Cold PB has come a long way. When I first made it, there existed no support. Even Speaker of the Dread’s Vitality>Cold conversion didn’t exist back then.
Now we have a sweet skill mod that adds %WD to each blade.
Screenshot of Cold PB
Screenshot of Chillspikes (component skill)
In a shotgun situation Phantasmal Blades has roughly 45k more DPS than Chillspikes. So why did I bother with this thread? Firstly, the damage of each blade being comparable is rubbing me the wrong way. The skill mod being weak to the point a single component can be compared to it (of course Chillspikes doesn’t have the ADCtH, but performance wise it’s similar)
Secondly, Chillspikes is a pure Cold/Frostburn skill so most of the DPS there would be from Cold damage. PB on the other hand is notorious for being a clusterfuck of damage types.
Chaos and Vitality remain in high amounts. Vitality PB can make use of Chaos and Chaos can make use of Vitality. But Cold cannot use these two damage types, they are literally gimping it
Suggestion:-
My suggestions are simple-
>Increase the %WD mod to 20% (i.e 4% per blade and 30% more Weapon damage in total, discounting Frenetic Throw of course)
>100% Chaos and Vitality converted to Cold skill mod. Bleeding would remain to be a problem but getting rid of those two damage types would make a great deal of difference
NOTE:
Currently, my own setup uses TSS nuke so my own build is fine and I can live w/o the buffs. Yeah the damage output was low to the point I decided to use a nuke. I don’t mind using nukes on builds tbh but Phantasmal Blades is by no means a skill weak to the point that I resort to using this stuff. Heck I use PB as a nuke on my Pierce and Acid builds so you can imagine my surprise when I find out Cold PB is still not strong enough on its own
Chthon,
I have good news for you. Since I also playing around with SB using cold phantasmal blades I would like to pay your attention to the next items:
Mythical Deathbound Amethyst - give us 25% vitality damage conversion to cold damage to phantasmal blades (sweet bonus from the patch 1.0.4.0)
Unusable due to the bonuses. If the bonuses get changed, I can use it. I mentioned it in the other thread
Saw it and it looked anti-synegistic to me. Why add Vitality Decay instead of Frostburn? (It operates on the logic that we can stack 100% Vit>Cold conversion but we can’t do that)
We still need Chaos>Cold conversion skill mod and some extra weapon damage
Do you mean Mythical Deathbound Amethyst in point 2? The vitality decay damage to phantasmal blades looks weird. I agree it will make more sense to replace it by frostburn damage. However, from my point of view, the amulet still is BiS for cold phantasmal blades builds.
Yes, it would be great to have chaos to cold conversion.
I am glad this has been commented. I would certainly enjoy more gear and mod supports for this build. My Cold PB is left hiding in the shelves due to this.
Lacking +skills to PB on that scepter makes it bad. When using this scepter and amulet the overall DPS increase was 4k per blade
But I lost 20% RR to get this. Not only do we need to drop Eternal Haunt loosing the RR proc but dropping Chillstrife means we loose 10% RR skill mod. Had drop Haunt to get +PB bonus
That amulet isn’t exactly BiS, at least not at the moment anyway. I used it during testing but the overall performance was bad. While it’s true PB itself was slightly better but the build’s performance dropped as we lost +skills and crit for little to no damage
If they increase the %conversion the skill mod and replace Vitality Decay with Frostburn then we can use it and it will become BiS but atm it isn’t
You can get higher dps then your cold p- blades is showing. Yes vitality is better because alot of vitality gear supports chaos also. Definitely need chaos to cold conversion somewhere.
Right now I have 39k dps on cold p-blades.
I am guessing you use Lethal Assault, cause I don’t. If I get Lethal Assault and shift the gear a little then I can get it to around 35-36k. Problem is the overall build’s performance goes down.
Got the point. The calc of SB on cold PB from one of my experiments with almost all skills at maximum rank from PB tree: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/YNna88dZ. In this case we will loose only 10% RR from skill mode if we use Mythical Ulzaad’s Channeler instead of Chillstrife.
P.S: Got some fun with granted skill from Mythical Clairvoyant’s Wand.
Your weapon choice is incorrect. You need weapon with cold base damage, your weapon’s base damage is aether
Also you forgot you can go for Badge of Mastery, I didn’t mention that as an option as the medal alone gives us 800HP (more than any MI)
Since it’s been brought up that Cold PB DPS can be increased, I’d like to say that I apologize for the poor wording in the original post. Indeed the DPS can be increased and I did come across it while testing but kill speed went down radically (for my taste). Without LA the DPS was at 35-36k and with LA this is the DPS per blade
W/o Ulzaad but with LA+Amethyst+Chillstrife+ MoD setup should be at 36k (?)
I think my point is this particular PB variant needs more support. We use crap like Lethal Assault (I am a caster, why I need to use it is beyond me) to have some good DPS numbers and still loose out on overall performance. When I finally arrived at a stable variant of my build its DPS was similar to Chillspikes which is bad no matter how you look at it.
you can grab censure but it takes like 20 skill points, and you already get 117% RR without it. DA and stun will only be an issue in Crucible Gladiator.
EDIt*
Not sure how spellbreaker is As I deleted all my characters when AOM was released. And I have only leveled 3 characters so far as I mostly play PoE.
But they definitely need to give us some items with chaos to cold conversion. Like on Nightscorn they could replace the pierce to cold with chaos to cold and turn the %pierce into %chaos, as you already can get 100% pierce to cold easily.
Little offtopic - PB variant focused on poison & acid damage also needs more support. I tried different gear and devotions setups to get more effective poison & acid PB build. With good rolls on items I got 93% piercing damage conversition to acid damage.
Found my old post on our community forum with the first cold PB SB setup https://www.grimtools.com/calc/0V0wyzE2 - with mythical Clairvoyant’s wand. According to my notes PB dps increases from 43K up to 53K under the buff from skepeter. I write the post from phone, so can’t double check this information.
