MasterT's Righteous Cold Dot 'Autobomber'

This is a Very Budget Friendly Build. All of my builds are designed to be extremely cost efficient. You should have to spend no more than 20D to have the full endgame setup running.
(Will Update this Cost if the economy changes, It will be mentioned in the changelogs at the bottom of this page)

Intro:

Heelllo Internet, and Welcome to the Righteous Cold Dot 'Autobomber'

This build has very very powerful offenses, and really tanky defenses making it a very powerful all rounder for all content in the game while staying at a very low budget. It is by far the Strongest character you can play at a low budget because it has to sacrifice Nothing, you have the damage, you have the tankiness, you have the speed and you have the qol of pressing little to no buttons with the pseudo autobomber playstyle while clearing (Just have to activate Vaal Cold Snap every 8 seconds, Check the how to play section at the bottom for more info on that)

This build utilizes Elementalist's Golem scaling along with the very powerful gem scaling of Cold Damage Over Time skills to get massive amounts of damage, reaching DOT CAP (35.8M) with very low investment.

Defenses are not light either. Massive ES pool and multiple different defensive auras, block cap, and 1-1.5K ES Regen per second the build is Not easy to take down. It is not immortal by any means, but it is definitely on the super durable side of things. On top of the defenses, there is also a pseudo defensive layer of massively slowing down nearby monsters with Chill from Vaal Cold snap, so even without pressing any buttons any mob that comes near you will already have a 20-30% chill on it.

The Build also utilizes a Low Life setup, For a very detailed explanation on that please refer to the very start of the video build guide.

Extra Important Info:

There is a full video showcasing the build vs all the major endgame content:
https://youtu.be/-DAyAFAArak
As well as a full build guide video here:
https://youtu.be/t5DGjxkw7iQ

Regex:
This is the regex I use for both t16s and t17 mods, this includes the mods that brick the build but also mods that I personally just hate running.
"!f el|eir m|o al|'v|ur$|gen|efe|s rec|d fl"

Animate Guardian Gear:
The website's interface does not allow me to Show the Animate Guardian's gear in it, but it is written separately in the gear section and also available in the pob if you switch the gear set to animate guardian.

Levelling Pob:
While at this point in the league I do not recommend levelling from scratch with this, there's so many very powerful foulborn uniques that allow to level up Insanely insanely quickly. But if you do want to try this From scratch, I dont have my own levelling pob for now, I will have one for Next league as a league start version of this build, but you can use this one that I followed last league early on:
https://pobb.in/jEixYq6_sWze
From a youtuber named Alkuroth, cool guy heres his youtube too:
https://www.youtube.com/@Alkuroth

Chaos Bloodline:
The Chaos Bloodline is how we get permenant uptime on Vaal Cold Snap. You get your chaos bloodline by killing the Ultimatum boss. This guy is a joke to kill. Just get a t14 white map, use an Ultimatum Scarab of Dueling and it will guarantee that the last wave of ultimatum will be the boss. Kill him then speak to him and he will give you the bloodline.

Bandits:
KILL ALL

For any questions please join my discord, linked below, and tag me in the Help me Please channel, please make sure to do so in the Path of exile One section.
I rarely respond to dm messages because I forget to check them, but if you want to reach out to me in dms please tag me in the server and tell me to check my dms.

ISSUE IN POB:
There is Culling Strike mentioned in the custom config notes of the pob, remove that line since I removed culling strike from the build because it felt unneccessary but forgot to remove it from the config.

Have fun with the build!

My discord: https://discord.com/invite/rNVCYuRVkt
My patreon if you'd like to support or want early access to builds and other guides: https://www.patreon.com/c/_MasterT

CHANGES/IMPORTANT UPDATES (PRICE FIXER AMBUSH):

Guys. Please stop trying to copy the Pob 1-1. You will get ruined by price fixers because they are preying on people who arent watching the video, or looking at any gearing guide, and just going to buy copies of exact gear from the pob. Do not pay hundreds of Divs for a corrupted helmet. Do not pay mirrors for the ring. Do not overpay for Anything unless you have money to waste for no reason.

Refer to the video's How the Build Plays section to see a live display of exactly what to do and how to play this build the right way. but tldr the bossing rotation is:
Frostbite + Vortex + Creeping Frost + Vaal Cold Snap + Cold Snap. This will put all the ground dots and then you can do whatever. They will last 7 seconds overall, that is usually enough for most bosses to die but if a t17 is tanky or if the boss is moving around alot then you have to use the skills on him again
If this is a boss thats not too psychotic, like a fortress boss or any pinnacle boss, then activate Vaal RF after you use Vortex.
You can also spam vortex and creeping frost back and forth to get more hit dps in, but not really necessary.

For mapping, you just use Vaal Cold Snap

GRAFTS:

Estimated Cost: 2D)

Freezing Tulgraft
Main modifier you want on this is a Suffix which makes Skills Used By This Graft have a Chance to Cover Enemies in Frost on hit.
Desirable prefix along with that is %Increased Cold Damage

Hardening Uulgraft
There are no desired mods on this item, just the skill itself from this graft is what you want. It gives you endurance charges on low life, and this build is always on low life.
The Somewhat Desirable mod is Damage over time multiplier on the prefix.

The Very rare modifier that you can try to get on this is a Corrupted Implicit for a chance to take less area damage from hits. This is hard to hit so try to snipe one if you can.

ANIMATE GUARDIAN GEAR AND FAQ:

The animate guardian exists as a Support Bot, similar to mercs in 3.26. He applies an extra curse, helps pull ailments away from you, and applies a -res debuff with his helmet. He also taunts enemies which makes them focus on him not you, and if they do hit you then taunted enemies deal 10% less dmg to anything thats not whos taunting them. So overall a very nice big boost in damage and defense. In the higher budget version he will use a Garb of the Ephemeral to also provide you with Action speed immunity and crit immunity.

Sign of the Sin Eater

This makes nearby enemies apply elemental ailments to your animate guardian instead of you. Helpful sometimes.

Transfer-attuned Spirit Shield
You will use a shaper exalt on this shield, and then use Loathing Essences until you hit Recover Life on Block, then Craft Additional physical damage reduction on it

Giantslayer Helmet
This will be a Redeemer influenced helmet with the modifier Nearby Enemies have -9 to Cold Resistance, ideally with an open suffix to craft Life Regeneration Rate.

Windscream
This gives the animate guardian the ability to apply an additional curse on top of your own.

Replica Volkuur's Guidance
IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE THIS GLOVE. The glove slot is ANY glove with the implicit of curse enemies with elemental weakness on hit. This glove is just one of the best ones because it has chaos res on it too.

Doppelgänger Guise
Gives the Animate Guardian a bunch of Phys and chaos mitigation, while also giving a massive amount of regen when he gets hit.

The way to gear your animate guardian is that you go into any instance where you can drop items on the ground, you can not do so in hideout.

Drop all the gear you want him to equip, then CAST the animate guardian skill on the individual gear pieces on the ground and he will equip it. If you cannot see the gear because your loot filter hid it then just hold Alt and it will show, or turn your filter off.

The animate guardian's gear does not go away if he dies. if he does die, he cannot be respawned in the same zone, but can be respawned in the next zone by just recasting the skill.

Be careful not to recast the skill on any random piece of gear on the ground, it will replace whatever he had equipped and it will be gone.

Full Overview of How the Build Functions:

Unlike Ignites poisons or bleeds, cold dot works very differently as it's not a regular ailment. The damage over time is linked to the individual skills instead of an Ailment applied to the enemy. This means that every single cold skill in the game that has a damage over time affect can be used to Stack that effect, which is exactly what this build is doing. We use the 3 strongest cold damage over time skills, Vortex Creeping Frost and Cold snap, to stack massive cold damage over time for single target. These skills like all spell based skills scale very heavily with gem levels, but only scale AOE with gem quality so you can easily get lvl 21 gems without needing to worry about quality. The gem levels are further scaled using certain gear and uniques, all of which are very common and easy to acquire.

The build also scales it's damage by using golems with primordial bond clusters, as well as utilizing a very simple casual friendly animate guardian to provide a big boost to single target damage.

The final and one of the most important scaling vectors is the Low Life setup to utilize things like Pain attunement while still being able to use RF, something a CI build can not do. The life is reserved to give a bunch of extra utility through auras.

The defences of the build are very straight forward. Since the damage is so easy to get the gear can be fully focused on defenses, getting a large amount of ES and a little bit of armour. The armour part is explained further in the gear section.

The build also gets fully block capped by using a very very underused trash tier 3 unique daressos defiance. This unique gives you massive attack block if you block a spell, and since majority of things in end game mapping are spells (why spell suppression is considered so important) it makes it so you just need to cap your spell block and your attack block will get capped on its own.

This does come with the downside of not having any recover on block but that is mitigated by having a large amount of base Regen and converting it into ES Regen through zealots oath. The build in this state has 1400 ES Regen per second which is more than enough in all my testing. The only place this is not enough in is simulacrum since that really heavily requires recovery on block to survive.

Chaos Bloodline:
The Chaos Bloodline is how we get permenant uptime on Vaal Cold Snap using the Corruption's Embrace node. You get your chaos bloodline by killing the Ultimatum boss. This guy is a joke to kill. Just get a t14 white map, use an Ultimatum Scarab of Dueling and it will guarantee that the last wave of ultimatum will be the boss. Kill him then speak to him and he will give you the bloodline.

We get Shephard of Souls via this ascendancy, and in order for this to work you need to have 4 corrupted items EQUIPPED. Equipped only applies to Gear, not flasks or skill gems or jewels on the passive tree. In this build the 4 corrupted items are the amulet, the shield, the wand and the hungry loop.
DO NOT corrupt all your uniques, if you go to 6 corrupted items it will proc the next part of the chaos bloodline and that bricks this build.

GENERAL FAQ:

This will be updated with any and all questions that I get after the build goes live.

12th December 2025

CHANGES TO HOW TO CRAFT THE JEWEL:

BEFORE:
All the other jewels in this can either be bought right off trade, or self crafted. I got very lucky with my self crafts and hit max res on all of them, and harvest swapped them into max fire res to have more net ES recovery from the RF degen.

Get Fractured Cold Multi
Reforge Defense on the Harvest Bench until you hit %Energy shield.

You can stop here, or keep going until you get a 3rd good mod, or all 4 good mods.
Mod priority is the following, excluding the cold dot multi and %es:
Max res (any element, you can use the harvest bench to change it)
+Damage over time multiplier
%minion dmg, cold damage, spell damage holding a shield
%inc damage over time
Attributes

AFTER:

Get Fractured Cold Multi, Dot Multi, %minion dmg, %cold damage, or %spell dmg while holding a shield
Reforge Defense on the Harvest Bench until you hit %Energy shield.

keep going until you get a 3rd good mod, or all 4 good mods.
Mod priority is the following, excluding the cold dot multi and %es:
Max res (any element, you can use the harvest bench to change it)
+cold dot multi
+Damage over time multiplier
%minion dmg, cold damage, spell damage holding a shield
%inc damage over time
Attributes

One of these desired mods will be fractured, and then you will just reforge defense until you hit %ES and stop there, or keep going until you get more of those mods.

CHANGES TO THE TRIUMVIRATE AUTHORITY RING

All variants of the ring are now sold on trade, with a few handfuls left that are heavily price fixed. Now the only option is to use the alternative hungry loop setup that I've mentioned in the gearing section, or to farm the ring yourself. The ring drops from Atziri. The 3 rings i showed in the video were all self farmed. It is a little annoying to self farm it, but not insanely bad. it took me around 30 atziri runs i think to get the 3 rings, out of a total of 7 ring drops. Im not sure if thats lucky or not lucky since the wiki does not have the drop rate for the ring from regular non uber atziri.

Uber atziri drops the ring with 4 modifiers on it. I managed to get her to drop one of those after 10 runs, but the wiki does have the drop rate for the 4 mod one and it is 5%. the 3 mod one from regular atziri might be more common so try that.