Cold BV Elementalist - Asmodeus League Starter Guide

Weapon

Bitterdream is a pseudo 8-link that fits very well with cold Blade Vortex. It can carry you through the entire atlas progression.

Shield

Use Kaltenhalt or a rare shield with increased block and +1 to Physical Spell Skills. Life and chaos res are good to have on all your rare items until you're capped on chaos res.

Body Armor

Carcass Jack provides a great way to increase your AoE and AoE damage early on as well as a mix of basic defensive stats needed early on.

Helmet

Heatshiver requires you to freeze enemies to be fully effective. If you notice that you're not freezing your targets, you can swap it for a rare helmet.

Gloves

Hrimsorrow are required for the build to work and should be your first purchase. Do not swap to Blade Vortex without them.

Boots

You can use Dusktoe early on to help with your chaos resistance, but I recommend getting a good rare pair of boots as soon as you can and putting the eldritch implicits on it for a massive damage boost.

Belt

Use a rare stygian vise or the cold damage version of Doryani's Invitation (Cold), It has all the stats you need plus a rare source of life leech from all cold hit damage.

Rings

Mark of Submission is a great way to get a curse on hit set up early on. Since we're playing BV, we want to automate everything we can for a smooth playstyle. Later this can be replaced with a Elemental Weakness glove corruption or a rare ring with a curse on hit modifier.

The Taming is the best other ring you can use early on. The cheapest way to get it is by combining Berek's Grip, Berek's Pass and Berek's Respite at the vendor.

Amulet

On the amulet you want to get Life and ideally Chaos resistance. Bloodsoaked Medallion is a great early option before you can get an amulet with +1 to level of all Physical Skills

Flasks

You want to use these 4 flasks:

• Quartz Flask
• Granite Flask
• Silver Flask
• Quicksilver Flask

and these 4 suffixes on them:

• Movement Speed
• Increased Armour
• Spell Damage Leeched as ES
• Reduced Effect of Curses on you

Get them as soon as you can and automate them with an instilling orb enchant so that they're automatically used when the charges reach full capacity.

Jewels

Use Careful Planning in the socket slot next to Mind Over Matter for an extra 100 Dexterity which will help you meet all of the attribute requirements.

Cluster Jewels

Make sure to get a Large Cold Cluster with Blast-Freeze and another notable that makes the Blast-Freeze accessible with just 2 points, instead of having to path to the back side of the jewel. You can always check which combination of notables allows you to do that, by importing it to PoB straight from the trade website or making the jewel yourself in PoB.

The second cluster jewel you NEED for this build is a single Medium Herald Damage Cluster with Heraldry. This node will give you almost 40% more damage. You MUST have it if you want to deal any damage with this setup.