The Wintertide Brand was hard to build around. It had a complex set of mechanics, and it didn’t work the way you’d expect from Brand. With that, I’ll explain how it works and cover the pitfalls I ran into.

Brand is a skill that attaches to enemies and deals damage to them. When it does, it projects an Icy Sphere around the target. Do you think it would hurt monsters around it? It doesn’t, it just damages the target it’s on.

However, when Brand drops from an enemy, any monsters in the Sphere will get a Debuff called Wintertime End. This deals with the same damage as it did to the target. If the target circles overlap, it defaults to damage for one second. Therefore, only the strongest stack will cause the most damage to monsters.

If you want the skill to do anything like clear, you need to make it drop a lot. There are four possible ways this can happen:

• Overwrite one new Brand with another.
• The monster they attach it to dies.
• Pull it off with Brand Recoil.
• Use Mastery, make it jump to the new enemy.

Activates every 0.3 seconds and says the only way this ability feels good. If you use Mastery, the next thing to watch out for is the damage from WinStar Brand. It’s actually a Debuff that inflicts Cold damage over time. This means we do not classify it as hitting an enemy, so it has no damage effect. For example, Life On Here or Hexade support, it can not be more than a bonus trip as a DOT. But it can’t reflect to you, so you can run full LED Reflect Maps.

Despite AOE tag, the Debuff does not apply to area damage. So this Concentrative Effect doesn’t give you extra damage. But it will reduce Radius. Note also that flags equipped to support damage to spells only apply to hits. So the extra damage added in this way does nothing for the points. You also can’t Crit, so you further limit your Skating options.

Another advantage of this skill is that when it attaches to an enemy, it will be timed according to the skill’s Activation Frequency. Each tick adds a phase, and each phase causes Debuff to deal up to 20+ damage. By default, these phases have coverage of 20 and damage increased by 400%.

You also get a Lab Enchant, which adds 4 Max Stages and 480 more damage. This is by far the best damage Enchant. You can attach up to three Brands to an enemy, and they stack by default.

However, you only need to open the case twice with POE Currency to get the three Rubenbinder Keystones you need. But getting extra damage is a little trickier. Usually, it seems to activate every quarter of a second and expire two seconds after connecting. So by default you’ll only get Eight Stacks or 160+ damage.

So you need to increase the duration of the skill or increase Activation Frequency or a combination of both. You can increase it with Cast Speed or Brand Activation Frequency. And during the duration of our use of skill effects or Brand duration, we don’t need much time to achieve our goal.

Also note that this skill does not apply damage at Activation Frequency like other brands. So once you get past Max Stacks, you can add as many durations and gas velocities as you want. While these increases your total damage, it does absolutely nothing for your DPS. This means that the skill actually has a hard limit on what it can handle.

We should note that when the skill knocks down an enemy, Brand calculated POB’s damage. Stacks as a cruise will persist and be applied to the next target. Therefore, Brand Recoil is essential for doing high damage and worst things.

All you can do is recast them before they expire. This caused them to be overwritten with a new Brand from scratch. This does mean that you need to watch Brand Counter like a hawk.

You don’t panic too much. Because the skill upgrade is Chill, it will reduce the enemy’s action speed by 10%. If you have the right Non-damaging Ailment Effect increases. This slows your enemies to a poor crawl. You can probably still outrun them, even if they just bit off your leg.

You defend your legs against their attacks. Also, spells are much slower and Elemental Focus causes Brand not to cool down. Because the cold makes you feel super safe and is a really powerful free Defensive Lair.

While they look like they have a refrigerated section, they don’t. If you want the cold area bonus from Bone Chill, you have to apply for it with something. Plus, like Vortex, it actually complements the skill’s damage deficiencies nicely, and can also scale with spell damage. Because this also applies to skill effects.

In my opinion, the best mass effect is the normal one, which increases Chill damage over time. This skill is absolutely amazing. It can put most bosses to shame. So I’d definitely consider using it to balance the beginning of the problem. Once you hit the end game, boss, anything with cold resistance will take an age to kill. If you don’t mind slower, safer, smoother gameplay, you might really like this skill.

It’s really well designed in terms of maps and map bosses. But four minutes to kill Endless Hunger, and even five minutes to kill Elder let me down. So I wouldn’t use it again unless it gets a sizable buff. Hope these will help you on your way of exploration.