Pondering The Orb | Cold Fractured Crown Build | 0.8.4

Sorry for the meme title, but I think the situation demands it. We all know that orbiting node got struck by a nerf bat pretty hard, which was hardly unexpected, of course. I never liked the orbiting build – recast orb => walk => things die in your wake – it’s way too passive for my liking.

So, I’ve been pondering my orb for quite some time, you might say. (even before the patch). I promise I’ll stop now.

So, orbiting is cool and all, but there are these two nodes:

  • Manacharged
  • Overcharged Detonation

So I thought it could mean a decent synergy with high-mana setup, e.g, the one involving the Fractured Crown.

It’s obviously not a secret that Fractured Crown builds are naturally quite tanky. But now you can have the DPS too!


Build links (lastepochtools):

  • Rare items, T5 affixes
  • My actual gear, some exalts: ZA8w06o6
  • Arena build (Focus replaced with Flame Ward: KQb5pDAM

(had to remove the last 2 links due to new user’s restriction, feel free to use codes)


video


SKILLS

There’s a lot of synergies in this build.

  • Main interaction, is, of course, between huge mana pool provided by Fractured Crown and other + mana items and between Static Orb nodes Manacharged and Overcharged Detonation. Both these nodes stack which results in HUGE damage multipliers, giving you juicy 400-700k crits (on dummy). What’s funny, is that these multipliers also apply to small orbs, which means you can reliably hit up to 2-3M per Orb
  • Then Glacier is a main source of mana regen (and secondary damage source), with nodes that return % mana on crit and on kill
  • Ice Barrage is a jack-of-all-trades, providing solid trash clear, huge global cold damage buff and pretty good frontal projectile block.
  • Teleport is teleport, of course. The only mandatory node is “1 free cast after TP”.
  • Focus is self-explanatory. You need Null Profusion node, of course. You can play with overcharge % mana, but I don’t think it’s reliable. But it could work pretty cool for zerg-rushing some Mono bosses.
  • Flame Ward (instead of Focus)-- is a must in >200 arena. Focus is not much help, since you mostly lose mana due to damage anyways (contrary to Monos). And you’ll have plenty of mobs to leech mana back with Glacier. I wouldn’t recommend taking it to Monos instead of Focus though, because otherwise you’ll struggle on tough solo targets (like Mono Bosses).

GEAR PRIORITIES

Well, you guessed it.

mana

Mana is your everything. As long as you have mana, you basically can't die. And the more you have it, the more damage you do. Therefore, mana is both your offensive and defensive stat. Otherwise:

OFFENSIVE

  1. cold penetration
  2. spell damage
  3. cold damage
  4. spell crit
  5. armor shred
  6. crit multi

Crit multi you don’t need that much, since you already have a lot from Fractured Crown. Cast Speed does help too, but I’d say that the one you have from passives and idols is more than enough to keep you going.

DEFENSIVE

  1. capped res (ofc)
  2. crit avoidance
  3. endurance
  4. end. threshold
  5. HP

HP is still good, but you don’t need it that much (aside from chest piece), because you already have effectively large hp pool from mana shield. Remember, that even with 700+ mana and merely 1000 HP and ~60% conversion YOUR MANA WILL RUN OUT FASTER THAN HP. On the plus side – you are easy to heal with even little leech. And, of course, it makes endurance threshold incredibly effective.

OTHER

You can also add some Freeze Multi, if you want, as a secondary layer of defense. But that’s not necessary. I have Freeze Multi gear only because it rolled some god-like T7 affixes.


LEGENDARIES

I was thinking about this for a while but it seems like there are very few immediately obvious great choices (not considering 4 LP rolls, of course). And I’m absolutely positive you could do reasonably well without Legendaries whatsoever.

For 1-2 Legendary Potential (LP) I think it could be something like that:

  • Fractured Crown – is the most obvious choice and would be absolutely fantastic even with 1 LP. The thing is, I honestly have no idea how it can be obtained in 0.8.4. And even if it could be obtained at all. And if it could – then could it roll LP?
  • Prism Wraps – this is second most obvious choice. Common drop, could be great for any mage with 2+ LP. Especially with some juicy T7 affixes.
  • Yulia’s Path – could be great even with 1 LP due to good native resistances, endurance, movespeed, healing. Heck, I probably wouldn’t mind even a normal version with good rolls. These boots are great!
  • Tome of Elements – common drop and has effective level 20, so there’s a non-zero chance for high LP. Potentially could be great, depending on your merged exalted piece, otherwise don’t bother.
  • Orian – could be absolutely godlike even with 1 LP (mostly due to 100+ mana). But I don’t even have the normal version, so… yeah.
  • Urzil’s Pridepossible, with good LP. Mostly due to native mana.

GAMEPLAY TIPS
  • The main idea is to put an Ice Barrage between you and mobs and then spam Glacier for mana conserve/regen. This way you are both protected from projectiles and are doing some good clears.
  • You are allowed to free-cast your huge Static Orbs after TP, so don’t forget about it, when conserving. Usually 1 Orb is enough for most elites.
  • Always keep an eye on your mana. If you out of mana – you die instantly. Until then you are invincible.
  • Pre-cast Ice Barrier as a global Cold Damage buff before your burn phase on boss. 4 seconds of buff is more than enough to burn all your mana, and then you can go into a conserve mode.
  • Don’t forget about Lightning Aegis from one of the Orb nodes. It doesn’t make you invincible, but can certainly help to survive some tough spots.

That’s my first build posted on this forum. Hope you like :upside_down_face:

3 Likes

This really sounds interesting. As for the fractured crown, is there a way to actively farm that thing? I only found deprecated information on obtaining it via destructive fractures. Pretty sure this won’t work anymore.

Thanks! :relaxed:

As for the crown: there definitely WAS a way to actively farm it. And it was probably the MOST trivial unique to target farm (aside from Shade’s ring). You could get 1 crown per ~5-7 Gilded Crowns. So it wasn’t even that hard to get some very good rolls. (Perhaps EHG wanted to make it a little harder)

But right now it’s really not clear how to get it, since the new craft system doesn’t involve “fractures” of any kind. And the only random factor is the amount of FP lost on craft. So I think it probably has something to do with FP.
I tried crafting it “the old way” – i.e. by simply failing the high Tier crafts. But no luck so far. 500k in the dumpster <3

Perhaps it could be some particular combination of glyphs applied to a craft? I.e. order->chaos->hope
Although, it’s not even guaranteed, that it’s now obtained from craft at all. Perhaps there’s some other “fracturing” involved.

In any case, the EHG dev confirmed today that it CAN be obtained in 0.8.4: https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/rg6z89/comment/hoircqf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3


EDIT

I have a VERY strong feeling, that it might involve new Rune of Ascendance applied to a Gilded Crown.

I’m like 70% sure.
Though, I can’t test it, because I don’t have a rune yet :sweat_smile:

Runes of ascendance can only spawn uniques that are world drops, or at least what the devs said was that they can’t spawn boss drops. Also, since the rune can spawn any unique from that item type (ie, helms), it would be very expensive!

Well, unless it has some specific interaction if you use it with Guilded Crown.

It needs testing though. I don’t have any of these runes yet, so I can’t confirm it, sadly :unamused:


Also, according to a dev reply, it’s not as rare as some of them would like it to be:

Yes, this is a possiblity.

You’re attributing generosity to Trasochi when you should be attributing malice (or at the very least capriciousness) to @KissingAiur.

Gilded crown + ascendance + chaos/hope? In case of hope it works when hope triggers?

If anyone is still wondering how to obtain Fractured Crown in 0.8.4., here’s the guide by u/d3_reaper_of_data:

TLDR:
It involves Rune of Ascendance craft on >T21 Gilded Crown with specific “+Mana” and “Damage delat to Mana” affixes.

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Decent gear update:

After a few weeks of 0.8.4 and with a new recipe for Fractured Crown, I finally managed to craft a Crown with **Legendary Potential** and decent stats. I also managed to merge it with T6 Static Orb helmet, and it got me thinking: what can I improve for those 3 spare points?

I noticed that the build struggles a little bit on T4 Julra, in cases when I run out of mana. Glacier regen on solo target is, obviously, not enough. So I thought I could try something new, which is LB synergy node in SO tree:

https://i.imgur.com/ElgxHKG.png

This node doesn’t seem like much for basic SO, but when your orbs cost 200 mana, suddenly getting 150 of it back in 3 quick casts doesn’t seem too bad.

As a result, my survivability and clear time on Julra improved significantly (since I’m rarely out of mana now).


Video

Here’s a video with the last floor of T4 dungeon and a kill on Julra in ~40s. And then one more kill on her from another run (also ~40s):


Current build and gear:

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