Wintertide Madness

Good Morning Friends! I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning but I figured I would spin up another Path of Exile post. Last night I wrapped up Act 10 on my Inquisitor. I still have yet to transition to my final form, but in theory, I will be doing that as soon as I find a reasonable six link. The truth is I was able to breeze through Merciless Lab so I should be able to start running maps without a ton of hassle. The build that I am following is more or less this POB. However I never really evolved past the Wintertide brand phase and am still leaning heavily on that.

What happened along the way is I picked up this Unique, the Bitterdream Shadow Sceptre. My current version has the 3 links that I am using with Wintertide which are Wintertide Brand > Elemental Proliferation > Controlled Destruction. Then in addition to the two support gems, this unique item treats it as though I also have slotted in Bonechill, Hypothermia, Ice Bite, Cold Penetration, Cold Damage, and Inspiration. This adds up to a dumb stack of effects that I could likely never get working all at once. I am having a freaking blast running around and watching entire screens of enemies evaporate in a “cold disease” that spreads from target to target.

I’m also abusing a second unique called Gang’s Momentum which causes me to deal more damage to ignited enemies and also increases my chance of igniting them. So I run around casting Elemental Weakness that curses everything in the radius lowering their elemental resistance, then I drop a flame wall and spread my Wintertide brand and watch things just sort of disappear. I’ve yet to start on maps but I plan on doing some tonight and also trying to heists to see if I remain as tanky as I seem today. Even if I never turn this fully into Righteous Fire, I am pretty damned happy with it in its existing state. So long as there are no major nerfs that would impact this build for 3.19… it is extremely likely that I start the season as Inquisitor.

The last thing that I have been doing lately is listening to a series of lore videos about Path of Exile. There are a bunch of details that I missed while playing through the campaign twice and I appreciate Kitten Cat Noodle doing a deep dive into explaining the finer points of the story. Truth be told the lore behind this game and its gods are pretty interesting. If you are at all interested I suggest popping open this playlist and giving it a list. Each video is around 16 minutes in length and covers a single act at a time with some additional details thrown in as necessary to explain things.