Velyna's Ice Trap Saboteur Build Guide (PoE Trial of the Ancestors 3.22)

November 6th, 2023, 17:49

Introduction

Cruise through the acts into endgame quickly and easily with Ice Trap! For most of PoE’s history traps have been known as a strong leaguestarter, not requiring expensive uniques or heavy crafting to kill bosses early, and this remains true today. Often overlooked despite the built-in defense layer of freeze/chill, our gear remains cheap. Just toss a couple salvos near a pack and move on, the traps have big AoE and hit hard. We also don’t overlook defense like some trappers out there.

Below is a video guide I made for Youtube. This is a good place to start and goes over gearing as well as Pros/Cons. The PoB’s and guide may be more current so make sure to check!

Overview

Pros

✔️ Power Curve: Traps are a historically cheap starter with fantastic early uniques.

✔️ Fantastic Leaguestarter: The acts and early mapping are essentially free with this build. When it’s time to upgrade, the next pieces are cheap as well.

✔️ Bossing: I killed 6/7 Ubers, some of them with a level 16 Ice Trap gem.

Cons

❌ Defense: Although tankier than many trap builds, the defenses aren’t fully together until you get Determination running.

❌ Playstyle: Some people love it, and some hate it. Traps are a different feeling from attacking or casting directly, it’s more like playing Brands.

How Does it Play?

Ice Trap has big AoE and can be thrown into the center of packs, making it great for mapping. Throw a few traps and move on, anything that doesn’t die will be chilled/frozen for you to quickly finish. For bosses you can stack traps between phases, or during the fight whenever you get a chance. You can have over 20 traps out at a time for single-target damage.

Damage and Defensive Scaling

Ice Trap is a cold-based spell, so we want to stack gem levels and %spell/%cold mods. Cast speed can be used later, when you get Slavedriver's Hand. Since this is a crit build we love that as well, it can roll quite high on wand and shield. And finally we stack as much double damage chance as we can from Lethal Pride.

Defensively this trapper is fairly stacked, running Grace Grace and Blind with Defiance Banner. Capped spell suppression is easy to hit. Not only do we blind everything near us, we take 15% reduced damage from blinded enemies. There is also Ghost Dance with ~700ES. Late game, you can even fit in Determination.

Help

For help with this build, the best places to ask are:

My stream https://www.twitch.tv/velyna
Autarkis stream https://www.twitch.tv/autarki
PoE Vault Discord https://discord.gg/arpg-vault

PoB Imports

The current PoB’s for this build are always available here:

Pobs and Skills

Gear

The gear page has premade item searches and info about each item in the late-game PoBs.

Gear

Leaguestart

All of my Leaguestart PoBs contain step by step pathing, and you can scroll down on this page to see what skills to use in acts 1-10.

Act 1

Before Prison

At Prison

Merveils Cave

I put Steelskin on my move button so it autocasts as a defense layer. If the mana cost is too much stop leveling it or take it off entirely for a while.

You will need some STR on gear to run Vitality, keep checking the vendor every time you level for an Amber Amulet.

Act 2

Don’t forget the Great White Beast quest gives a second Quicksilver Flask.

Kill all the bandits.

Act 3

I ran lightning trap until the end of act 3, but you can probably swap at the library if desired.

Lab should be easy to do right after Dominus, take Explosives Expert.

To get full benefit from this ascend requires a source of flat fire damage to spells so we can ignite, it can be found as a weapon prefix or as an implicit on some wands.

Act 4-10

I dropped Vitality and Clarity Clarity to level 1 and added Grace Grace once I had enough reservation efficiency on tree, then levelled clarity back while keeping vitality quite low.

This was the setup I ended the acts and started mapping with, from here I moved towards matching the Leaguestart PoB.

Need Help?

I try to give all the information needed to enjoy the build and succeed, but questions do come up. If you need any help with my builds the best place to go is either My Stream or My Discord

This site also has guides for game mechanics, trading, crafting, and just about anything else, all collected here:

PoE-Vault Gameplay Guide Hub

GL out there, Exile!