Good Morning Folks! We’ve been dealing with some sort of flu-like crud that has swept through our house. I feel awful, but I am doing much better than my wife is… which means that I have become the defacto caregiver. So this weekend I pretty much needed some comfort gaming, which meant that I spent most of my time screwing around with a new character in Path of Exile. For a while now I have contemplated either building a cyclone character or a blade vortex character for that whole whirlwind “spin to win” equivalent gameplay. While neither is really quite like the Whirlwind Barbarian, Cyclone mostly gets used as a vehicle for delivering other attacks via cast-on-channeling… which pushed me towards Blade Vortex.
More specifically I was interested in the cold conversion version of the build that can freeze entire packs in seconds allowing you to ignore a lot of the defensive layers as locking down targets goes a long way. At the moment I have a 93% chance to freeze targets, and given how often blade vortex hits that is pretty much a guaranteed freeze as soon as I hop into a pack of mobs. More than that I am running a medium cluster with Blast-Freeze which works similar to Fan the Flames does for ignites and my freezes spread to everything in a 1.2 meter radius. I wish this was chained, but unfortunately, it only applies to freezes from the initial attack and not freezes that proc from Blast-Freeze. I also have an “explody chest” with the crusader modifier that causes enemies to deal 1/10th of their life as physical damage… which then gets converted entirely to cold damage via hrimsorrow.
I am loosely following this POB, and am now trying to decide if I want to go the route of +1 physical wand and shield, or if I want to shift things up and go for a +3 bow and quiver setup. The biggest benefit of staying with a physical wand or scepter and a caster shield is that it allows me to keep using shield charge. Given that all of my physical is being converted to cold, it is not unusual for the shield charge itself to freeze something. The biggest negative about +physical gear right now is that is also what Penance Brand of Dissipation is using, which has jacked up the price of everything on the market. I have a +1 physical scepter that I attempted to throw some fossils at but have not really had much in the way of luck yet. I might yolo some “reforge cold” harvest crafts to see what that yields given that I have +1 physical as a fracture.
Probably the best aspect of this build is that it can pretty much perma-freeze a boss long enough to kill it. Which helps greatly considering that my survival is in a really bad state. I have capped my resistances at 75% all but have nothing much in the way of armor or evasion to speak of… and am not even close to having capped spell suppression. If I get looked at the wrong way I am going to go down in a blaze of glory. Mostly right now I need to grind out the first few charms and then put on some levels because I think currently I am level 73 so just barely started. I can however fairly comfortably do red maps even without upgrading to a decent wand/shield. I should probably also swap out all of my gems for fully leveled and qualitied ones as I just have whatever I leveled with. I did splurge for a 21/20 Blade Vortex but so far that is the only “endgame” gem that I have.
At some point today I will work my way through the fourth labyrinth and get the Primal Aegis up and running. That should help quite a bit as I already have quite a number of notables allocated. It will also make me immune to reflected elemental damage which will help greatly as I am converting all of my physical to cold. Other than that I really need more life, and would love to figure out a way to work in haste because I feel slow currently. For a very squishy build it is shockingly viable given the screen-wide freezing effect. I get now why this has at various points in the past been a popular league starter.