I want to do a fire+cold mage but am not sure how to itemize that. Mono damage is clearly simpler in that regard, so is hybrid even worth it?
Ah, “viable”… Along with “PTW”, “offensive”, and “ornithorynque”, one word that comes back all the time with very different meanings for everyone…
Fire and cold would both be spells, and both elemental, so it should work well enough to reach empowered monos and add a bit of corruption. But it probably wouldn’t go quite as high as a single damage-type build.
I suppose I would try to focus the cold part on crowd control effects like chill and freeze, and the fire for pure damage, with affixes adding fire damage % and freeze chance %, for example.
Sorry, not very specific, but again it shouldn’t be TOO hard to build and reach endgame.
Doing multipel damage types does work well, as long as the main damage skills you use share some kind of scaling options.
In your case elemental damage or damage over time (depending on the skills you want to use) would work.
Depending on what skill you will use for bosses and tougher mobs you might want to try and fit in some resistance shred for that skills damage type.
So for example if you clear monos mostly with a cold skill but doing single target damage with a fire skill you would want to try and get fire penetration and fire shred.
You definitely need to be a bit more thoughtful on your stat budget but you can definitely make it work.
I just started doing frost claw that’s been changed to lightning
Using a ladle with an enigma but then also using equips that give freeze rate multiplier so that my novas can freeze mobs
Now I have the boss clear And the clear speed and survivability of frost claw freezing mobs
Ive tested both builds, going all in on each and this hybrid version is better then either alone.
Reasoning ?
Frost claw just doesn’t do boss DPS and you can’t get crazy high ward like with enigma ladle lightning frost claw.
I would die alot at bosses with frost claw but rarely die during map clearing everything just stayed frozen but no matter how much freeze rate or multiplier I could at most freeze the boss every few seconds . Also with all the uniques for frost claw freeze I lacked resistance it was hard to cap them out .
But with frost claw changed to lightning I get the branded enemies and rares and way over maxed resistances and the damage of spark charge .
But with I can also get like 1200 freeze multiplier+ 80freeze rate so that way my novas have the ability to freeze
There are items like Scales of Eterra that might be interesting to try build around: https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAwRgzCCcCsQ