I will guide you through a fun build for the Occultist featuring a new Transfigured spell - the new Cold Snap of Power in Path of Exile 3.23. It is seemingly the ideal spell, with very high base damage and effectiveness of the added damage, a 10% base Critical Strike Chance, and very fast cast speed. The only downside here is that it has a cooldown, which you can bypass by sacrificing power charges.

How It Works

The Cold Snap itself can generate power charges on critical strikes, and if you pair this spell with the Power Charge on Critical Support at max quality, you will have over 100% chance to gain power charges when you hit with Critical Strike. With such a high base crit chance, it is trivial to reach the cap.

The Occultist is the best ascendancy for this skill. It grants you a lot of cold damage, access to additional curse, and boosts your damage and area of effect for each power charge you have. However, if you rely on energy charges to scale up your damage, spending energy charges to avoid cooldowns can be very contradictory.

The Cold Snap of Power removes the damage over time portion of the original spell but has much better hit damage. You will be easily able to Freeze or heavily Chill all enemies in the game. You will get insane damage bonuses for every additional power charge you obtain. The build is moderately tanky due to high evasion, immunity to Elemental Ailments, and a high amount of maximum life sourced from the Utula's Hunger. You can use Enfeeble as your third curse, heavily reducing the damage of affected enemies. The clear speed is great. Your cold snap can cover a wide area, shattering all enemies caught by it. The single-target damage is very good and scales with your investments very well.

You will need the fundamental unique items to start playing with this build. Rare items with basic defenses will be sufficient at first but should be upgraded as soon as your POE Currency allows.

Unique Items

Interacting with your charges demands unique items. The Utula's Hunger armor grants a lot of maximum life and significantly reduces the price of all other items since you don’t need maximum life. modifiers on them.

The unique Jewels are very powerful, even in the most basic version. Void Battery grants additional power charge, cast speed, Critical Strike Chance, and a lot of spell damage. You should use 2 of them. You might be tempted to use the Malachai's Loop shield for even more power charges, but it makes spending them very difficult.

The Badge of the Brotherhood is another important element of every power charge stacker. It raises your frenzy charge limit to be equal to power charges, which in this build means 36% more damage and cast speed. It also lowers the cooldown of your Frostblink.

To take full advantage of the maximum power charge, you can use Ralakesh’s Impatience Boots. These boots make it easier to gain Frenzy and Endurance charges, which are usually hard to generate. Charges must be generated in order to spend them.

Militant Faith converts nearby Keystone into Inner Conviction Keystone, which grants you more damage per power charge but disables generating frenzy charges, which you bypass with your boots. Ideally, it should give you useful bonuses for each devotion but doesn’t convert any of the picked up notables. Atula’s Hunger grants tons of Maximum life and lowers the burden on your other items. It should be corrupted for plus 2 levels for AOE gems and linked to tainted fusings. Doing so will make coloring with tainted chromatics much easier, as those ignore the attribute requirements of items.

Watcher's Eye is a very useful jewel for this build. You can use it to obtain Spell suppression, Life Leech, redirect a portion of physical damage to be taken as Elemental, or simply boost your damage with Hatred or Zealotry. The Heatshiver helmet can be corrupted to give additional power charge. It would grant you tons of damage, but you would need to get plenty of mana reservation efficiency on your Jewels or readjust your aura setup. It also doesn’t provide an energy shield, which would make sustaining casting harder.

Rare Items

On your rare items, you will need Spell suppression, Resistances, and Attributes to improve the damage. You should look for cast speed and Critical Strike multiplier. It is important to have a corrupted implicit on any of your Jewels that grant 2% reservation efficiency, so your Leech won’t stop once you fill 50% maximum life with Petrified Blood. You can get a lot of mana reservation efficiency, with Essence and Eldritch implicit. It should also provide Attributes or Resistance.

You can opt for an additional power charge, but you would probably need to readjust your auras, as it is hard to have both modifiers at once. At first, you can use a regular rare armor with bonuses to maximum life, spell suppression, energy shield, resistances, and Aura effect. When doing so, though, you will also need maximum life modifiers on all other rare items. It is easier to assemble, but you will miss roughly 1,000 maximum life and 2 bonus gem levels for your major spell.

Here, you should focus on defensive bonuses such as Resistance, Spell suppression, or Attributes. Although there is some damage to consider, the primary significance lies in the Eldritch implicits that apply Unnerve and Exposure on enemies. Energy shield recharge rate can significantly improve your sustain.

Your belt is another defensive item. Look for resistance and strength. You can craft a modifier that grants energy shield regeneration while a rare enemy is nearby to improve your sustain. You should use the Stygian Vice for the additional Abyss Jewel socket. Abyss Jewel is the best target to obtain the corrupted implicit that grants reservation efficiency. In addition to that, it should offer maximum life, Resistances, Attributes, and, if preferred, cast speed and Critical Strike multiplier. Jewels do not count as equipped items.

On your rare rings, you should get a lot of Resistances and Attributes to improve your damage. You should look for cast speed and crit multiplier. Make sure you can sustain the improved cast speed. Crafting mana cost reduction will also help in that regard. Make sure to concentrate on maximum life, missing resistances, and Critical Strike multiplier. It can also provide a bit of mana reservation efficiency, which will be essential if you want to use a helmet with an additional power charge.

Thanks to Cluster Jewel, you can get the Doryani's Lesson notable, which grants your life Leech. Pair it with 2 other useful modifiers depending on your budget. The Cold to the Core notable is effective in this build because you require numerous attributes for your gems. Taste of Hate is a great defensive flask that grants a decent amount of protection against physical and cold damage. Make sure to not include it when you balance your resistance, as the uptime on this flask is not perfect.

For your remaining flasks, I recommend using Quartz Flask with mana cost of skills reduction, Jade Flask with an evasion rating bonus, Quicksilver Flask with cast speed bonus, and a Life Flask with bleeding.

Skill Gems

Cold Snap of Power deals with high cold damage in the area. Cooldowns can be avoided by consuming power charges. It has the highest Critical Strike chance in the game and has a 30% chance to generate a power charge if you critically hit an enemy. You can use the Spell Cascade Support for better area coverage and potential overlaps if you aim correctly, but it is harder to land 3 hits than it used to be before the change.You can instead use the Bonechill Support to increase the damage of the single hit, making it easier to Freeze.

Grace grants a lot of Evasion rating and helps you improve it further. It also has very potent available modifiers on the Watcher's Eye Jewel. Purity of Elements grants immunity to all Elemental ailments and provides plenty of Elemental resistances, which saves you a lot of trouble gearing up.

If you have enough resistance, you can swap it to Zealotry Aura. Petrified Blood delays the damage from incoming hits, making them easier to manage. It makes your Leech more effective and enables the Pain Attunement Keystone for 30% more damage. Vitality grants life regeneration and allows you to gain Life Leech via Watcher’s Jewel. To decrease your mana reserve, you can keep it low. You should link your main auras with the Enlightened support to reduce their mana reservation.

You will also need a bit of reservation efficiency in your gear. The Herald of Ice inflicts cold damage on your spells and detonates it around foes that have been crushed. You could replace it with Arctic Armor to gain physical damage reduction while casting. The Arrogance causes linked auras to reserve life instead of mana. If you get at least 1% Global reservation efficiency, your Leech won’t stop upon filling the Petrified Blood limit. Zealotry improves your spell damage and critical strike chance. You can also use the Hatred Aura instead.

The major difference comes from the relevant modifiers on the Watcher’s Eye. The Divine Blessing changes your permanent Aura into a temporary buff that doesn’t reserve any mana but requires an upfront mana cost, which you can pay using the Energy Shield thanks to the Eldritch Battery Keystone.

Frostbite is your primary curse that lowers the cold resistance and makes your freeze last longer on the affected enemies. Enfeeble lowers the damage and accuracy of your enemies. You can also use Temporal Chains to slow them down and further improve the duration of your freeze. Elemental Weakness lowers all Elemental resistance of your foes. You can use the third curse thanks to the Whispers of Doom notable.

Arcanist Brand is a brand skill that can attach to an enemy and cast all linked spells in rapid succession. Thanks to this skill, you will apply all 3 curses with one button. To apply your curses, you can also use the new Bane of Condemnation, which has a higher cast speed but significantly lower area of effect.

The regular Bane is not a good choice, as it lowers the effectiveness of your curses. Frostblink is a very good movement skill for this build. It deals enough damage to kill weak enemies, and the cooldown is heavily reduced by your amulet. If you find yourself out of charges very often, you should consider using any skill with a fast hit rate. You might need this setup against bosses if your Critical Strike Chance is still low or if enemies can steal your power charges. It shouldn’t be necessary during regular gameplay. Steelskin creates a protective barrier that absorbs incoming damage and stops bleeding effects.

Bandits & Pantheon

You should kill all Bandits in Act 2 to be rewarded with 2 additional passive tree points by Eramir. For your major Pantheon power, you should pick the Soul of Arakaali, as it helps you with mitigating damage over time effects, which are the major weakness of Petrified Blood builds. As the minor Pantheon power, we recommend using the Soul of Shakari. It further reduces the damage you take from Poisons and Chaos Damage.

Passive Tree

You will need a very high Critical Strike Chance to reliably generate power charges, so you should use any other cold spell to level up. You can start scaling crit early, but the best choice would be any cold damage over time spell, for example, the regular Cold Snap. It doesn’t require crit and scales very well with just cold spell passives.

During the campaign on the passive tree, you will pick up 2 additional maximum power charges. The third one should be allocated by the anointment on your amulet. This build utilizes 3 very powerful Keystones:

• The Pain Attunement simply grants you 30% more spell damage as long as you use the Petrified Blood Aura.
• The Eldritch Battery changes your energy shield into a resource you can use to cast your spells. It will constantly recharge for 33% of its maximum value per second, which you can boost by increasing the recharge rate, adding Energy Shield leech, and simply increasing its maximum value.
• The Inner Conviction, comes from the Timeless Jewel. It grants you a lot of spell damage but disables the frenzy charge generation. Do not pick up the Hex master Keystone until you can convert it with this jewel. Cluster Jewel is the best source of Life Leech for Elemental spell builds.