Good Morning Folks. I am still feeling under the weather, but last night I continued plugging away at my Storm Brand of Indecision Surfcaster in the Legacy of Phrecia Event. There are a few things… firstly this is one of the more squishy builds that I have played. Essentially I have no life and no mana… all of which is being used for reservation auras. The only defenses that I have are roughly 3000 Energy Shield, 20k Evasion, and Ghost Shroud. I can soak the stray hit here or there, but if anything actually gets in contact with me and starts beating away… I am going to drop quickly. Last night I got to the point where I felt comfortable swapping to a Melding of the Flesh setup, and now have 82% Elemental Resistance to all resists. Ultimately my goal is to stack enough +2% max lightning resistance jewels in order to get up to 90% all eventually.
I made a bunch of updates to the build, namely swapping out unique helm and gloves for rares with a large amount of Evasion and Energy shield on them. Essentially having high evasion is a requirement for making Ghost Shroud not feel awful, and the more Energy Shield I can get… the bigger the buffer. I also swapped over to Nebulis which gives me 15% Increased Cold Damage and 20% Increased Lightning Damage per 1% of resist over 75%. So this alone is giving me 105% Increased Cold Damage and 140% Increased Lightning Damage. At some point I want to try and find one with 20/20 on the boosts but for now this one works well enough. I also swapped over to the Headhunter I already had, mostly for the addition buffs which helps make mapping a little bit more smooth. However at some point I will probably swap to a well rolled Crystal Belt to add a bit more defense.
In my adventures yesterday, I noticed a bit of potential unintended interaction. In order to stack more Damage and Critical Chance, I have been leaning heavily into Large Cluster Jewels and Medium Cluster Jewels. I had a bunch of these sitting in my bank and used Harvest elemental re-rolls in order to craft some with reasonable stats. There are a bunch of these that I mostly just settled for anything that looked interesting. One of these abilities was something called Thunderstruck which gives me +20% Lightning Damage, 30% increased Critical Strike Chance, and then the text “Your Critical Strikes Knock Back Shocked Enemies”. This is not a chance to knock back… but if you crit they get knocked back 100% of the time. I did not really expect there to be a significant interaction and largely just went with this notable because it gave a lot of crit and some damage.
However when I started playing with it… I noticed some nonsense happening. I recorded a clip of me fighting a map boss so that you can see what is happening. Essentially Storm Brand of Indecision is constantly attaching and detaching from the target… something that is happening essentially every 0.16 seconds. How this actually plays in a map is that effectively it pushes a mob away from you… rapidly… in an almost comical manner. This reminds me a lot of the nonsense that players were doing with Knock Back and Totems during Trials of the Ancestors to effectively stunlock the mobs and keep them from doing anything. This does not prevent mobs from casting… but it does seem to confuse the shit out of them while they are being rapidly pushed in one direction.
I am also using freeze proliferation and cold exposure on my gloves… which combined with Herald of Ice produces big pops. If you are going to use Heralds… you gotta use the Automaton MTX to make big pretty splashes of course. I am in a weird space with this character because I like it a ton… but also it is way the hell more squishy than any character I normally play. I am not sure how far I will push this character. If I can get it to 90% all res, and maybe swap out a few other pieces for more defenses… it might get to a comfortable place. However it will never be as comfortable as something like my Righteous Fire Scavenger or my history of Chieftains will ever be. Evasion/ES just is never going to feel quite as good as Armor+Block+Max Res+tons of Regeneration.
All in all though, I am pretty happy with Storm Brand of Indecision Surfcaster. It was a lot of fun to pull together and will only get better as I keep poking at it. This is ultimately going to be the last character I probably play of Phrecia because I will obviously be at least giving the Path of Exile II Dawn of the Hunt league a shot. I am likely going to be playing something on the Smith of Kitava first. I just don’t really know what abilities I am going to go with. Maybe whatever that fire spear attack was that was shown in the presentation. Probably pairing a spear with Chernobog’s Pillar shield and then going all in on buffing fire damage as best I can.