In this guide, we will study the Vortex Cast on Frostbolt Saboteur build in Path of Exile 3.23.
Gear, Jewels & Flasks
This is a build that makes use of quite a few unique POE Items, most notably Heatshiver, The Annihilating Light, The Fourth Vow, and Ashes of the Stars.
They’re reasonably priced, and ashes are not really mandatory. It’s just way better than anything else, and we wouldn’t even recommend playing without it. Some of the unique jewels are valuable, too, but the build functions without them.
With Heatshiver and enough POE Currency, your damage against frozen enemies will double, which means you can easily do with your high damage and crit chance. Corrupt it for the local reservation cost reduction and socket your aura skills here.
With Annihilating Light, your damage will triple, but your elemental resistances will reduce at the same time. It’s a big issue for this build. But with good rare items, Purity of Elements aura, or Mageblood, this issue can be solved.
The build has quite a lot of armour, and with Divine Flesh, half of the elemental damage is taken as chaos damage.
The Fourth Vow chest makes armor apply to chaos hit damage, improving your survivability.
Skin of the Lords as the pure glass cannon option to melt bosses even faster. However, for regular mapping, this gear is not good enough.
Mageblood is especially good here, as it allows you to effortlessly cap all the resistances and gain tons of armour from flasks.
Ashes of the Stars: the extra gem level and quality will significantly improve your damage.
You’re using quite a few gems with an alternate quality that is of the essence to make this build perform as it should. Therefore, you’d better buy POE Currency in advance.
It’s a low life build that needs a lot of Elemental and Chaos Resistances, making Lori’s Lantern a good pick for a ring. Damaging hits being unlucky is also a uniquely good and rare defensive layer.
Immutable Force increases stun and block recovery, making it expire instantly. Combine it with Energy Shield Mastery to base your stun threshold on ES rather than life.
Bloodnotch recoups up to 60% of damage taken from stunning hits, which is most of them. It works great with Immutable Force.
With Xibaqua’s Glorious Vanity, you can transform your Mind Over Matter into Divine Flesh. It’s a must have with The Fourth Vow, but requires you to cap your chaos resistance.
There are a good amount of passives you can go for from a pair of Forbidden Jewels. Polymath seems like the best option for more damage and life recovery. Heartstopper, Unstable Infusion, Deadly Infusion, Mistwalker, Opportunistic, and Ambush and Assassinate are all valuable, too.
Extra armour from Determination, elemental damage penetration from Zealotry and Hatred, or extra crit chance from Hatred are the best mods to look for on a Watcher’s Eye.
The staff reduces your elemental resistances, so be sure to have a lot of them on your rare gear. You will also need 80% chaos resistance due to the Divine Flesh and body armour combo. Armour is important, too. For more damage, look for crit modifiers and Elemental Penetration. To benefit from the Explosives Expert, you should know how to apply all 3 base Elemental Ailments. Brittle can be acquired from boots, exposure gloves, and Scorching Ray.
Regular boots with resistances, movement speed, and maximum life will be enough. It can also be a source of Elemental Ailments Avoidance, which, combined with jewels or passives, may result in a 100% chance to avoid shock, ignite, or freeze. A 100% chance to avoid freeze can be crafted here. You should upgrade them with Eldrich Implicits for Brittle Ground and cooldown recovery rate.
You should choose the gloves that grant you primarily maximum life and resistances. For Eldrich Implicit, seek Unnerve and Cold Exposure on hit.
On a belt, again seek resistances and maximum life with strength. As the Annihilating Light makes it harder to cap them at 75%, you should focus on elemental resistances.
On a ring, you should get tons of resistances and life. You can also craft the shock on focus suffix for a big damage boost with Explosives Expert passive. It’s hard to inflict shock otherwise.
Abyss Eye Jewels can grant you up to a 50% chance to avoid being shocked or ignited, but as always prioritize maximum life, resistances, and attributes if you still lack them. Regular Jewels can increase your crit chance, crit damage, or cold damage.
For Large Cluster Jewel, if you can shock, get Sadist for a massive elemental damage boost. Prismatic Heart is fine for the extra elemental resistances. For other notables, select Inspired Oppression, Widespread Destruction, or Doryani’s Lesson. We have used two of such Jewels.
Enduring Composure from a small cluster jewel generates endurance charges after receiving a hit. These are good to mitigate physical damage and to improve Immortal Call.
Bottled Faith is a good flask for most crit builds. It creates a consecrated ground that also improves your DPS, life regeneration, and reduces curse effect on you.
For other flasks, get a Granite Flask, Quicksilver, and Basalt Flask. These should increase your armour, movement speed, and reduce curse effect on you.
A life flask that stops bleeding is also quite useful. If you have the Mageblood, get a Bismuth Flask for resistances or a Diamond Flask for crit.
Skill Gems & Sockets
Vortex will be cast on your Frostbolt projectiles. It deals high initial damage, which we will focus on. The Divergent one is the best. It has an increased cooldown recovery rate at the cost of duration, which we don’t need, anyway. Use it after releasing Frostbolts. Link it with Empower, Hypothermia, Increased Critical Damage, Concentrated Effect, and Added Cold Damage support gems.
Frostbolt is a piercing projectile that deals cold damage. You can detonate it by casting Vortex. Divergent quality is mandatory. It slows down projectiles so that you can stack many of them over the enemy.
Use Anomalous Scorching Ray to deal low damage and channel Frostbolts. It also applies a powerful fire exposure. It’s good, as half of the damage dealt to Frozen enemies as fire damage with Heatshiver. Link it with Cast while Channeling, Power Charge on Critical, Enhance, and Greater Multiple Projectile support gems.
If you use Zealotry, the Critical Strike Chance for spells and spell damage can be increased. Hits against unique enemies may create consecrated ground.
Determination adds an increases armor to mitigate physical hit damage.
Petrified Blood is good on low life builds such as this one. It’s used to shift a portion of incoming hit damage to be taken as DOT. It’s good with Recoup and Regeneration.
Defiance Banner increases armour and evasion. Nearby enemies have reduced Critical Strike chance.
Elemental Weakness lowers all Elemental resistances, resulting in more DPS. You’re dealing cold and fire damage due to the Heatshiver.
You have a higher chance of landing a critical hit on an enemy that has Assassin’s Mark on them. Such crits have increased crit multiplier.
Immortal Call consumes endurance charges to significantly lower physical and elemental damage taken.
Most hits will stun the character due to the low stun threshold. It will trigger these spells linked to the Cast when Stun support if that happens.
Hatred simply grants you more cold damage. Hatred is a temporary aura that reserves no Mana with Divine Blessing support linked to it. With the Eldrich Battery Keystone, you can afford to cast it.
Flame Dash has a simple mobility spell to avoid damage and move faster. You can swap it for Vaal Righteous Fire. It grants you more spell damage.
Vitality grants some flat life regeneration.
Bandits, Pantheon & Passive Tree
Kill all three Bandits to receive two passive skill points. You could also consider helping Alira for +20% to Global Critical Strike multiplier and +15% to all elemental resistances.
Soul of Solaris is what we would recommend. It improves your durability during one-on-one fights, which is this build’s main purpose.
Soul of Shakari is great if you struggle with poison damage. If you’re not, get Soul of Gruol for physical damage reduction per hit taken recently or Soul of Garoan for less effective shock on you.
On the passive skill tree, get Critical Strike nodes, maximum life, elemental damage, spell and area damage with more area of effect.
Get the two reservation clusters to fit all the auras. Allocate Eldrich Battery and Mind Over Matter Keystone. The ladder will be transformed into Divine flesh.
For masteries, get 50 extra life as Life Mastery, 30% increased defenses as Staff Mastery, 10% of armor applies to chaos damage taken as Armor and Energy Shield Mastery, 10% increased effect of auras on you as Reservation Mastery, stun threshold is based on 60% of ES instead of life as ES Mastery, 25% extra crit multiplier against bosses as Critical Mastery, and 10% of leech is instant as Leech Mastery.
With a Polymath from Forbidden Jewels, you should also take Caster Mastery for 25% more spell damage if you’ve been stunned while channeling as Caster Mastery and Elemental Mastery to avoid Elemental Ailments from critical strikes against you.