good morning and welcome back. Today, we're going to be talking about Blade Vortex Max block. [Music] Occultist. I set out to make a tanky Blade Vortex build on a witch. This build went through many iterations before I ultimately settled on a cultist in cold damage. This build actually started as a chaos build, but ultimately it was just too lonely, and I felt like I was forcing myself into chaos and making bad build decisions in order to do so. So, we converted over to cold, and boy, does this build shine. We go for Max block, lucky using the Swallen Shield. Yes, I know this is a very popular shield right now, and it's for a good reason. So, we have 88% lucky block and spell block. We have several thousand Ward that we use for a defensive layer that is pretty much up all the time. And on top of that, we have some evasion. If you were looking for a map blaster, this is a really fun one. I was doing tier 16s and tier 17s.

mods and really the only thing I had trouble with was when I juiced up the tier 17 bosses. The single target is rough, something like a life his extra es tier 17 boss with one or two defensive mods, and it's going to take a while. However, I built the build to have way too much area of effect. You can dial that back and get a lot more damage from your medium clusters and some other places and help solve that issue for you, particularly if you plan on doing tier 17s. So, the really cool tech here is this Fallen Shield gives 88,888 block. Now, block is phenomenal, especially enabling a ward build with our flask up. We have about 6,200 ward, and provided you don't get hit, that ward is always going to be up. And even when we do get hit, it's only down for a second, and you can just press your flask. However, this build has an extra layer of defense that doesn't show up in Po, and that's freeze. This Fallen Shield has a line on it that

causes you to trigger on block, but it's only Elemental skills. So, we use Ice Nova of Deep Freeze and two other support damage links to cause this to go off up to four times per second in very juicy content. When you're getting hit a lot, you're not taking any damage, but you are casting a massive Ice Nova of Deep Freeze, which I believe has a 6.2 meter radius, and then that prolifts and freezes the entire screen pretty much every time you get hit. We'll showcase that once we jump in-game, but that on top of our block and our evasion means our Ward's up all the time, so we have a huge health pool. This is not a traditional tank, but for the purposes of juice mapping, this build feels fantastic to play. So, let's jump into the gear and talk about how everything works, and we'll get you playing. Hey, I stream on Twitch every single day almost. September is Subtember, so we're going to be doing a subathon, so make sure you come and

check out my stream twitch.tv/aeore. We have a lot of fun over there. Back to the show. Let's start with a little showcase of how the defensive layers work. So, we've got our almost 5K Ward here. When our flask goes up, it's even more. And we have this three-link that we talked about. It's got Ice Nova, Deep Freeze, Bone Chill, which gives us more damage for our main skill. And then Awaken Cold Pen, so we hit a little bit harder with each one, making us more likely to freeze enemies. Now, I'm not going to press my Blade Vortex. I'm just going to run up to some enemies to showcase how this works. As soon as one hits you, it triggers an Ice Nova that freezes everything. Of course, I don't have power charges right now, and they're most of my damage. So, when they're off, I'm not actually doing a ton of damage. But if I kill a few enemies first to get my charges up, and then we'll wait until

my blade Vortex goes down. Now let's go find a big juicy pack here, and you can see without my blade Vortex, everything on screen just kills itself with the Ice Nova of Deep Freeze. So let's talk about the gear, try to make this video a little bit quicker. This is a level 98 Arrow. Ain't no milk drinker. We have a lot of milk debates in my chat, and I am team no milk. So some starter tech that we use, the belt Indas Stand. This gives us up to 60% of armor and evasion from our body armor as Ward. We take this off, we go down to 500 Ward. Put this on, we're at 4700. So we get 4200 and change from just this belt. In a really nice chest, I crafted this chest myself. I bought the 208 Quality Base, and then I got very lucky, I believe, with fossils. We hit some crazy rolls here. We Divine this once or twice, and we have 3,500 of each.

armor in evasion, but I basically just made this with dense fossils, and then you do the suffixes with reforges or however you want to finish it. But that tech alone is what gets us all of this ridiculous amount of ward. We also use gloves. These give us a decent bit. We don't have a lot of increased defenses, so basically any added ward we get is just flat. We have to get some conversion on these gloves. We have conversion from hatred Watcher's eye, and we have a little bit of conversion on the tree. So this Fallen Shield, there's a number of ways to get to block cap. I did kind of a difficult one. We got plus five corrupted block on this shield in order to get our attack block up, and we only have 11 regular spell block. But as you can see, we do get to 6565. We use some tech on the tree here that allows us to have Supreme Entation. This makes it so we can tattoo our entire tree. I know this can be a little bit intimidating.

for newer players to go this route, but it really is phenomenal. We are crit immune, fully crit immune. We are fully curse immune when we have our flask up. We get a little bit of block down here to help us get to cap. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do when you use supreme ostentation. But also, on top of that, we have an impossible Escape here that allows us to grab a bunch of nodes around the Supreme ostentation Jewel that are modified. Now, these travel nodes don't give anything. The reason this is valuable is because it's a waste of points to path to things. However, the notables are very strong. We have 12 block and spell block on these two notes here. We have 37 chaos res and then frenzy on hit. There are a lot of different options here. You can go for two attack blocks. That would probably be easier because there is more spell block on the tree that you can grab. You can get block and spell block.

on Jewels. I think it goes up to 3% for each, and then I also grab attack block here on the chest implicit. It goes up to 10%. We got it to nine. You can also use a roomies concoction flask, which gives you attack block and spell block. There's the replica Restless defense Jewel. There's a ton, a ton, a ton of ways to get Block. You can do the way that suits you the best. So here we have a void battery with the shaper on it. The shaper part is not necessary. I just wanted to match my tattoo, so we made this with an omen of Fortune, I believe it's called. So we just got a 30 quality prophecy wand just because we wanted to put some AOE on it. You could probably go la damage here. We grabbed a synth helmet and just kind of crafted this up with reforge life, I believe is what we used. I don't know if that's the most efficient way to do it, but getting a power charge on the

helmet is nice. You can also go for a crusader helmet, awaken or orb that into something else depending on how much money you want to spend. So for the Rings, you can get a spell damage per power charge ring for like ADC. They start super, super cheap. I think I paid four divines for this one that also had Elemental damage on it. And then I just did a crit multi Essence until I hit some useful stuff. Obviously, a plus one power charge ring is going to be the nuts here, but I didn't want to spend that much money on this build. Over here, we have a circle of fear. This was four divines, but these are actually quite cheap without the move speed on it. If you just look for a frostbite ring with cold damage and buff effect, it's really not that expensive. When I looked, they started at ADC, and there was like 20 something on the market. If you can't get the frostbite on one of these, if the market gets bought out, you can just get

frostbite instead of the spell damage per power charge on a ring. Uh, over here and then get whatever you want in the circle of fear for the amulet. We did a lot of work to get this six extra block from the second annoy. Don't know how worth it this was because I'm really just getting six extra block here. But what we did was we bought a we bought an amulet that had plus one power charge infused. So we don't have to path to infused on the tree over here as well as brutal blade. This gives us six attack block. And then we did a very expensive craft to get plus two gems on it. This is totally not worth it. Do not do this. Just go for the uh replica Dragon Fang which is going to give you plus three blade Vortex. It's going to be more damage than this uh and you can just solve your block somewhere else. Don't ask me how to craft this. It was way too expensive. Don't do it. Please don't do it. Uh, we

have this Fallen Shield that we talked about. These boots are actually not optimal. I pulled these off of my Cyclone build. I was planning to craft boots, and I just kind of never got around to it. Really, what you want is onslaught, tailwind, and elusive. Those are going to give you the most amount of speed, and elusive is also going to give you more damage avoidance, so your ward stays up longer. So, most of the gems are self-explanatory. Let's talk about our Frost Pling setup: Frost Pling, Wintry Blast, Spell Echo Support, and Faster Casting. This is a phenomenal way to move around the map. It's very snappy. I really like it. I started with Shield Charge, but I ultimately dropped it for this three-link setup. For our auras, we're using Arrogance with Vitality and Herald of Ice. You can't level this up all the way. You want to make sure that you are not reserving 50% of your life or more. As long as your life total is at least one higher than your reserve.

number you're going to over Leach. What happens with petrified blood is when you are leeching, it gets to 50%, and petrified blood says you can't leech higher than that. So, it'll continue to try to leech as long as you have extra space available, which means you'll have basically what Slayer over Leach does. So, keep your Vitality level to whatever that number is, use Herald of Ice, of course, and then we have a setup here with an Enlightened 3, Temper Shield, Hatred, and Petrified Blood. Obviously, Temper Shield is very important to help us get to spell block cap. Our Blade Vortex links are very simple. You definitely want V Blade Vortex, and then we kind of have a superpowered Steel Skin here. This is not necessary the way I have it. I didn't really know what to do with my extra link, so I decided to make a giga Steel Skin. So, basically, our Steel Skin is about 50% uptime, so 2.23 seconds of the

buff, and then 2.33 seconds of cooldown. It can take up to 2600 damage. We are using more duration. We are using automation, so it's always going off. And then we have an enhance attached to it. One of the nice things about this build being Supreme ostentation is you can use any level gems. It doesn't matter ever the requirement is, and you can fit them in. So we have a hatred crit and hatred cold conversion Watcher eye. This is around 20 divines. Um, there's actually a surprising number of these. They're not that expensive 'cause hatred has fallen a bit out of favor this league. Now, if you want to make this build do more single target, here is the solution. I have four mediums that give... well, I have three mediums that give zero damage and one damage medium cluster. You can drop two, even three of these AOE mediums. I don't recommend dropping all three, but you can drop some of these to take more damage. Things like pressure points and precise retaliation are very strong, but I way

overdid the AOE because I enjoy it. If you want to get more single Target, this is the easiest way to do it. We take the forbidden flesh and Flame for hard of Destruction. This was only a handful of divines because no one is playing wi this league, so free damage for us and free AOE. This is a phenomenal set. We also use a mutable force. I don't have blood notch in because I didn't feel like it was worth it, but we get stunned a lot on this build because our health pool is low, so I enjoy IM mutable force in this. It felt worth the one point. Pretty much never feel getting stunned after this. So quick quickly talk about the ascendency. We have explode from profane Bloom, forbidden power for all that AOE scaling and damage for power charges, and then frigid wake and void Beacon. The iron flask when pressed will restore your ward to full. Now our Ward downtime is only about 1.2 seconds, so you might not even be quick enough to

press this, but I found that I never even really needed to reactively press it in order to get that fast Ward. You get a roll of tier one faster restoration on your gloves, and that is more than enough to get your ward cooled down to 1.2 seconds. All right, let's call it there. If you want to check this build out, the PO is down in the description. I am live just about every single day on Twitch, twitch.tv/aore. If you want to support me here on YouTube, you can like, comment, and subscribe down below. I appreciate each and every single one of you. Thank you for watching, and as always, take care. [Music]

Actually Tanky Cold Blade Vortex Occultist Mapper [PoE Settlers 3.25 Build Guide]

Actually Tanky Cold Blade Vortex Occultist Mapper [PoE Settlers 3.25 Build Guide]