[3.26] Ice Dancing God - Icestorm/Cyclone/CI - Viable For Everything

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile2builds/s/Xg3Wug1739

Someone had asked about WI in a thread and this thread was linked in it.

PoE 2: Chill Guy

A small update from PoE 2. I've been playing it on and off while waiting for the next PoE 1 league, and I think I finally made a build that could use the PoE 2 version of WI in a meaningful way. It's a bit too late in the league cycle to make an official guide for it, and everything can change in the next league. But here's the PoB and build theory:

(PoB2) Chill Guy: Icestorm, Comet, Frostbolt

The class is Invoker. The one class in PoE 2 that's specifically designed for CI. Not being CI in PoE 2 just sucks. That game's balance is still bad, any build that has less than 8-10k hp can and will get 1-shot unless it's totally broken and 1-shots everything first (and even then it can still get 1-shot). And the only way to get it is ES. You can't get nearly enough Life. Armour sucks. Evasion sucks. Non-ES builds try to use various tricks like MoM but stacking mana is harder than stacking ES. And CI makes you immune to chaos and bleeding - both of which are insanely overtuned in PoE 2.

Invoker has 4 very good traits, i.e. all 4 of the Ascendancy nodes:
1. He can easily recover ES (while there is no ES leech in PoE 2).
2. He can get 200+ Spirit for meta skills and auras.
3. He can easily stack and proc meta skills.
4. His crits bypass resists.

It's a perfect class for a CI crit build - and that's a familiar territory for us here.

My earlier attempts at WI builds in PoE 2 ended up lacking sheer DPS and clear speed because the PoE 2 version of the staff is much less powerful than the PoE 1 one, and there is nothing like the Cyclone-CwC mechanic in that game.

However, Icestorm can work really well as a triggering vessel for a more powerful single target DPS skill - Comet. That one does crazy amounts of damage but has a super long and awkward casting animation. Its only real use is to be triggered by meta skills. Such as CoC. And Icestorm is perfect for that, especially with a class that's built for meta invocation (and is named exactly that).

For map clearing, Frostbolt became really good in 0.3 with the addition of the new support gems. Now your map clear can go like this:

Mapping with Frostbolt/Comet/Icestorm

Invoker can afford (200+ Spirit) and easily trigger not one but TWO meta proc skills: CoC and CoA. Both of which trigger Comet on top of already solid Frostbolt AoE. And on the bosses and tanky rares you just press the Icestorm button and they explode:

What Bosses?

For single target this is the best implementation of the Comet Rain concept I've ever seen. There are multiple builds that use skills like Ice Nova and Frost Wall to trigger Comet. But nothing comes close to this:

Chill Guy vs Uber Arbiter

CoA doesn't do anything against pinnacle bosses because you can't freeze them often enough. So I switch it out for Overwhelming Presence to get the first freeze that much faster. Comet Rain is already very nice DPS but when the boss gets frozen - Icestorm consumes that freeze to empower all 20 bolts in the next cast and effectively double the overall DPS (I did eventually figure out that trick with shorter duration, and now I'm using it).

Of course, you still have to level to 75 to start using the staff. But there are tons of generic spell caster leveling guides with Frostbolt or Spark. Including the one I used in the Blood Mage version.

So that's a very viable way to use The Whispering Ice in PoE 2. Depending on the changes in 0.4, I will probably do this right at the start on the next league there.