Apologies up front for the long post. TL;DR at the bottom.
I spent the weekend making a Tempest Strike Shaman and it has been a lot of fun to iterate on and is level 78 currently. I tried 3 different skill trees in an effort to find the one most ideal for damage while also looking for the wow factor. One constant I had in all of the variations was the 4/4 in Earth’s Aid to auto spawn Thorn Totem on the physical Earth Spikes proc. Since there are totem passives that can grant extra protection and Melee damage it was a no brainer to pick up Grove Mind to pop 5 totems and supplement them with Frenzy Totem untalented and Storm Totem to give me flat lightning and chill chance from it’s respective tree. I also am using Ice Thorns specced to proc on hit to buff my cold damage and improve my defenses a little and Avalanche specced to follow me around and no longer be channeled. Lots going on on the screen with this build! I also used the same weapon throughout all the testing as well since I hit a solid double physical Sovnya polearm.
Frozen Tundra
I started with just going off my early passive tree and it didn’t have any added lightning damage in the tree so I figured I would try it with the Grounded passive. Picked up Hailstorm and Winter’s Blast but I stayed away from Winter’s chill and the rest of the cold side. It felt alright having big ground slams and hailstorm proccing but damage was meh still so I decided to switch it up.
Stormbringer
The next attempt was based on having a balanced approach to all the proc rates to get the most value out of The Perfect Storm. It involved going 2/4 in each of the starting nodes to even out each proc and also ended up getting a couple points in empowerment to raise the proc floor (ceiling?) This variation snags a 2% extra crit on the lightning side and the Tempestous node. This variation was instantly more DPS. It seems giving up an entire proc just doesn’t get rewarded enough. The explosions, three procs, Hailstorm, and Tempestuous going off felt really great. Thorn totems popped all the time from Earth’s Aid like the first variant so I could continue to justify not having it on my skill bar to self cast. I should mention I didn’t have to change my passive tree at all from the switch from the first build as well.
The Harbinger of Winter
This one felt the most point starved of the three builds. It requires laser focus on the cold nodes. 4/4 Shatter, 5/5 Absolute Zero, 2/4 Winter’s chill and the starter point in chilling blows and we are already 12 in. Since I have to keep Earth’s Aid there goes another 6 points. This also caused an issue that didn’t become apparent until I maxed out Absolute Zero. By the time I hit 5/5 I noticed that my totems weren’t proccing nearly as often as they were. I anticipated some drop off since it does reduce the proc rate of Earth Spikes, though it doesn’t specify how much and supposedly only on the first point. I ended up having to use my final 2 points in Reinforced Stone to punch that proc rate back up and it still wasn’t enough. Thankfully the idol system came to the rescue and I had an idol that procs thorn totems on hit and seemed to be enough to maintain uptime so maybe you could justify dropping that whole leg and just use two of those idols. Since I didn’t have any points left to pick up Winter’s Blast for the chill synergy with Shatter, I had to respec 4 points on my shaman tree to get the Hail Bringer talent. Sidenote, it feels really bad to have to pick up a talent called Hail Bringer and you can’t even spec the Hailstorm skill due to point starvation! That could also totally be on me and my build. Regardless of this hiccup, this version absolutely smashes compared to the other two. The DPS was night and day better. That extra crit multi and added flat cold damage is world’s better and made it feel really good swatting magic packs and rares.
Chill and Freeze
Since this ended up a cold build and the Shatter skill partially relies on it to get the bonus, the freeze mechanic needs some more info on it to maximize it. I rarely got any frozen mobs before I was fully specced into Absolute Zero so I suspect the Freeze Rate stat is most important thing to stack, rather than the Freeze Multiplier stat. Even after this, I still don’t get nearly enough frozen mobs. I think either some additional baseline freeze rate needs to be added to the skill or you need to allow us to spec into it on the passive tree. Adding it to the Hail Bringer nodes seems best. If that makes the passive over budget, then take the cold protection off the node. I get that making mobs non interactive is really powerful but if you are tying skill trees to utilize it, allow me to.
Skill Tree issues to investigate
There are some tooltips that need their wording cleaned up and aligned to the other relevant element choices.
Absolute Zero doesn’t mention the actual proc rate reduction on Earth Spikes like Grounded and Mute Earth do. Please add the actual reduction and also look to see if this skill is bugged and reducing the proc with each additional point spent in it. It sure feels like it does get more then the intended reduction.
Shatter needs its wording fixed. It states more critical damage against chilled or frozen enemies in the top section but then says “Tempest Strike and Northern Winds Critical Multiplier against frozen enemies:x% Considering my damage went way up after speccing this node, it seems it is still being affected by the chill part as well but adding the chilled wording clears this up.
TL;DR
Fun skill, aesthetically pleasing. Buff Grounded skill to make Hailstorm do more damage. Cold build is (lich)king. Access to freeze rate on the shaman tree would be cool. Clean up and investigate a couple skill talent tooltips and we are onto something. Looking forward to finishing leveling up this character!