around after you switch Weapon Slots while it is inside one of your weapons, even while it is active. Sooo... stick it in if you have a free slot and combine it with whatever you like if you got another one free. Otherwise, just stick to Pyromaniac and a Stone Golem if you need Life Regeneration and keep a Mana Flask around. You will need Mana Regeneration only after you get smacked due to MoM, anyways, and in those cases you want your Mana back faster than Siphoning may be able to provide. A good option is to put Siphoning Trap into an Unset Ring, as it works quite well by its lonesome.

Whirling Blades/Shield Charge + Faster Attacks + Fortify or Lightning Warp + Faster Casting + Reduced Duration

Standard Movement skill-link for this build. Pretty slow until you get quality on the gems, though.

Lightning Warp won't allow you to have some sweet Fortify, but it is definitely far more flexible than the other two. Also, it is damn near essential if you don't want to have a terrible time with the Minotaur.


Cast When Damage Taken(Level 3) + Immortal Call(Level 5) + Increased Duration

Standard survival link. I consider this link almost mandatory as you won't have any physical reduction without Lightning Coil.

Blasphemy + Elemental Weakness/Temporal Chains/Enfeeble

Use Elemental Weakness for more damage and either Temporal Chains or Enfeeble for survival. At first I prefer Temporal Chains from the three as it allows you to better kite enemies, but later focused on Enfeeble as it is much easier to trade it out for Elemental Weakness. Choose whichever tickles your fancy more.

Bear Trap(From your Shield) + Culling Strike + Increased Rarity

This skill you pretty much only use for culling, and it's good for it! But you can also mix it into your rotation when dealing with bosses. It's damage output is surprisingly high!

This will only come into play when you have Jaws of Agony, of course. If you use something else, or if you simply don't care about the Bear Trap that much, socket your Survival/Movement link in here.

Clarity for more Mana regeneration

Golem

For your Golem, either decide between the Ice one for more Crit, Fire for more consistent Damage, or Stone for much needed Life reg and the potential of him tanking a couple hits. I sometimes use the Stone Golem as it is surprisingly good at tanking some bosses. When its taunt hits, of course.

By the way, if you hate recasting the Golem all the time, just link him up with the Cast when Damage Taken support gem in your survival link setup. Of course, that way you will get a weaker Golem if you want it to be still cast by it.

So, now that we have the pro's and con's and links out of the way, how do you play this build? Well, it's quite simple! You start off by throwing a cluster of Ice Traps, have your Skitterbots get everyone shocked by their prudence and then follow that with a Fire Trap! Or, y'know, just spam both like crazy

That wasn't only a joke, by the by. The best way to kill bosses is by throwing a cluster of Vaal Lightning Nova trap/traps to both Shock the enemy and activate Elemental Equilibrium, followed up by a Fire Trap and lastly an Ice Trap cluster. From there on out you switch between Fire and Ice Trap to always get that minus 50 resistance debuff from Elemental Equilibrium for each Trap. When you think your opponent is no longer shocked by your bots sheer presence, or you need some Power/Frenzy Charges throw another Vaal Lightning Trap every now and then and repeat from step one!

The best two uniques to get are these two!


These allow you to turn your Shock Nova Trap link into a 5-link! That means more damage, or chance to shock, depending on what you prefer. And the 30% movement speed is active at all times, anyways! The downside, of course, is that they have rather bad life, no resistances and a low Evasion rating. Still, they are totally worth it! Well, since 3.1, there is another option...


Of course, once you go into Maps, you may consider getting a set of Shaped Gloves that offer a Trap with possibly Added Trap and Mine Damage or just a global increase in Trap damage. They are relatively cheap for shaped items and, if you manage to obtain a nice pair, quite worth it. Overall, a good replacement for Deerstalker! I would suggest to get one with a Trap link and global added Trap damage on them, as having Added Trap and Mine Damage may give you a six link Shock Nova Trap, but the global Trap damage increase also affects your other Traps! The ultimate set of Gloves with this effect would be the Fingerless kind. Though, that would be very, very expensive.


This thing is pretty darn awesome, due to it's ability of pretty much keeping your Power Charges up at all times! And you get a level 20 Bear trap on top of it! But, just with the Deerstalker boots, its Evasion and ES is reaaally low, and the -15 damage taken from physical only offers so much... With which I mean it is near useless. It is best used in your offhand nowadays, so you can quickly change weapon sets, throw a couple traps, get your charges up and go from there. Together with Blast Cascade in the Passive Tree or Charged Traps Support in your Shock Nova Trap, you can ensure that your Power Charges are always up. You can see me make use of this tactic in the Shaper video below.

Other Uniques you should consider!


Ah, Carcass Jack, why are you so great? Oh, maybe because it adds both increased Aoe radius and damage! Get it, and love being clad in literally skin.


A Dagger that has all the stuff you need! More spell damage, more crit, more AOE radius! However, it does outlive its use once you get your hands on a better Dagger with both more crit and damage, but it's certainly a great choice until then!


Life, ES and Spell Damage. The perfect Shield if you decide not to use Jaws of Agony! Don't overestimate the 10%, however. Roughly 80 health will still be better on a shield. But hey, this amount of ES while still getting life and Spell Damage is not possible on other Shields!

Fairly simple: Get either Evasion/ES or pure Energy Shield stuff with extra life and resistances for those slots that you decided not to replace with a unique

Due to the High Mana demand, a very important stat to have is increased Mana regeneration on your Rings and Amulet. I highly suggest getting a Blue Pearl Amulet due to it's amazing base stat. Also, get some Dex and Strenght from your rings or other stuff, that way you don't need to skill it!

For gloves, since all the Izaro enchantments on them don't work for traps, getting Fingerless Gloves with some very swell effects is going to be great! Of course, you can instead decide to ditch Deerstalker and get some shaped Gloves with a Trap link in it with, preferably, global increased Trap damage. Now, if you can combine Shaped Gloves with Fingerless Gloves, that would be the ultimate combo.

As a budget idea, get yourself a corrupted amulett with Additional Curse on it and corrupted Gloves that have Elemental Weakness on Hit. In the Labyrinth enchantment runner I explain why Lab enchantments don't work with Gloves but Curse on Hit etc. does.

At first, skill towards the big trap build on the right, getting all the life nodes you can get along the way. Next, skill either towards Blast Cascade or go straight for Mind Over Matter, getting all life nodes, the small Trap tree, Saboteur, above the Shadow, the two Jewel slots and Elemental Equilibrium on the way. Next, get Doom Cast and the Hasty Reconstruction, then all the stuff above the Witch. At last, get to the Templar and from there skill all the Jewel Slots and skipped single life nodes here and there that you still are able to get.

For Leveling, get yourself Explosive at first and a Fire Trap later along the way. Once you kill General Gravius, get Ice Trap, Shock Nova and potentially buy a Deerstalker for like 1 Alteration Orb. From there, you can go full Trapper, and yes, it does deal more than enough damage while leveling!

Level 95 Skilltree for the build (3.6)

POB Link for version 3.6.

The two links show two different setups for 3.6. I will have to try around a bit to see which one I will end up using.

Saboteur is definitely my preferred one. You can get Assassin, sure, but Chain Reaction in my opinion outperforms any crit you get from the Assassin skills!

Get Perfect Crime and Chain Reaction with your first two batches of points and then Pyromaniac for Life regen and after that Born in the Shadows to blind your enemies with your shocking looks!

For the helmet, it's either Increased Fire Trap Damage or Increased Fire Trap Fire Penetration. More damage for Ice Trap is also a good option, but it's better to get it for Fire Trap for more single target damage.

For Boots good options are increased Critical Chance if you haven't crit recently to deal more damage with the first throw. If you go for more survival, get Mana and Life reg if hit recently or Spell Dodge when hit by a spell. Increased Movementspeed when not hit recently is also nice to have.

For Gloves, things get a bit tricky. You see, everything that gets cast on hit does not work with Traps. Things like CoC don't work with Traps, either. However, stuff like Curse on Hit etc. do, because the trap technically doesn't cast that curse itself, but merely apply it. To put it simple, Traps can add status ailments and curses, but cannot cause effects that would cause them to cast stuff; they are Traps, after all. The moment the would cast the stuff, they are already considered dead, though status ailments can be applied even after death, hence they still work.

Regardless, this greatly narrows down the amount of useful enchantments for Gloves, and honestly locks off some of the best out there. So you have to decide between either an on kill or if getting hit/crit one. I recommend Commandment of Life when going for survival and not using Enfeeble, Commandment of Spite when going for survival and using Enfeeble, or either Commandment of Frost or Inferno on kill when going for more damage. Honestly, the on kill enchantments rarely come into play, so I recommend using one of the survival based once. Either that, or just get Fingerless Gloves.

Help Alira for more Mana regeneration, more Crit multiplier and some Resistances as a neat side bonus. Either that, or kill all and get 2 skill points, your choice.

For these, get yourself one Hair Trigger. The increase in Damage and Trigger Radius is quite nice!
For the rest, get rare once. These stats are important:

-Trap Damage
-Life
-Area Damage
-Crit Multiplier
-Crit Chance
-Mana Regeneration

These are alright to have:

Stats
Resistances (If you haven't capped any yet)

The rest is pretty much useless, unless you want to pimp a single trap with extra x elemental damage.

Here are some examples:

The Good:

Trap and Mine Damage: More Damage!
Controlled Destruction: More Damage!
Concentrated Effect: Moar Damage!
Cluster Trap: Did somebody say MORE Damage?!
Cold/Fire Penetration: I think you get the gist of it.
Fire Trap: More Damage since 3.3!
Increased Duration: Increased Duration!
Golems: More Golem life means longer distractions!
Faster Attacks: Faster Attacks for faster Movement!
Whirling Blades: Faster Attacks for even faster Movement!
Blasphemy/Curses: Quality with all of them is great to get!


The Fine:

Summon Skitterbots: Increased Minion Speed. Pretty alright.
Ice Trap. Increased AOE Range. Nice to have, but not the most amazing thing ever.
Shock Nova: More Shock Duration. Not bad to have.
Elemental Proliferation: Same as Shock Nova, too, basically.



The Bad:

Immortal Call: Increased Cast Speed. I... never feel this. Does this get removed with CWDT?
Cast When Damage Taken: Increased Damage. If Immortal Call could only scream your enemies to death, eh?

Uber Atziri and the other Alluring Abyss Bosses [3.3]

The Shaper [3.3]
This video compared to the old one really shows how much better Traps gotten.

The Shaper [3.0]
One death because I got cocky and danced with two Shapers at once near the end.

T16 - Pit of the Chimera [3.3]

T16 - Maze of the Minotaur [3.0]

T16 - Forge of the Phoenix [3.0]


T16 - Lair of the Hydra [Pre 3.0]
I die like an idiot at the end, though that's my fault and not the builds.

T14 - Mineral Pool [Pre 3.0]

T14 - Maze [Pre 3.0]

"Why don't you use Lightning Trap instead of Shock Nova + Trap Support?"

Lightning Trap does not harmonize well with the other two Traps due to the fact that it is not considered an Area of Effect skill; the other two Traps are. Due to this, anything that adds area damage does not support it, like Carcass Jack, for example, but only Projectile damage does, which in turn does not add any damage to the other Traps. On top of it, I don't enjoy it. It shoots a bunch of projectiles you need to get Penetration with and they can potentially miss something near were you threw the Trap, but maaaaybe something far away by chance. I'd much rather see what I hit, thank you very much.

"How about using Vortex + Trap Support?"

Vortex is a powerful spell, and is actually very neat when used as a Trap. The reason I don't run it is because first, Ice Trap requires not an additional link to work, and secondly because of Elemental Equilibrium. Vortex deals its main damage per the damage over time effect, potentially out-performing Ice Trap with it, but due to Elemental Equilibrium, said damage will go through the 25% Cold Resistance the enemy will gain.
The initial hit of Vortex will only cause Elemental Equilibrium, true, but it still will hamper the Vortex effect for some time before your Fire/Shock Nova Trap hits. Also, I prefer having my damage deal in one go, and not make we wait around a second longer! Still, if you want to use it, by all means, do so. It functions much better for this build than Lightning Trap.

"Does dealing two types of elements with a single trap cause Elemental Equilibrium to add resistances to both?"

Yes, and no matter how insignificantly small that second elemental damage was, it will still add it. This is a big problem with Elemental Equilibrium, forcing you to keep your Traps clean of any elemental damage except their main one. That means any weapon that deals X amount of damage to Spells is a no-go... Except if it is Chaos damage, I suppose.

"Why not drop Elemental Equilibrium? It seems it is more bother than help."

True, Elemental Equilibrium can be a bother sometimes. However, if one were to drop it, this whole build would actually be pointless. The only reason to ever use three Elements at once is because you use Wild Strike/Elemental Hit or if running Elemental Equilibrium. The -50% Resistance it essentially adds is huge, but requires a proper build to go with it. Also, if Elemental Equilibrium would be dropped, this build would be really boring. Instead of alternating between all three Traps, you might throw your Shock Nova Trap first and then whatever of the other two seems more useful a the moment. Elemental Equilibrium might be a special kind of wacky, but I love it.

"Why are you not using Tinkerskin?"

Short Version, it is a nice Map Starter due to being cheap, but cannot compete with Carcass Jack.

Long Version, Tinkerskin is a decent armor, offering high health/evasion/ES, adds some (very unnoticeable on this build) reduced Trap Cooldown, Phasing for fun, Frenzy Charges and a little (and I mean a little) Health and ES regen.

The reduced cooldown is now useless on this build since 3.3 which was its biggest upside before.
Phasing is fun to have, but that really is all. Sometimes it allows you to get out of hairy situations, but it's mostly a useless effect.
Frenzy Charges do not work too well with Traps, as only the 5% increased damage does anything, both casting and attack speed being utterly useless. Also, with the new Charged Traps Support Gem, this might be also a mute bonus.
And the regen, well, there is this Eldritch Battery build that people used to counter the high mana costs of traps together with this Armor, so they never go OOM... Can't think of any of those builds that stuck around for more than a week (Well, this changed since the introduction of Shimmeron, so this statement is no longer true). Past that, it is a really low regen, especially since Chain Reaction causes only one of your several traps to be actually triggered and healing you. Not a problem with obtaining Power/Frenzy Charges on trigger, but getting heals? Yeah, no. This is especially meh now since the new effect of Pyromaniac, which actually does not have the "Triggered by Enemy" restriction, making it infinitely better at regen.

Carcass, meanwhile, adds a solid 50% Area damage and increased Area of effect. Simple, but very effective.

Now, Tinkerskin might still be better for survival, however this build already focuses on it quite a bit, so throwing a Carcass in there to balance things out work quite dandy.

"Can I run X or Y instead of A and B?."

Absolutely. Try out things, go out of the norm, mold this build more to your own liking! Want to use Pain Attunement? Get Shavronne's and focus heavily on ES instead of Life! Want to use a different skill that is not listed in the guide? Sure thing, go for it! Builds are merely a template for you to go wild on, and I highly recommend for everybody to experiment with it. Hey, maybe you will find something even I didn't know about!