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The Strongest Tank Build For POE 3.22 League Start! - Cold Dot Occultist

Aug 23, 2023

And what other build is better for POE 3.22 league start than my favorite tank build, Cold Dot Occultist? I’ve started the last four league games with that. So I can safely say this is one of the best starter builds around. So let’s see what we got in terms of damage.

Skill Itself

Abilities for this build include Creeping Frost, Vortex and Cold Snap. Vortex explodes around you, dealing cold damage to enemies and leaving behind a vortex. It deals cold damage to enemies. Creeping Frost fires an icy projectile that explodes on impact and starts dealing cold damage in the area.

POE 3.22: The Strongest Tank Build For League Start! - Cold Dot Occultist

Whereas Cold Snap will cause you to deal cold damage over time area in the target area, and the area will expand by itself. We’ll also be using a Vaal version of the ability to deal more damage and speed up our clearing through the map. Plus, when this skill kills an enemy, you get an extra Frenzy Charge.

Damage Increase

This build will use 3 curses to further increase our damage. Frostbite reduces an enemy's cold resistance, and Elemental Weakness further reduces this damage as well as punishment. If you haven’t used a Punishment curse before, it will kick in when the enemy’s health drops below 50%.

All these curses we will apply with one button, Arcanist Brand. Most of our damage comes from gem levels and passive trees, which is why this is a good build to start with.

POE: Blade Vortex and the Faster Projectiles Support

Defense

For defense, we use Grace Aura to increase dodge rating. This way, normal attacks or projectiles wo easily kill us from monsters. Since we use Grace Aura, we can use Ghost Dance Keystone. When we take a hit, we restore 3% of our evasion rating as an energy shield. 

Last league they nerfed Molten Shell, so benefit from this Guard skill now as before. You need to use double the amount of armor in your build, which is next to impossible with Occultist.

So from now on we will use Immortal Call as our guardian skill and cast it when taking damage. The build is very tanky, even if not sure. If you feel comfortable building without armor, you can spend POE Currency to add a damage Aura to your build.

Now we are almost untouchable by physical attacks. The only danger left for us is spell damage. But using spell suppression on gear and passive trees prevents half of spell damage when we take it.

POE: Vaal Immortal Call

Items Explanation

Because the league has just started, it is difficult for us to get any legendary items on the first day of the league. That’s why we have very basic POE Items on our list. There is only one item worth mentioning: Rime Gaze Unique Helmets. It’s not required, but it’s nice to have.

This is very cheap for the first day of the league, only needing 1-2 Chaos Orbs. It can give us high damage boots and a little survivability. You can easily get this item for a day or two, and it’s even cheaper after that.

Another important thing is that we don’t use life mods on our body armor. Because we got the new Life Mastery in the last league. If our body armor didn’t have a life mod, it would give us 15% of our max life.

POE: Rime Gaze Unique Helmets

Passive Tree

Early in the league, I recommend you start on the right side of the passive tree and work towards Elemental Focus Support and Entropy. You can get all life nodes you see. But you want to skip jewel socekts for now, you can only assign it if you have no other nodes to get.

This is for the early levels. If you already own Aura and would like to accommodate more of what you see in POB, you can select a reserved node here. We use this Occultist as our Ascendancy. Because this Ascendancy Synergy is really well with Cold Dot skill.

POE: Cold Dot Occultist Passive tree

This concludes this build guide. I still think Cold Dot Occultist is the best POE 3.22 league starter tank build so far, and we’ll be able to scale it up nicely later on. I hope you enjoyed this guide on Cold Dot Occultist builds. Exiles, see you in-game.

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