I always enjoyed the frost bow and decided I’d try to build something that can use it. Keep in mind this is not meant to be the end all be all of builds, however, it’s a different take on what people are doing and in my opinion, a fairly entertaining option.
There were two routes that I initially started with, one using the Arcana traits, and one without. I wanted to take advantage of the fact that you can freely shift attunements with a conjured weapon without affecting your skills, however, because the might sigil doesn’t work with a conjured weapon, and because of lack of blast finishers, I decided to go away form this route. If someone wants to try, however, I’d love to see it!
The route I decided on goes like this:
Fire 10- Burning Precision
Air 30- Bolt to the Heart, Quick Glyphs, Inscription
Water 30 – Vital Striking, Piercing Shards, Cleansing Water(this can be whatever you want)
Skills:
Glyph of Elemental Harmony
Glyph of Storms
Glyph of Lesser Elementals
Conjure Frost Bow
Elite-Glyph o f Elementals
Weapon:
Up to you, however, I go with staff because you’ll already be at range and
staff allows you to use all the utility of staff between frost bow cool down.
Because the weapon stats do not carry over to the conjured weapon, I’d advise going for a staff with defensive or support stats.
Gear:
I always prefer to be a little tanky so I wear alternate between wearing a mix of Knights/Valkyrie/Berserker and a Power/Toughness/Vitality gear set with Berserker Trinkets. However, depending on you play style, you could certainly go more squishy.
In general I value precision and crit damage over power up to a certain point as power seems to scale very poorly. Critting also enables you to apply burning and apply vulnerability.
Game play:
The idea here is to stay in water because your frost bow’s 2 ability will keep vulnerability and you do increased damage to vulnerable targets. You have a vast amount of utility with the frost bow- healing, vulnerability, chill, confusion, stun/interrupt, and aoe. While the frost bow is not the heaviest of damage, it does provide you with lots of utility. Most of the damage comes from the bow’s 4s ability as well as the 2 ability. Using the bow’s 4 on top of a glyph of storm results in some pretty decent aoe damage. Furthermore, if you open up with meteor shower, glyph of storm(fire), into bow 4, you’ll do even more damage. Having shorter cool downs on glyph of storm, elemental, lesser elemental, as well as your heal is very handy and the ability to shift into any element to summon the desired elemental at will without affecting your skills is very useful.
Why no increased charges on frost bow?
I found that because the frost bow attacks slowly, even if you spam as much as you can, you only end up with maybe 5-8 seconds without a frost bow where you can utilize your staff or whatever weapon you choose. Putting in traits for extra charges is overkill and you end up “wasting” about 10-15 charges.
Why so little points in fire?
I found that the +20% damage to vulnerable targets in my gear (full exotics) in water is an overall higher dps gain than putting points into fire. I could put 10 points into water and 30 points into fire, however, I like the extra health, the passive healing, and the ability to heal my party if necessary.
I am trying to see if can figure out a build using the frost bow and arcana and will update if I manage to find one.
Thanks for your time!