Build Idea: Melee Cold Shaman

So, I recently got a full Shattered Lance set and wanted to theorycraft a build with it and came up with what I believe is a really good Shaman build. At first I was looking into Spellblade, but soon after I realized that this would work wonders on Shaman due to generic health regen Primalist gets from passives and idols.

So, the main idea is to dual-weild an Ice Sceptre and the Sword from the set in order to get high amount of base cold damage and then pick a few physical attacks and play them as cold since your base damage will be mainly cold, then you stack a lot of health regen and Vitality to get as much health regen as possible. I have chosen Tempest Strike and Earthquake as my main damaging skills, but this could probably work with Swipe and Upheaval as well. Tempest Strike also gets higher value due to passives from Shaman tree and additionally it puts the cold spell damage from the sceptre to good use.

For supplemental skills, I have chosen Fury Leap, Ettera’s Blessing and Warcry. Ettera’s Blessing was basically a momentarily spark of creativity which happened to fit the build quite well, as it probably needs some sort of defensive tools to offset the vulnerabilty you have due to dual-weilding and also benefits from healing effectiveness nodes from Druid tree.

I’m curious to see your thoughts on this one. I believe it to be a strong build, but only seems so on paper. I don’t know if I’m missing something, but I would definitely play it if I wasn’t missing Core of the Mountain (my chosen body armour), which seems quite strong for the build, although I’m not sure if it’s necessary.

Here’s the link for the build:

Gaining large status bonuses based on the number of activated totems is a very important build system for shamans
By stacking the maximum number of Thorn Totems, it is very easy to maintain 13 activated totems, and then we can get huge elemental resistances, physical resistances, INC% bonuses based on the number of totems through the idols and shaman talents.
On the other hand, the equipment suffixes are liberated to such a great extent due to the massive resistances complemented by the totems that we can stack more maximum health as well as health regen and convert health regen to huge INC% bonus through the Shattered Lance set.
Finally, the totem resistance system can be extended with several other interesting ideas, such as Frostbite Shackles gloves with cold resistance, Urzil’s Pride body armor with lightning resistance.

This is a very powerful and interesting DOT Aftershocks Shaman build that I’ve been playing recently.

Hope it will inspire you!

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Your build confuses me. To begin with, I don’t understand why you use Spriggan Form and how you use it. Next, if you 're playing with dot aftershocks earthquake, does the melee cold damage bonus do anything for you? And lastly why do you need Frostbite Shackles?

1, The Spriggan Form can summon 8 healing totems
2, I will gain a lot of ward based on my armor every 7-8 seconds when enter Spriggan Form . By using the unique idol Throne of Ambition to stack armour and converting cold resistance to ward retention by Frostbite Shackles , i can hold 2~8k ward in Boss fighting
3, By quickly emptying the rage to transform back into human form, I can remove negative mana and gain additional 50-80 mana
4, Yup, even if the earthquake converted to DOT type, it still has a melee tag, which means its DOT damage can benefit melee INC% bonus, can also be affected by the Damage Taken bonus from Doom status applied by the unique ring Siphon of Anguish.

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Just…don’t. Shaman does not scale very well at all with melee skills and is pushed into doing elemental melee damage, which then pushes you to Tempest Strike and…need I say more? I tried variations and ultimately always came back to having T. Strike proccing lightning and doing that way.

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