TbXie's Wintertide Brand Occultist Build Guide (PoE Settlers of Kalguur 3.25)

Out Of Date

June 12th, 2025, 09:43

Introduction & Expectations

Due to the latest balancing changes, we do not recommend playing this build anymore, as it does not meet the high standards we apply to our guides in terms of fun and performance. We are leaving it up as a reference and it might be revived in a later patch.

I expected this skill to perform a lot better than it is in your guide. Why is this?

Because it is impossible to cater to everyone, I choose to not overcomplicate things. As a rule of thumb, this means you get to be confident you can obtain your two first Voidstones, an otherwise full Atlas completion & have a great mapping experience in T16 maps with moderates amounts of juice.
This implies you will most likely be looking for some help, or further investments to obtain your last two Voidstones. This is due to the fact that fighting these bosses on acceptable amounts of gear requires an enormous amount of game knowledge, fight practice & mechanical skill. Trying to compare your playing experience to those who’ve done nothing but play for years, tends to lead to dissapointment.

Therefore, take your time & appreciate the fact that some content can be harder for you, and the characters powerlevels you’ve managed to acquire, than for others. There’s no shame in this.

Disclaimer

I am currently playing the new Challenge League and a lot of things have been added of which no mention can be found in this guide?

While I would very much like to give you all the ins and outs of the new powercreep in the new Challenge League, it saddens me to let you know that no Early access is given out and we thus have no more information than anyone else when updating our build guides before the new patches. We try our utmost to make sure everything is as close to perfect as we can, but cannot forecast which special mechanics / interactions might exist in new Leagues. If something of tremendous power is teased or announced beforehand, you can find specific League specific remarks in the section on the GEAR PAGE

What to Expect

🔸 T16 Maps ✔️
🔸 T16 Maps w/ a few Atlas Mechanics or some scarabs ✔️
🔸 Pinnacle bosses when playing well ✔️
🔸 T17 Maps ❗
🔸 Uber Content ❌
🔸 Uber Content when investing well beyond the guide ❌

Wintertide Brand

Wintertide Brand is an incredibly potent early game skill which sadly caps out relatively fast. While, undoubtedly, there is ways to push it past its limits. I chose not to do this. What Wintertide Brand is for is to provide you with a smooth leaguestarter which goes as far as the pinnacle bosses and regular T16 mapping. When everything is completely minmaxed, I expect T17 maps to be doable. It’s not the fastest but it is really defensive and does enough damage to get you where you want to be. What’s important here is that Wintertide Brand starts being a really solid clearing and solid target skill from level 12, or well, 14, because it takes you that long to get to the all important mastery.

Playstyle

The build plays like a caster, where you just throw down your Brands and they either start playing ping pong between all monsters dropping circles of DoT’s which will clear the screen. Whenever there’s no ping pong going on, it will stick to the single target and deal all of its damage to it. Other than Wintertide, you’re pressing Curses, Vaal Cold Snap and Cold Snap on bosses. Keeping up one instance of Cold Snap is a huge damage increase and as such should be done on challenging targets.

Build Assessment

Pro’s & Con’s

➕ Relatively Fast Mapper on Leaguestart
➕ Gets going on no Gear
➕ Scales into Pinnacle content

➖ Low Ceiling
➖ DoT Builds aren’t for everyone
➖ For maximum Damage, you press a lot of buttons

Viability in Numbers

🔸 Ease of Transitioning: ★★☆☆☆
🔸 New Player Friendliness: ★★★★☆
🔸 Playstyle: ★★★★★
🔸 Ease of Gearing: ★★★★☆
🔸 Easily Executable: ★★★☆☆

Map Modifiers to Avoid

While certain combinations of modifiers are generally just bad, such as for example a couple of damage modifiers combined with Critical Strike Multiplier, these are things you are supposed to get a feel for yourself and test out. Just make sure not to combine too much crazy things together. Modifiers the build cannot run are listed here.

❗Reduced Block Chance
❗Elemental Damage Reflect

Damage & Defenses

Mechanics

Wintertide Brand does more damage per stage. It gains those stages every so often and the frequency of which it gains stages at is defined by your Cast Speed. Therefore, the longer a brand lasts & the more cast speed you have, the more likely you are to gain maximum Wintertide Brand stages. One thing that should be explained is the potency of Brand Recall. Brand Recall makes your brands unattach & reattach which makes them drop a new DoT. This means, that by Recalling your brands, you’re getting a second high damage DoT as Wintertide’s Damage gains Damage stages as it’s out there longer. Therefore, by getting another DoT from the same brand, you’re getting another one with high stages. You should use Brand Recall on cooldown on Single Target.
Other than that, Occultist leverages maximum Curses, which, sadly, are hard to automate nowadays. Because I really hate manually casting them, I put them in a Trigger Wand but you should really be selfcasting them if you can endure the button presses. Lastly, Cold Damage over Time instances stack, so we’re running Vaal Cold Snap to generate Frenzies & have a regular Cold Snap to create extra DoT’s on the enemy. Whilst doing less than Wintertide Brand, they still augment your total DPS significantly and you’ll be using them on Rares & Bosses.

Scaling & Layers

This build layers a lot of conditional mitigation to mostly avoid getting hit for relevant damage. These layers are combinations of following attempts to avoid taking relevant hits:

🔸High Life Pool
🔸Capped Block & Spell Block
🔸Four Endurance Charges
🔸Immune to Chaos Damage
🔸Decent Armour
🔸High Recovery through Aegis Aurora
🔸 Incandescent Heart & Chaos Immunity combo

Build Resources

Leveling the Build

Leaguestarter or Transitioning

This build has the Leaguestarer tag. This means we will be holding your hand right from the get go until you reach the pinnacle of your power and finish the guide. In order to maximize your experience, please make sure to follow the Path of Building leveling sections accordingly. We will be providing multiple skill trees & gem sets to ease your progress to endgame maps.

You can find the Path of Building link on the Passive Page .