When is a movement skill not a movement skill? When it’s amoral. Welcome to Build of the Week. I’m Nancy, from mmogah.com. Today we’re looking at Devon752’s Hotstepper, and Elementalist that uses Frostblink and damage conversion to ignite enemies. It makes use of a reworked Bronn’s Lithe to scale gem levels to new heights, burninating everything it collides with.
How Does It Work?
So, how does it do such a thing? Frostblink is a movement skill that instantly teleports your character across the screen, creating chilled ground and blasting enemies with cold damage. As it turns out, it scales very well with gem level. Devon explains how we can get our Frostblink gem all the way to level 31, which we’ll get into later. We’re then converting all the Frostblink cold damage into fire damage, and with the Elementalist Ascendency, we can ignite everything we touch. What we end up with is a highly mobile, satisfying build, with plenty of options for scaling damage and defence.
Offence
We’ll go over damage first, naturally. I mentioned that we have a level 31 Frostblink gem, let’s have a look at where that comes from. We get one extra level from corrupting the gem itself. Five levels from the newly reworked Bronn’s Lithe. Two more from a corrupted implicit on the same unique. Lastly we get three more from our Dagger, Replica Cold Iron Point. We’re going from this much base damage (Deals 1144 to 1716 Cold Damage) at gem level 20, to this much damage (Deals 3830 to 5746 Cold Damage) at level 31.
So how do we put the hot in the Hotstepper? We’re using a Cold to Fire support gem to convert half our damage to fire, and we’ll convert almost all of the rest using the Pyre Unique Ring. If we use Turbulent Catalysts on the ring, we can reach 48% cold to fire conversion, for a total of 98%.
Then we simply pick up the Shaper of Flames Elementalist passive to ensure ignites, and the roof will indeed be on fire. Devon also notes that the keystone Elemental Overload is huge. If we get enough critical strike chance we can consistently proc the keystone for a near-permanent 40% more damage. In our case, we can get this from Eldritch Implicits, Flasks, and the Precision Aura.
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DID YOU KNOW? |
Speaking of auras, you may have noticed that we have a few. No less than seven, in fact. We can achieve this by investing into as much reservation efficiency on our tree and gear as we can find, and by anointing Sovereignty onto our amulet. You may also notice that the amulet we’re using is Impresence, with a variation that allows us to cast Flammability for free as a curse aura.
With so many auras, it makes sense to pick up the Reservation Mastery that increases our damage for each aura, for a total of 56% increased damage. At this point we’re warping around, burning packs like it’s nothing. But what about our single target? Devon is using an Arcanist Brand setup which can be cast on any tough enemy to apply Combustion, Exposure, and Burning Ground. Even highly resistant enemies will wilt under this combination. For a further burst of extra damage, we can cast Hatred, linked to Divine Blessing, for a temporary boost. Since we have almost no mana we must combine this with Vaal Clarity, which lets us cast skills without paying their cost.
Lastly we can swap out our Ignite Proliferation gem for Unbound Ailments when we come up against bosses, for even more single target goodness.
Defence
Occasionally our enemies survive long enough to hit us. What then? While half our aura stack is offensive, the other half is defence. Namely Purity of Elements, Grace, and Defiance Banner are a robust defence in and of themselves.
Purity of Elements is especially important because of the Ignite immunity. Damage over Time is a significant threat to this build so every bit of mitigation helps. We’re also using Lethe Shade to help with DoTs, and the Soul of Arakaali to the same end.
To deal with everything else, Devon has leaned heavily into the defensive model of simply never taking hits. We’ve got a nice amount of Evasion, which lets us avoid damage frequently. We’ve also capped out our spell dodge at 75% by picking up the Acrobatics keystone and gathering the required amount of spell suppression on our tree. And since we’re not getting hit very often, the Wind Dancer keystone provides some excellent additional mitigation.
This build even uses Replica Mistwall, which provides 75% chance to block spells if we haven’t blocked anything else recently. So even if we don’t dodge a spell, we’ll have a good chance to block it. All this combined with our high mobility gives us a good shot at survival in hairy situations, even if our life pool isn’t huge.
Conclusion
Devon has created a fast and satisfying build, able to melt most content in a blink. It must also be noted that Devon has created a clean and thorough build guide on the forum.