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Path of Exile 3.27 has been out for over a month, and major content updates have ceased. Most players have likely switched to PoE 2, and those still playing PoE 1 are likely casual players.

Therefore, Cold DoT Elementalist build recommended today is perfect for casual players. It requires minimal investment, involves few actions, and is incredibly versatile.

Cold DoT Elementalist Advantages And Disadvantages

Cold DoT Elementalist is a very versatile build, with no weaknesses in farming or boss battles. This build primarily relies on DoT damage, so even if the weapon's damage is low, the impact is minimal.

This build can apply slowing and other negative effects to monsters, and although its health is relatively low, you can compensate by stacking energy shields, making it actually quite tanky. Additionally, this build can generate pulses periodically, enabling automatic farming.

However, as a DoT build, DoT damage has a cap, so even if you invest heavily in PoE Currency to acquire top-tier gear, your burst damage won't surpass that of burst builds. When facing bosses, you need to cast spells to stack DoTs, and fights against bosses with high Cold resistance can be lengthy.

Core Gameplay

This build's damage doesn't come from any single skill, but rather from multiple layers of Cold Damage over Time and large-area Chill crowd control. You simply need to keep moving, and mobs will die around you.

Therefore, your damage primarily comes from these skills:

• Creeping Frost
• Vortex
• Vaal Cold Snap

Once the ice field is established, players hardly need to cast spells frequently; simply keep moving, and monsters will be slowed, frozen, and naturally fall under the CTD damage. The key to achieving this is Vaal Cold Snap, which inflicts Cold DoTs and Chills on enemies within a certain area.

Building upon this, since enemies are almost constantly chilled or severely slowed, and DoT skills can be applied from a distance, you rarely need to engage in close-range combat. This means that even if your armor and elemental resistances aren't at their maximum, you can achieve high safety through control, distance, and timing.

However, when facing elite monsters or bosses, relying solely on Vaal Cold Snap is insufficient. You need to actively apply curses like Frostbite and sequentially apply Vortex, Creeping Frost, and Cold Snap to keep the target constantly in multiple frost zones. You need to amplify existing damage over time, not change your damage output.

Cold DoT Elementalist Gear

This build is playable regardless of your currency investment, and approximately 20 POE Divine Orbs are needed to make it run smoothly.

This build doesn't rely on specific gear, so you need to understand which affixes you need. Once you understand your damage and defense sources, you can then apply affixes to your gear yourself.

Weapons

• Recommended: Tulborn (Foulborn Version with +4 Cold Spell Skills)

For weapons, focus on the affixes Cold Damage over Time Multiplier and +Cold Skill Gems. The weapon type itself is irrelevant; as long as it contains these affixes, it's usable for a long time until you find something better.

Armor

• Recommended: Daresso's Courage, Rime Gaze

You don't need to deliberately stack resistances. What you need is health or energy shields to provide stable support for sustained combat and map movement. If your support gems require you to maintain low health, then stack more energy shields.

Resistances, status ailment immunity, and movement speed take priority over armor or evasion stats. Since enemies are often in a chilled state, you rarely suffer concentrated melee attacks, so gear should prioritize increasing survivability rather than tanking enemy damage.

Jewelry

• Recommended: Ashes of the Stars, The Hungry Loop, Triumvirate Authority.

For necklaces, rings, and belts, their primary function is to supplement resistances, provide attribute requirements, and further enhance Cold DoTs. If they can further increase DoT damage or skill level, it will significantly enhance overall output, but these are not necessary conditions for building a full set.

Cold DoT Elementalist Skills

• Chest Armor: Creeping Frost, Cruelty, Hypothermia, Swift Affliction, Elemental Focus, Controlled Destruction
• Helmet: Vortex, Cruelty, Controlled Destruction, Bonechill
• Gloves: Arctic Armour, Tempest Shield, Summon Stone Golem of Hordes, Malevolence
• Boots: Summon Lightning Golem, Summon Flame Golem, Summon Stone Golem, Summon Chaos Golem
• Ring 1: Animate Guardian, Elemental Weakness
• Ring 2: Vaal Cold Snap
• Main Hand Weapon: Shield Charge, Vaal Righteous Fire, Frostbite
• Off-Hand Weapon: Vitality, Arrogance, Flesh and Stone

Your DoT output primarily consists of Creeping Frost, Cold Snap, and Vortex. Creeping Frost creates a frozen path, while Cold Snap rapidly generates a Cold DoT area around you. Vortex unleashes a burst of energy, primarily used when enemies approach.

These three skills are sufficient for clearing maps and farming bosses. Other skills are mainly for triggering passive skill buffs, further enhancing your DoT.

Skills like Golem and Animate Guardian aren't direct sources of damage; they provide damage reduction, auras, or additional debuffs, making Frost DoTs last longer and have more consistent coverage. Especially in long boss fights, the indirect benefits of this type of gear are often more significant than simply stacking damage.

Passive Skill Tree Keystones

• Pain Attunement: Increases spell damage at low life.
• Hex Master: Reduces Curses damage, but grants unlimited damage over time.
• Eternal Youth: Reduces life regeneration efficiency and leech, allowing life to regenerate like an Eternal Youth.
• Zealot's Oath: Life regeneration effect can be applied to ES.

Masteries

• Cold Mastery (2)
• Elemental Mastery (1)
• Energy Shield Mastery (1)
• Damage Over Time Mastery (1)
• Reservation Mastery (1)
• Minion Offence Mastery (1)

Cold DoT Elementalist is very easy to play and can satisfy almost all endgame content. The process of clearing out mobs is also very smooth. You can try to optimize this build yourself.

Before the full release of PoE 3.27 Keepers of the Flame content, many players anticipated significant balance changes due to comments made by the game director in a previous patch Q&A session. However, the official patch notes were disappointing in terms of balance adjustments.

Unexpectedly, the biggest impact of PoE 3.27's meta gameplay wasn't on balance changes, but rather on the addition of hundreds of Foulborn unique items. Now that the official focus is primarily on POE 2, there shouldn't be any new Foulborn unique items in this league. So, will Foulborn unique items be integrated into the core gameplay?

What Are Foulborn Unique Items?

Foulborn unique items are not new unique items, and they are unique items that already existed in the game, whose one or more affixes have been replaced by Foulborn affix.

Because Foulborn affixes are generally stronger than regular affixes, these Foulborn Unique items become unique and powerful enough in many situations to form an entire build idea around them.

The Red Drea (Foulborn)

Foulborn unique items were used in many builds in Patch 3.27. The Red Drea (Foulborn) was the most frequently used Foulborn unique item in both softcore and hardcore trade leagues in patch 3.27. In softcore, 8% of level 95-100 characters used it, while in hardcore, this figure rose to 11%.

Its most common Foulborn variant replaces its Endurance Charge chance affix with Fire Resistance or All Elemental Resistances talent allocated nodes based on Jewel range, providing an increase in maximum life. This provides a much-needed boost to life-based builds, allowing them to compete with the energy shield configuration.

The Red Drea (Foulborn) is used by approximately 40% of Chieftains, 17% of Juggernauts, and 20% of Gladiators, with Elementalists also making significant use of it.

The effectiveness of a Jewel is closely related to its position in the jewel socket on the Passive Skill Tree. The classes with 3 jewel sockets have particularly strong effects.

The sockets outside Marauder's starting point have the greatest potential. By using Tattoos to replace Strength path talent points with "+6% Fire Resistance" nodes, and combining them with The Red Drea (Foulborn), each small node provides an additional 4% maximum life increase. This allows for a total of approximately 55% additional maximum life increase using this unique item.

Templar slots outside the starting point offer slightly less potential, providing approximately a 30% increase to maximum life. Ranger slots south of the starting point offer around a 20% increase to maximum life.

This allows life builds in this area to either become more durable due to the significant increase in life or save talent points invested in damage, thus better tackling endgame content.

Hand Of Thought And Motion (Foulborn)

Foulborn unique items even impacted the PoE 3.27 meta. Hand of Thought and Motion (Foulborn) boasts a powerful affix that increases accuracy rating by 5% for every 25 points of Intelligence.

It fundamentally solves the scaling accuracy problem inherent in past accuracy-stacking builds. Previously, these builds heavily relied on Precursor's Emblem Rings, but the improvements they provided were limited and had limitations.

Now, Hand of Thought and Motion (Foulborn) allows you to scale accuracy simply by stacking Intelligence. This is incredibly powerful because Intelligence stacking has been strong in recent leagues, and it also provides a significant amount of energy shield.

Combined with Shaper's Touch Crusader Gloves' boost to energy shield and accuracy, Stormrider Boots' base Lightning damage, and Juggernaut's Undeniable Ascendancy node's massive attack speed, you can create an extremely powerful build, potentially the strongest build of the league. But if Foulborn items don't carry over to the next league, this strongest build will only be available in Patch 3.27.

Doedre's Scorn (Foulborn)

Foulborn affix of Doedre's Scorn indicates that the socketed gem is supported by a level 30 Impending Doom. This provides approximately 6000 to 9000 flat Chaos damage. Players can equip it at level 39.

A normal level 4 Impending Doom Support Gem only provides 175 to 263 flat Chaos damage at level 38. This means that at the corresponding level, Doedre's Scorn (Foulborn) version can deal approximately 34 times the damage.

It allows players to quickly complete campaigns and even one-shot campaign bosses. Its ingenious design lies in the fact that in the endgame, it is surpassed by the highly sought-after Forbidden Shako Helmet.

However, the latter is extremely rare or it requires a vast amount of valuable PoE Currency. So Doedre's Scorn (Foulborn) will give players the freedom of choice if it could be in core game. You can choose to use it from start to finish or simply as a fast leveling tool.

Other Noteworthy Foulborn Unique Items

Berek's Respite (Foulborn)

Berek's Respite provides a new way to obtain the explode affix for various builds, especially when combined with Elementalist's Ailments transformation, creating interesting explosion chains.

Esh's Mirror (Foulborn)

Provides a relatively easy way to obtain damage reflect immunity, used by approximately 2% of characters above level 95, primarily in Detonate Dead builds.

Kaom's Spirit (Foulborn)

Kaom's Spirit (Foulborn) is very useful for mana stacking builds, and even more so when you use two. It provides immunity to curses, a large number of attributes, mana regeneration, and a flat mana of up to 200.

Will Foulborn Unique Items Be In The Core Game?

Foulborn Unique items will probably be added to the core game in some form. This is because Breach rework is almost certainly going to be included in core content and won't just appear in this league, and this mechanic requires unique rewards.

The hundreds of newly added Foulborn Uniques items have enormous potential, much like Replica Uniques. Many of them may remain dormant across multiple leagues, but should specific balance changes occur elsewhere, one or two of them could become key to a meta, enabling new builds.

Even if some of Foulborn items clearly require balance tweaks, they provide players with more options and more playable toys, which is a good thing in Path of Exile.

As the saying goes, everyone has their specialty, and this applies to Path of Exile as well: different classes specialize in different powers and weapons, and the main functions of available builds also differ.

Unlike the classes, whose basic attributes are fixed, the builds themselves, as craftable creations, are entirely up to you. Whether dealing with bosses, developing new dungeons, or farming PoE currency, each build's fate is sealed when it's crafted.

Of course, with the updates to various mechanics in 3.27 league, your strategy for crafting builds should also be adjusted. To save you time, this guide will directly introduce how to craft Death's Oath Occultist Build, suitable for farming resources.

Death's Oath Occultist Build Overview

In fact, this isn't a completely new build originating from Keepers league; it appeared in earlier leagues, but 3.27 gave it another chance to showcase its power.

As the name suggests, this build revolves around Witch Ascendancy class Occultist and the unique Astral Plate of Death's Oath.

The Occultist specializes in cold, chaos damage, and curses. And Death's Oath, when equipped, grants Death Aura effect. This effect deals continuous chaos damage to enemies within a certain range and inflicts chaos damage on yourself when you kill an enemy.

As a key element of the build, Death's Oath's advantage lies in its easy availability at the start of the season, allowing you to farm currency or XP early on through its effective health, damage reduction, and wide-area explosion.

However, as the league progresses, this build becomes less effective due to its relatively low single-target damage, requiring you to adjust your build strategy.

How To Craft This Build?

Before you can unlock Occultist class for crafting this build, we recommend using Chaosslinger build as a transition, which also focuses on chaos damage output, to complete early battles, accumulate resources, and level up.

This transitional build is centered around Spellslinger, combined with other chaos damage-dealing skills to quickly farm XP. Of course, if you have a more suitable Occultist leveling build, you can play at your own pace.

Next, use your earned currency to exchange for some basic gear, such as shields or rings that increase damage, but more importantly, obtain at least two Voidstones.

Socketing these items into Atlas of Worlds will enhance the base map's tier, up to Tier 16. This will give you a chance to obtain more and rarer loot when clearing the map later. The available Voidstone types and their corresponding enemies are:

• Ceremonial Voidstone - Drops from The Maven
• Decayed Voidstone - Drops from Uber Elder
• Grasping Voidstone - Drops from The Eater of Worlds
• Omniscient Voidstone - Drops from The Searing Exarch

Next, use these buffs to wreak havoc within your capabilities! Continue until you've earned enough Divine Orbs. Then, try to acquire Cluster jewels to expand your talent tree and activate more passive nodes.

Based on this, combined with your existing Death's Oath and Occultist, the basic build and the resources to further optimize it are complete.

Recommended Gear

When crafting this build, aside from Death's Oath as chest armor, most gear choices are not fixed. Just ensure the rarity is at least rare and meets your attribute requirements. However, for the helmet and amulet, we recommend the following:

Helmet - Heretic's Veil:

• Adds +2 to the level of socketed cursed gems.
• Socketed gems gain a level 22 Blasphemy bonus.
• Socketed cursed gem retention efficiency increased by 30%, dodge and energy shield increased by 90-110%, and maximum energy shield value increased by 40-50.

Amulet - Impresence (Chaos):

• All attributes are increased.
• Damage over time increased by 30-40%.
• Adds extra chaos damage.
• Maximum health increased by 50-70.
• Chaos resistance increased by 17-23%.

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How To Obtain Enough Divine Orbs?

There are many ways to obtain this currency, but we recommend Heist and Delirium. Heist's advantage lies in its optimization in 3.27 league; rogues' skills will upgrade along with their chosen jobs, accelerating your reward farming.

Since the enemies in Heist are not dangerous, you can easily complete it even in the early stages of the season when your character's damage output is insufficient. If you want to improve efficiency, you can equip items that increase movement speed.

To maximize your Delirium currency earnings in League 3.27, you need to add Delirium orbs to the relevant maps to increase the level of Delirium enemies encountered and the final reward. Currently available orbs include:

• Abyssal Delirium Orb
• Armoursmith's Delirium Orb
• Blacksmith's Delirium Orb
• Blighted Delirium Orb
• Cartographer's Delirium Orb
• Diviner's Delirium Orb
• Fine Delirium Orb
• Foreboding Delirium Orb
• Fossilised Delirium Orb
• Fragmented Delirium Orb
• Jeweller's Delirium Orb
• Singular Delirium Orb
• Skittering Delirium Orb
• Thaumaturge's Delirium Orb
• Timeless Delirium Orb
• Whispering Delirium Orb

How Effective Is This Build In Combat?

If you're familiar with PoE player community, you'll know that Death's Oath Occultist Build is often considered a chaotic version of Righteous Fire build, which inevitably results in a very slow combat pace.

But don't worry, with the right gear selection, you can ultimately gain increased chaos damage and damage over time, and further enhance your build's defense by stacking chaos resistance.

More importantly, besides direct damage output, Occultist class allows you to curse enemies, slowing their movement speed and reducing their damage output, thus ensuring you survive longer to the end.

That concludes this introduction. Hopefully, it will help you delve deeper into 3.27 league!