Avalanche Shaman Uber Aberroth kill Last Epoch [1.3.4]

Описание: Planner in the comments. 1.3 got a nice new toy for Avalanche and its not Spirit Xylem(although that staff is pretty good). Rather I think the best new update is Legends Entwined as I've come to the conclusion using Avalanche without Halvar's set is just a mistake and the ring can get a lot more skill levels for Avalanche from combining sets.

There is a major bug with the build though(as usual). Hollowed Branch states that you get 200% ward retention for 6 sec 'when you transform', this is the same as Shapeshifter buff in Druid which also states 'when you transform'. However, while shapeshifter activates when you go from Spriggan to Human form (which is a transformation right), Hollowed branch doesn't (it only works when you go from Human to Spriggan). Honestly, I'm sick of items/skills not working the way they should in this game...

Now when I was testing my old 1.1 builds against the Uber many of them simply did not measure up in terms of damage and I gave up on updating them. Avalanche shaman was one of these, but I still wanted an Uber viable shaman so I started thinking what other options are there for Shaman... Reflect was one new OP option but I didn't wanna do reflect as I think its kinda boring. Well then Shaman is also the totem mastery, Storm totem would've been a solid pick but there's just so many ways to scale storm totems(Tempest strike, storm crows, lightning dmg from shock chance, upheavel totem, thorn totems, warcry) that I started to get choice paralysis. What about other totems? I don't particularly like Thorn totems, Upheaval totems are better on Beastmaster and Claw/Tempest strike totems are garbage.

So with all this uncertainty I came back to Avalanche, was there really no way its damage could scale to Uber tier? I tried some more offensive upgrades and concluded that the only way would be if I could spam Avalanche with no mana issues and thats when it clicked. When I initially made my Avalanche build in 1.1 I had focused on getting mana regen and cost to a reasonable level for easy clearing which is definitely not the play in 1.3. So instead I completely reworked the build focusing on cooldown recovery to use/abuse the Spriggan mana battery and ignore all mana regen/mana spent gained as ward affixes to instead focus on DAMAGE and this really helped. Another key change was replacing the - mana cost skill nodes(which actually don't do much due to the high base mana cost of avalanche) with the overlooked node Snow storm which is normally looks like its not worth the investment of 5 skill points but every bit of damage counts and its feasible to get thanks to the skill levels from hollowed branch and legends entwined. All this pushed me into the range of Uber viable damage.

Now there's 2 core concepts of the build from when I initially made it to explain the skill choices:

1. Avalanche has a huge weakness in that an enemy can easily walk out of its range wasting a ton of damage (this is mostly relevant on tanky/boss enemies). The way this build mitigates this is STUN, freeze could also technically help but seems much more difficult to proc. Storm stacks which are generated from avalanche and maintained by Friends of the tempest give like 300% stun chance(and freeze rate) and Maelstrom stacks which are typically around 20-30 should be giving atleast 600% stun chance. Note that this is useless for Uberroth since that shitty idiot has an overtuned amount of health and can't get stunned(and constantly annoyingly jumps/charges out of Avalanches).

2. There is a neat synergy between Hollowed branch, Wall of Nothing and stacking Maelstrom's with the Shaman passive Swirling Maelstrom as it gives 20 endurance threshold per stack of maelstrom. This means when you stack maelstrom's you are getting both ward threshold(from wall of nothing's endurance-ward threshold) as well as ward generation from Hollowed Branch. Now, the endurance threshold is really good defensively and the ward threshold is nice but honestly the ward generation is really pathetic. EHG should seriously buff the mod on the staff to atleast 7-10 ward per second(per maelstrom). Despite this, the defenses are solid enough and I think Hollowed branch is still the best staff option as its got good base damage and 2 skill levels(Spirit Xylem is a primordial unique and can't use it with Halvar's set). However, body armor slot can be heavily contested as both Titan heart and Pale Ox can be pretty viable here (I have not tested these as I'm too lazy and damage was honestly the bigger problem than defenses, also salty bout the Hollowed branch bug).

Now since i had mostly been finetuning the build for single target, I thought it would require many changes to be good for clearing. But I was wrong, Halvar's set essentially carries the clear and it becomes kind of an Autobomber playstyle. The key to mana management is being very stingy in manual Avalanche casts only keeping it for champs/nemesis/beasts or really large groups.