TbXie's Freezing Pulse Totem Hierophant Build Guide (PoE Necropolis 3.24)

TbXie

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Disclaimer

If a guide says it was updated for a specific challenge league, you can be assured it was actually passed through & adapted for that specific patch. You might encounter PoB’s which are outdated but that is either because you’re looking at a Path of Building that was released before the contributors of this program got around to patching it or leveling tree, which hasn’t changed. You can be assured that you can just follow that iteration of the Path of Building without any issues. However, should we wait to push our guides until the program received its final update, we’d never be able to get you this content before the league hit.

Introduction

One of the most classic build archetype in Path of Exile definitely are Totem Builds. Totems have gone through a lot of iterations over the years, and other skills were popularized through skill balances, Ascendancy releases, and changes of mechanics. One of the most iconic builds in PoE is definitely “Pizza Sticks”, which is slang that was used for Flameblast Flameblast Totems. While this might sound horrible in the current state of the game, Flameblast Totems were considered the most broken thing to ever have happened to Path of Exile when they were popularized. Obviously, Flameblast, Ignite, and spell totem were changed and the skill lost in popularity! Freezing Pulse Freezing Pulse totems were looked at as more of a meme-build, which was only done with tremendous amounts of currency to make it look decent. Nowadays, however, it has gained a lot of popularity because it excels at getting stuff done easily, cheaply, and early!

This build guide covers Freezing Pulse Totems like I think they should be played, on a relatively small budget, not too insanely min-maxed, and as a tool to just kill everything fast. If you’re looking to spend 20-40 Divine Orb Divine Orbs on a build, I would advise to look into something that scales a lot better off of gear. Even if some iterations of this build exist that use, for example, the very expensive Atziri's Reflection Atziri's Reflection, they usually just bump up the damage of this build from about 7-30 Million Boss DPS to about 9-35 Million, with about triple to quadruple the investment. I stand to believe that a build that has incredible recovery and survives one-shots as well as this build does, especially on a build that has so much mobility as this one (because the totems do all the work for you), does not need more than a 10 million effective boss DPS to completely trivialize the game.

By not going the Atziri's Reflection Atziri's Reflection route, we’re opening up our shield slot and you can do pretty crazy things with that. When I played the build, my shield slot gave me 100 Maximum Life, an extra maximum totem (or a 20% More DPS multiplier), 9% increased Cast Speed and 70% Increased Spell Damage, making it outperform any way, shape or form I tried making Reflection work. Overall, some pieces in the build might look a little bit expensive, but I’m including those just for those people who like pushing it a tad further. Generally, the build packs about 1.3 Million Damage per Totem. Since you have 6 Totems, you could practically get half of that and remain over 4 Million Shaper DPS on mostly gear you could pick up in Blood Aqueducts.

All of this got further amplified by the introduction of Viridi’s Veil. It replaces the Reflection at the “cost of a ring slot”. This offers you a way to scale in to the late game and easily push towards 15 million DPS. The gear swaps required to pull this upgrade off can be found in the gear section.

Build Summary

Pros and Cons

Pros

+ The skill functions on any budget
+ Feels like a lot of fun to have 6 Freezing Pulse Turrets
+ Viable in every scenario, be it SSF or HC
+ Scales well enough to kill every boss in the game, cheaply
+ Tanky through MoM and Hierophant’s MoM

Cons

This version of the build pretty much caps out at 12-13 Million DPS
Requires Soul Mantle which can be annoying for SSF
Can feel a little squishy at earlier stages of gear / levels

Map Modifiers to be Avoided

No Regeneration is annoying, but can be dealt with if you bring a Mana Flask. Otherwise, there’s nothing that’ll annoy you too much. Be careful for Elemental Reflect though; if you’re using a Trigger Wand, remove the Frost Bomb Frost Bomb as that will reflect its damage (which is fine if you keep it level 1, otherwise it might kill you).

Playstyle, Mechanics & Strengths

Totems have became a lot more popular because of a couple of mechanics that were added not so long ago. First of all, because of the changes to Soul Mantle Soul Mantle you’re now getting a 7-Link instead of having to link your Spell Totem Support Spell Totem Support manually, which has a pretty severe Less Damage modifier which meant you were effectively playing a 4-Link before Soul Mantle rework. Additionally, getting 100% reduced effect of curses, which was mandatory because of Soul Mantle, used to be impossible. The first way of achieving this was through the Guardian Ascendancy, which didn’t really feel great with totems or the Atziri's Reflection Atziri's Reflection, which was a 100 Divine Orb Divine Orb item at the time. the shield has come down a lot making it much more accessible to builds for more casual players. However, with the addition of the Asylum cluster and the buffs to Kikazaru Kikazaru, you can easily reach this cap before having access to Viridi's Veil Viridi's Veil.

This spiked the attention of a lot of groups because it suddenly was a contender for their Day 1 and 2 bosskiller builds. Obviously, as soon as they picked up on it, everyone started noticing and the build rose in popularity. Immediately, because of being able to pick Hierophant over Guardian, the power it brought spiked tremendously and brought us to where we are today. Overall, the build kills everything in the game, excluding Uber fights, on a very very tiny budget, but requires a couple of Divine Orb Divine Orbs investment if you’re not super familiar with the fight. Still nothing to sniff at, as there’s plenty of builds that require tenfold or more than that to shine!

With the introduction of Multiple Totems being summoned at once, Totem builds gained a lot more practical clear speed. You no longer need to put down a million Totems before your build starts doing something. You click once and two Totems appear, which will most likely decimate most of the screen. Worst case scenario, in very dense and high tier content, you might have to click twice per screen putting one of them left and one on the right side. This is a lot better than having to click four to five times. On bosses, you’ll spawn all of your totems in under a second, which is incredibly nice as well. Totem placement speed was a lot slower not too long ago, which made putting them on bosses incredibly annoying, and made it annoying to keep up the hexes of Soul Mantle Soul Mantle. You’ll regularly want to replace your Totems to refresh the Hexes that have been placed on you to keep up all of your damage, if the fight lasts that long at least.

The build excels in fighting bosses with telegraphed attacks, because you’ll be able to address 100% of your focus to the boss, as your Totems will be doing their thing regardless. That’s probably the main reason why builds like Totems, Brands, DoT’s are generally considered strong bossers. The way this build survives those bosses is through making use of Mind over Matter in the tree, as well as Hierophant’s inherent Mana scaling and additional 10% of Damage taken as Mana before Life. This makes our +/- 5000 Health Build actually have just shy of 8000 effective HP, which is a lot more acceptable than the 5000 is. This makes it so you’ll never get one shot by mechanics that are unavoidable, and while you’re running a decent amount of recovery through Mana Flasks, Life Regeneration, and high innate Mana Regeneration, the build will feel safer than it initially looks!

Solo Self Found

This build is definitely gearable in SoloSelfFound but loses a gemlink if you don’t have the Soul Mantle & therefore also loses a ton of damage because you can no longer apply Self-Flaggelation. Once you get a Soul Mantle, you’re probably stuck with the Kikazaru variant because self-farming a Maven Drop is generally kind of hard. Obviously, this goes for many SSF builds as you are constraining yourself to sub-par or unoptimized build paths. However, even with a rare chest piece & no anti-cursemechanics, this build reamins a solid mapper & with a gemswap can down some non-ubers for sure.

Videos

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. 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 & Pantheon Power Page

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 Page

Our recommendation:

Item Slot Item Name
Head Viridi's Veil Viridi's Veil
Amulet The Pandemonius The Pandemonius
Chest Soul Mantle Soul Mantle
Gloves Sorcerer Gloves Sorcerer Gloves with High Life, Resistances and Damage with Hits against Chilled Enemies
Boots Any rare boots with Life, Resistances and Movement Speed
Belt Coward's Legacy Coward's Legacy
Rings Rare Ring with Dex, Resistances and Life or Essence Worm and 1x Kikazaru Kikazaru or a Magic Ring (Viridi’s Version)
Weapon Rare Wand with Spell Damage, Cast Speed, +1 to level of all (Cold) Spell Skill Gems, Crit Multiplier & Trigger
Shield Rare Shield with +1 to Maximum number of Summoned Totems, Maximum Life, Spell Damage & Cast Speed

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

Since we are very adamant about trying to give you a leveling experience that lies as close to your endgame playstyle as possible, we will be providing you a way to level up with Freezing Pulse Freezing Pulse. If you are looking for the most optimal way to level a character to maps, we refer you to the following guides.

Getting to Brutus & Merveil

For starters, create a Templar in whichever league you want to start.

Pick up an Stormblast Mine Stormblast Mine from the vendor to start your journey and go to kill Hailrake and clear Mud Flats. Set up the following links after Mud Flats:

  1. Freezing Pulse Freezing Pulse
  1. Stormblast Mine Stormblast Mine

After killing Brutus, you will be adding an Added Lightning Damage Support Added Lightning Damage Support to your Freezing Pulse.

Level 12 and Onwards Setup

From level 12, after killing Merveil, you’ll be setting up for your road to maps. It might be a little rough for some bosses, but you should eventually be fine with this setup.

  1. Spell Totem Support Spell Totem Support
  2. Added Cold Damage Support Added Cold Damage Support (Added Lightning Damage Support Added Lightning Damage Support if you can’t get a hold of a Added Cold)
  3. Freezing Pulse Freezing Pulse
  4. Elemental Focus Support Elemental Focus Support
  5. Controlled Destruction Support Controlled Destruction Support
  6. Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support

Use the following on bosses:

  1. Frost Bomb Frost Bomb
  2. Frostbite Frostbite
    or Assassin's Mark Assassin's Mark

Run the following auras:

  1. Herald of Thunder Herald of Thunder
  2. Summon Skitterbots Summon Skitterbots

FAQ

How do I get my Freezing Pulse to become a Totem / Why does my Freezing Pulse deal no damage after I allocate Ancestral Bond

If you’re leveling as a Totem Build you will have to use a Spell Totem Support Spell Totem Support as long as you do not have access to the Soul Mantle Soul Mantle. Soul Mantle inherently grants you this Support Gem and therefore removes the need of having the gem in your links. Before that you will need one or otherwise you will be manually casting Freezing Pulse whilst Ancestral Bond makes it impossible for you to deal damage.

Changelog

  • Updated for 3.22 Trial of the Ancestors

  • Updated for Scourge 3.16.

  • Removed Coward's Legacy as there's no fix yet Added Spell Totem / Soul Mantle issues to FAQ

  • Build added.

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