Eye of winter, before and after the orb patch.

Hi!

I played Eye of winter Lich this league from the start of the maps to lvl 90 and clearing hardest difficulty map bosses and some difficulty 0-2 pinnacles. I wanted to go all the way to difficulty 4 bosses but some other games came up. Here are some things about this skill that I noticed while playing:

Before the orb patch

When I first got to the maps and swapped to EoW it performed abysmally bad, despite the gear that I would consider rather lucky coming out of campaign (if I remember correctly I actually had a +1 focus with some spell damage and crit, its still equipped in my character's 2nd gear slot, and a +2 wand with some spell damage). I messed about respecing the character several times from crit to just ele damage on the tree, then back to crit, I tried various supports, but it was doing horribly, I could barely clear t1 maps, it wasn't killing the packs of white monsters before they could kill me. The elemental grounds were hard to put down and lasted barely any time at all, so getting the damage bonus of EoW was practically impossible. I was about to reroll a different character but then the 0.2.0e patch was announced that among other things made it so EoW gains its bonus damage when passing over orb skills, so I decided to wait until then.

After the orb patch

After the 0.2.0e the improvement was immediately noticeable. Orb skills have far more duration than elemental grounds, and by putting them on my 2nd weapon set I could give them even more duration and AoE. The frost bomb now comboes very nicely with EoW, and with addition of some further optimizations on my part and with finding out that the Effigy of Cruelty now exists, I was finally able to start progressing through map tiers. However clearing with EoW still sucked: without placing a bunch of orbs damage was still very low, chain, fork or pierce is hard to come by early into maps when you don't have a ton of links or currency for the expensive snakepit ring. So I resorted to using Ice Nova (no frostbolts, just bare Ice Nova). Initially I envisioned it for situations where I get surrounded by monsters, but eventually it turned into my main clear ability, and EoW came out only for tougher monsters and bosses. I find bossing with EoW pretty fun, it does a good amount of damage when you keep up all three orbs and you get a crit for effigy of cruelty. Most of the fight then becomes about positioning your character in such a way that most of the secondary projectiles come out inside the bosses hitbox and the orb skills are on top of you and the boss. But here are some of my concerns and things I would maybe like to see changed.

Proj speed, single target damage and gem quality

Right now the way proj speed affects the skill is like this: As I said before I want secondary projectiles to come out inside target's hitbox and all hit the target. To achieve that I want to slow down the main projectile so it releases all the secondary projectiles in a smaller space. but that makes clear worse. Which is fine that is how I chose to play the skill, I simply added Ice Nova for clear. The strange part is that gem quality on EoW gives projectile speed, and thus just makes your single target damage worse. I do understand that it makes your clear better, but as I mentioned before EoW is a very awkward skill to clear with: without orbs/ele ground you only have a fraction of the damage, so bad in fact that it will have hard time killing white mobs in higher tiers. You have to invest significantly into fork, pierce or chain, when there are other skills that already have that by default. So right now the quality stat of the gem contradicts the most obvious way to use the skill (at least in my opinion) and so does the Acceleration support that is listed as recommended for the gem.

Recommended supports list

Acceleration support decreases your single target damage. Yes there are potential uses for it but it should, in my opinion, be removed from the list, or at least be listed along side with...
Deceleration support its one of your main support gems if you want to do single target damage with the skill. Its currently not on the list
Embitter support has a ton of synergy with EoW and should probably be among recommended supports for it.

Early map damage and reliance on Effigy of Cruelty

Even after 0.2.0e build was struggling until I got some wand upgrades and Effigy of Cruelty. If I were to do the build again (which I intend to at some point, I really like it) I would struggle a lot less now, but I still had to spend a few hours trying different skill and support setups and passive tree to try to even begin progressing past t1 maps. In particular I feel like the skill would just be horrible without the Effigy of Cruelty. I can see when I'm killing the bosses the exact moment when I crit for the first time, apply the stacks and bosses heath bar starts chunking. Its not an uncommon or expensive unique, but you have to know about it.

Other miscellaneous things related to the skill

I don't know if that an intended behavior or not, but if you cast a curse skill supported by burning inscription, then weapon swap to a weapon set the curse skill is not allocated to during the delay time of the curse, the burning inscription does not go off. This added to the frustration of trying to play the build back before 0.2.0e, when I was using that mechanism to get burning ground.
The position of Pain Attunement on the tree feels really weird. Its a crit keystone that is surrounded by a bunch of minion and block nodes. Resulting in an abomination of a pathing on the passive tree:
https://poe2.ninja/builds/dawn/character/TumblerYumbler-4963/LifeISLowButNotZero?i=74&search=class%3DLich%26skills%3DIce%2BNova
This might be part of the reason why the build felt so weak at the start of mapping, I couldn't go for the main Low Life keystone for so long.

Other miscellaneous things

Some monsters (in particular big hyenas with spears and the new big slug monsters in purified maps, maybe some more) get highlighted multiple times when they can be culled by power syphon. Can be quite visually confusing
The gateway selector on the login screen forgets the last gateway you selected if the game crashes or DCs
The jar monsters on floor 4 of trial of sekhemas do an absurd amounts of honour damage. If you get stuck somewhere and tank their projectile attack it will take off thousands of honor, pretty sure I once got hit for 9k.

Despite all the complains I had a lot of fun with the build and the patch. Looking forward to the next one, as well as 3.26!