Hot Snapper Elementalist [Budget] [League Starter] [Not Meta?]

By taking Elemental Equilibrium (EE) we buff our Cold Snap's damage over time (DoT) by converting the initial hit of Cold Snap to fire via Pyre and Cold to Fire support. This fire hit lowers the cold resist of enemies. This is ideal since Cold Snaps DoT cannot penetrate or be converted to another damage type, and since Snaps DoT cannot crit, we will use Elemental Overload for a general damage multiplier as well. However, it is ESSENTIAL to avoid sources of added damage to spells. This is to prevent EE from raising the wrong resistance.

With Orb of Storms applying Ele Weakness and lowering fire/cold res with EE, Frost Bomb lowering cold res by 25%, and 25% fire pen via Mastermind of Discord, versus typical bosses we will be bypassing about *92*% fire and cold resistance for our Hits and DoT.

For most maps, we simply Snap and let the enemies melt, trying to place our spellcasts for clearing efficiently as possible. At higher levels for high resist/life maps, and for bosses we'll want to actually proc Ele Overload once in a while via Orb of Storms. Between packs, especially long stretches we'll consume our frenzy charges with Phase Run and pop our Quicksilver. Note that using Flame Dash or any skill will break Phase Run so be mindful of when you want to use which.

For bossing, we activate Vaal RF and drop Frost Bomb w/ Arcane Surge from the edge of the boss area, then go in, drop Orb of Storms and unload all our charges. Most bosses will die quickly enough that you won't need Vaal Cold Snap, but you can pre-activate along with Vaal RF/Frost bomb. Just activate it last due to it's shorter duration. For bosses with forced phasing, be aware and just ration out your Vaal skills as they will usually be overkill to use all at once.

For Elder and his guardians, remove Vaal RF to ensure you get souls for Vaal Cold Snap ASAP. These fights are different from all the others, having little/no charges, but they are still fine and even comfortable since you can focus on dodging while still doing solid DoT.

In 3.3, Cold Snap is capable of self sustaining casts in most cases without threshold jewels or uniques, along with Vaal Cold Snap being there to smooth things out. It creates an expanding chilled ground DoT, and has a chance to grant frenzy charges when an enemy dies in its area. These charges grant damage, cast speed, and are used to bypass the cooldown. Note it does not need to deal the killing damage to recieve charges, only have an enemy die in the chilled area. This is important.


Obtained from the medicine chest quest at level 4, Spell Cascade is practically irreplaceable once you get it. The multiple direct hits it creates can overlap, and it allows for the multiple expanding DoTs to overlap as well. It effectively multiplies damage dealt while increasing coverage for general clearing.



Additionally, each cold ground effect from Cascade has its own chance to generate charges when an enemy dies on top of it, allowing for slightly more reliable charge generation, party play (if you dare with EE), and potentially multiple charges from a single kill.



1 kill, 2 charges



This helps curb most of the concern with sustain or spamming, as you're far more likely to recieve multiple charges with lots of Cold Snaps laid out.

Lastly, assuming a level 19+ Spell Cascade gem with 20% quality, you only need 12% quality on Cold Snap to get your last possible AoE boost with this build. This is good for securing a suitable Vaal Cold Snap without worrying about super high gem quality, if you care about minmaxing.

Pros:
-Cheap; mostly uses basic rares or budget uniques
-Good boss killing/single target
-Hardcore friendly (see variant section), 6.5k+ HP without Kaoms/Belly, multiple defenses, defensive playstyle that lets you focus on dodging while the DoT works if needed
-Can offscreen comfortably, instantly hit anywhere you want in line of sight with a click and let the damage tick away
-All content, even reflect if you opt for Paragon of Calamity
-Don't care about EE maps
-Chills everywhere, feels good to spray ice all over the screen
-Lingering DoT is very effective and amusing for Beyond/Abyss
-Movespeed based movement feels smooth

Cons:
-Rarely a small hiccup from being based around charges, play with awareness
-No top tier movement skill, no top tier clearspeed if that's what you're all about
-No utility from freeze, or from Pyre's explosion effect
-Golems, while tankier than usual, still need resummoning once every once in a while - Minion Life Support is essential QOL, +2/3 minion gem helmet is nice too if you happen into it
-Cooldown means you can't break pots etc. freely at will ;~;
-SSF: Could take a while to get *two* Pyres despite being common, and don't count on Realm Ender for normalizing your DPS
-Vorici missions can suck a bit harder than usual

Rough guidelines for passive tree, do as you will:
15 points http://poeurl.com/bY7G
35 points http://poeurl.com/bY7F
59 points http://poeurl.com/bY7D
76 points http://poeurl.com/bY7C
90 points http://poeurl.com/bY7z
118 points http://poeurl.com/bY6W

Note: Herald of Ash won't be useful til you convert your damage so stash it in your weapon swap or something. Grab a Herald of Ice and maybe Thunder for levelling.

Heading towards Shadow area first to help with access to dex is a good idea. That along with a jade amulet from act 1 should help immensely. Ele Overload can be taken as soon as you have an Orb of Storms-Crit Strikes link to support it - act 1 - but you probably will want to wait a while and not rush it. Use something like Freezing Pulse with Added Lightning Support to help smooth things out until you feel confident in swapping to only Cold Snap. Don't bother with Cold to Fire support until you're ready to fully convert and use EE, stash it in your weapon swap. As soon as you have 2x Pyre + Cold to Fire together, swap over and look into the Snowforged notable for an above average damage boost. Focus the juiciest life and damage while setting yourself up to swap over to EE once you're geared for it around 50-60. Make sure to take Phase Acro by endgame unless you can replace it with Perfect Form.


Ascendancies: Liege of the Primordial and Elemancer first for lots of generic damage, cast speed, immunities, QoL. Then Pendulum of Destruction and finally Mastermind of Discord.

Bandits: Kill all for bonus points. Side with Alira if you -really- want some resist and regen, it's ok too.

Pantheon: Capturing Lycius, Midnight's Howl is essential for dealing with chain maps/incursions with your golems, and the bonus dodge/spelldodge Sebbert offers with it is also nice. Otherwise, Brine King is a fine option to prevent stunlocks from the moment you get it at least while levelling. For minor gods, Ryslatha is a good safety net for Eternal Lab trials in maps. Otherwise Shakari's poison immunity, or Garukhan for evasion and mobility is fine. Even Tukohama for standing and delivering against tough bosses is viable. Tweak to your needs and playstyle.

Path of Building :

https://pastebin.com/d1suVh37

This is the template I used for making the build, lvl 100, reasonable gear (didn't bother adding resists), easy to read. Actual current lvl 91 character is here:

https://pastebin.com/xwXbZEKr

For quality gems, anything that increases damage or AoE is great. Quality for Flame Dash is also nice since we're a bit slow.


Vaal Cold Snap - Spell Cascade - Controlled Destruction - Cold to Fire - Elemental Focus - Hypothermia (Efficacy 6th link if using Realm Ender)
Your core skill. Use cold to fire only once you're ready to switch to EE w/ Pyres.

Frost Bomb - Increased Duration - Arcane Surge - Vaal Righteous Fire
Arcane Surge should be leveled to match a single Frost Bomb's cost, and cap off at level 6.

Orb of Storms - Increased Critical Strikes - Curse on Hit - Elemental Weakness
Utility powerhouse, it triggers Ele Overload, Curses, and lowers fire and cold resists with EE. A build variant that goes for Beacon of Ruin would also get 20% shock from this for even more ridiculousness.

Summon Flame Golem - Summon Lightning Golem - Summon Ice Golem - Minion Life
Save ice golem for your last summon once you've ascended for golem immunities, he won't do much til then.



For the following, throw them into either your chest or your weapons, whichever one you're not using for Cold Snap. Keep Faster Casting from linking to your mana reservation skills if you can, or consider removing it if you really need to.

Herald of Ash (unlinked)
Herald of Ash will only be useful once you're converting fully to fire, and again with Mastermind of Discord.

Phase Run (no link required)
Phase Run is for using charges you've gained to move ahead when there's nothing you want to kill in the immediate area.

Arctic Armor (unlinked)
More defense, use it when mana allows.

Clarity (unlinked)
Level it as mana and gear allows or as needed.

Flame Dash - Faster Casting
For covering short distances and hopping ledges. Faster Casting not required but feels nice, as does quality on the Flame Dash gem.


Use your second weapon set to hold gems you can't fit while levelling or to level extra copies of spells etc.

On rare weapons, look primarily for just spell damage, elemental damage and cold damage. That's it. Cast speed, mana etc are nice bonuses as well. Avoid added damage to spells once you start using Elemental Equilibrium. Some chaos res on gear is nice for softening the blows of constructs in incursions, if you can squeeze it in.


Dual Pyres are the only required unique and they're cheap/common, just a few chaos even at the start of a league.


Despite the low % ele damage, it offers +3 gem levels and a cold to fire link, allowing us to run another damage multiplying gem and come out ahead of just about any dual rare weapons we'd run. Good budget option, low demand. Major downside is movement skills - we can't make great use of any so we'll be running. The ideal upgrade is a 6link chest with +gem level corruptions, allowing us to use rares weapons for more damage and movement options.


My personal pick. Allows you to run Arctic Armor for free, and get Phase Acrobatics for incursions while squeezing out a few points to put on life nodes. Costs dozens of chaos the first few days, but a decent option of many unique chests. For budget/starting just go with a solid rare, especially if it's an Omnitect %life drop, and aim for evasion.


The new Omnitect boss from 3.3 Temple of Atzoatl can drop boots with 30% movespeed and 11-12% spell dodge, which is excellent for surviving incursions against the chaos firing Vaal constructs. Very easy and cheap to get in trade league, reasonable for SSF - I found these ones myself.


A well rolled Three-step Assault is a nice option if you use onslaught, and it helps with dex requirements in addition to giving a solid bump to evasion and the essential spell dodge for incursions.


Speaking of dexterity requirements, you'll probably want an amulet that grants dex to help, along with whatever good stats you can get - life, mana, mana regen, spell damage, resists.


For everything else, just get as much life, mana. resists, evasion etc. as you can. Strength is also life, don't forget. If you opt for Perfect Form extra cold res will bump up evasion. A stygian vise belt is the endgame upgrade once you have an abyss jewel for it that gives good life + any other useful mods. Mana regen, cast speed, resists, evasion, dodge and so on. Just avoid added damage.

Flasks
For flasks, prioritize bleed and curse removal, then freeze or whatever ailment you want to guard against "just in case" your golems die. I find freeze to be the deadliest, so I rolled that - there's not much else to put on our flasks, and we get very little from unique flasks. Poison removal or even redundant bleed removal is good. Feel out your needs. Rolling "of Animation" on your healing flask isn't a bad idea either to help keep your buddies going.


Option:
For mapping, I use onslaught but it's not terribly efficient - use a Basalt Flask or Stibnite if you're serious about not dying. Even a Sulphur Flask for regen and damage is good, the build is flexible. Try to roll reduced charges used on your Silver or Basalt to get 2 uses out of them (30/60 charges used). We use Quicksilver with Phase Run to move quickly through empty stretches, and try to keep Quartz and Jade of Reflexes (important mod) going to take as few hits as possible when things heat up.

Jewels
We will be staying away from Abyss jewels as it's harder to make use of them and their flat damage mod pool. We'll be looking for:

-Spell damage
-Cold damage
-Area damage

These scale both hit and DoT portions of Cold Snap. "Damage over time" is also an okay damage mod, but not quite as good. Cast speed, mana/regen are also decent. Ideally you'll want as many of these as you can get as well as a life roll. You can also round out resists with a jewel if you really need to.

Thankfully (or regretfully?), Cold Snap doesn't benefit massively from any rare or overpowered enchants like some builds. This means the core build stays cheap, and you can just grab them whenever you feel like - you can comfortably take on endgame without any of it. Be careful not to brick your boots by getting added damage and messing up Elemental Equilibrium. Having a backup is nice.


-On helm, the Cold Snap damage enchant is the most consistently useful. For fights like Elder or his guardians where you won't have any resources to blow through for much of the fight, the Cold Snap cooldown recovery enchant can be nice option as well.


-On boots, cast speed feels great to move things along while mapping due how little cast speed we get otherwise. We can't take full advantage of the more popular ele pen or added ele damage enchants. Leech may be good but I haven't tried it, though I'm wary of it due to charge and on-kill limitations vs something like Elder - for mapping it's probably much nicer, but less needed as well.

T13 resistance + crit Malformation in 3:27 w/ incursion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl5KtOI6VzE
Don't mind the awful slow incursion looting, I'm just bad.

Cold Snap is bugged! It shouldn't be stacking DoT!

I thought that might be the case too at first but GGG hasn't said a peep after weeks, so I imagine it's just an intended new behavior, and it's a great one for Spell Cascade so hopefully it stays.


Why conversion? Can't you use EE without it? What about Malachai's Artifice with Orb of Storms or something?

Simply put, you lose the practical speed and smoothness of debuffing on any hit you do, as well as losing the utility of Orb of Storms-Inc Crit Strikes (Overload reliably)-Curse on Hit if you put Orb in the Artifice. You also lose a bit of damage because of a lesser EE granted by Artifice. I'm sure EE can be used well without conversion, it's just not the goal here.


Why no ignites?

I originally was hoping for a good way to use ignite with Pyre's large burn bonus and explosion effect, but building up decent ignite chance just stretches the build too far - roughly 12 points further, and takes points from damage or life as well as using inferior links. I may try a variant with no Ele Focus and the Beacon of Ruin ascendancy or something like that, but not this league. If you try it let me know how it goes, but GGG seems to really want you to specialize if you want useful ignites.


My PoB DPS seems low why is that?

For some reason, Liege of the Primordial is broken in PoB and doesn't account for the roughly 80% increased global damage it grants. The DoT DPS is also decieving with how it layers on itself.


What about the Winter's Bounty threshold jewel for Cold Snap?

It's bad, at least for this build.


Flame Dash sucks and this build is too slow, what about Lightning Warp?

If you can find the link room for it, by all means try it and good luck with that. If you want to run faster and don't mind losing out on some life, check variants for QotF.


What cosmetics do you recommend for this build?

I doubt anyone would ever actually ask this, but I'm recommending the fire and ice set with Innocence Herald anyway. Also Cold Grasp for Cold Snap of course.