TbXie's Frost Bomb Occultist Build Guide (PoE Necropolis 3.24)

Introduction

General Mapping Feel

Frost Bomb has historically been a gem that was almost impossible to use as your main skill as it had a cooldown. Because of the cooldown archetype of the skill, scaling & optimizing it was hard, not to say impossible.

With the introduction of Transfigured Gems, we have received an instant version of the gem, Frost Bomb of Instability, which you can spam out as it has no cooldown.
This in turn enables scaling through for example cast speed.

The build furthermore makes use of some fancy mechanics, such as Awakened Spell Cascade Support to make sure multiple instances of Frost Bomb can hit the same target. This allows us to create a screenwide AoE bomb which is able to deal ludicrous damage on single target. Therefore, at the high end of this guide, it will do millions upon millions of damage whilst maintaining an absolutely sick amount of Clearspeed.

vs Al-Hezmin Sirus Guardian

Disclaimer

While it is definitely a super nice mapper even without Awakened Spell Cascade Support its single target kind of only comes online post acquiring this. Additionally, the build is super clunky before obtaining a Frost Bomb of Instability. However, obtaining that should be very easy and will in worst case just require a few labyrinth runs. Lastly, to obtain maximum damage, you’re going to need a lot of bits & pieces to achieve overlaps. Follow the Area of Effect scaling to a t to make sure you have everything setup correctly. Before this point, you will require some aiming in order to get 3 out of your 5 bombs to overlap.

Build Summary

Video Showcase

Affliction Leaguestart Day 1 Recap Video

Affliction Leaguestart Day 2 Recap Video

Affliction Leaguestart Day 3 Recap Video

Pros and Cons

Pros

+ Looks to be shaping up to be one of the most fun mappers
+ An amazing way to interact with overlapping spells & their combination of Clear & Single Target
+ Should perform reasonably well on almost any budget
+ Deletes screens of monsters in a heartbeat

Cons

– Eventhough relatively tanky, delayed damage is always a bit sketch.
– Therefore I wouldn’t play it in Hardcore
– Requires a bit of gear and an Awakened Spell Cascade to tackle harder content

Map Modifiers to be Avoided

Depending on the variant of the build, some of these might change. In the standard Endgame, the only map modifier that looks impossible to me is Elemental Reflect which you could potentially still be doing through the use of a sextant. However, things like “Reduced effect of Aura”, “Recuded Recovery rate of Energy Shield” or “Cannot leech” can be annoying.

Playstyle, Mechanics & Strengths

As soon as this gem got announced, I immediately wanted to make this guide. Filling your entire screen with exploding Frost Bombs sounded like one of the most satisfying things to do. Once we started tinkering with this, it showed that overlapping the Frost Bombs was something that could be done, given you stacked enough AoE.
What this means is that if you have enough Area of Effect, the bombs would become big enough to touch eachother deadcenter of their “cascades”. This effectively means that if you aim your Frost Bomb on a single target, provided you have enough AoE, all 5 of the created Frost Bombs will hit, meaning you’re doing their damage five-fold.

Because we now needed to scale AoE to do damage, Occultist seemed like an obvious pick. The free Area of Effect you get from Power Charges is just such a nice boost to your AoE and makes scaling it up so much easier. Additionally, because Frost Bomb scales its AoE from levels, gemlevels is a second source of scaling. Further more, we opted into some AoE choices that match the budget of said stage in the Build. All in all, this makes that you are rewarded with a character that has a sick amount of map clear, because of its high coverage, whilst getting ludicrous single target when done correctly.

Sadly, the Occultist and more so the Witch Archetype generally has to borrow power elsewhere to become tanky. Since we can’t really borrow said power, as most of our gearchoices are locked because of the AoE & Damage requirements, this build will never become super tanky. It obviously can take a hit, and it wont die while mapping if you don’t make any significant mistakes, especially if you keep casting your Frost Bombs ahead of yourself so things die before you can see them, but it will never be able to AFK into a pack of monsters and laugh at them while it tanks them. Luckily, characters with theses amounts of damage & clear don’t really need much defenses.

Passive Skill Tree, PoB, and Gem Links

You can find an optimized Path of Building here. Every build I release will use the community fork of Path of Building, which is maintained and updated in a much more regular fashion than the original one. You can find PoB’s Fork, by LocalIdentity, here.

If you are not comfortable with Path of Building, PoePlanner’s website offers you a non-PoB alternative to import the code from the above link. Do note that this does not have the same amount of Support as Path of Building has and it is highly recommended you install Path of Building to follow builds most optimally.

More information about the Passive Skill Tree, as well as all the Gem Links can be found on our dedicated page.

Passive Skill Tree, PoB & Gem Links

Ascendancy, Bandits, and Pantheons

Our Ascendancy, Bandit, and Pantheon Power page goes into detail about all the choices you need to make in these regards.

Ascendancy, Bandits & Pantheons

Gear Summary / TL;DR

A lot of this is explained more in depth in the Gear Page, however we will provide you with a basic idea of what gear you’re looking for in this short summary.

Gear, Jewels & Flasks

Our recommendation:

Item Slot	Item Name
Head	Corrupted +1 Power Charge Heatshiver
Amulet	Ashes of the Stars
Chest	Corrupted +2 Carcass Jack
Gloves	High Resistance, Life Gloves with Damage against Chilled Enemies
Boots	High Dexterity, Resistance, Movement Speed & Life Boots
Belt	Micro-Distillery Belt with Life, Damage & Resistances
Rings	Rare Ring with High Dexterity, Cast Speed, Life & Resistances and a Polaric Devastation
Weapon	2 Void Battery

Questions & Support

If you enjoy my content to such an extent that you’d like to support me and my work, or you have a specific question you request my private time for, *you can buy me a coffee over at Patreon *. At no point should you feel pressured to contribute, but if you do, your support means more to me than you will ever imagine.

Even though we try to make our guides as complete as possible, obvioulsy it’s possible you still have questions. We have an entire mod-team readily available to support you & your questions on Discord. You can find us on the ARPG Vault Discord. Make sure to open a Guide Help thread so things stay clear in the main channels.

Leveling

For now, I recommend leveling this character as any other Cold Spell. Where as I’m fairly confident leveling this should be easy, I cannot recommend it until I have tried & tested it myself. With a little bit of tinkering though, and some clever play, you can definitely pick up this gem at level 4 and go all the way with it, possible supplemented with some other cold skill such as Creeping Frost, Wintertide Brand, …

• Our step-by-step leveling walkthrough, which allows even more experienced players to save time and speed through the leveling process.
• Our guide to Unique Items for leveling, which helps you gear up your characters for the leveling process.
• Our beginner leveling guide , which answers many of the questions new players might have and will set you on the right path.