Velyna's Ice Trap Saboteur Build Guide (PoE Necropolis 3.24)

Introduction

Cruise through the acts into endgame quickly and easily with Ice Trap! For most of PoE’s history traps have been known as a strong leaguestarter, not requiring expensive uniques or heavy crafting to kill bosses early, and this remains true today. Often overlooked despite the built-in defense layer of freeze/chill, our gear remains cheap. Just toss a couple salvos near a pack and move on, the traps have big AoE and hit hard. We also don’t overlook defense like some trappers out there.

Below is a video guide I made for Youtube. This is a good place to start and goes over gearing as well as Pros/Cons. The PoB’s and guide may be more current so make sure to check!

Overview

Pros

✔️ Power Curve: Traps are a historically cheap starter with fantastic early uniques.

✔️ Fantastic Leaguestarter: The acts and early mapping are essentially free with this build. When it’s time to upgrade, the next pieces are cheap as well.

✔️ Bossing: I killed 6/7 Ubers, some of them with a level 16 Ice Trap gem.

Cons

❌ Defense: Although tankier than many trap builds, the defenses aren’t fully together until you get Determination running.

❌ Playstyle: Some people love it, and some hate it. Traps are a different feeling from attacking or casting directly, it’s more like playing Brands.

How Does it Play?

Ice Trap has big AoE and can be thrown into the center of packs, making it great for mapping. Throw a few traps and move on, anything that doesn’t die will be chilled/frozen for you to quickly finish. For bosses you can stack traps between phases, or during the fight whenever you get a chance. You can have over 20 traps out at a time for single-target damage.

Damage and Defensive Scaling

Ice Trap is a cold-based spell, so we want to stack gem levels and %spell or %cold mods. Cast speed can be used later, when you get Slavedriver's Hand. Since this is a crit build we love that as well, it can roll quite high on wand and shield. And finally we stack as much double damage chance as we can from Lethal Pride.

Defensively this trapper is fairly stacked, running Grace and Blind with capped spell suppression. Not only do we blind everything near us, we take 15% reduced damage from blinded enemies. There is also Ghost Dance with ~700ES. Late game, you can even fit in Determination.

Resources

Crafting and Upgrading for Beginners

PoE-Vault Gameplay Guide Hub

My Stream

PoE Vault Discord

Using this Guide

For build imports head to the PoB and Skills page.

Pobs and Skills

Gear

Ascend and Pantheon

The build is designed to work through stages, explained next to the imports. The same page contains leaguestart tips and gem setups for leaguestart and endgame.

The gear page contains info about the endgame setup, links to help you search for items, and sometimes crafting tips as well.

Leaguestart

• My Leaguestart PoBs go step-by-step to place your talents during act 1-10.

• There is also an act-by-act guide for which gems to use, you can find it on the Skills page.

After the campaign get your lightning/cold/fire resistances to 75 and get life on every slot. You can wear a blue ring if it has life and resistance, that’s fine. Also start shopping for uniques.

The leaguestart is meant to grind out immediate upgrades in early maps, some builds can push into reds immediately and some not. Grind where you are cozy while upgrading.

When you can easily farm low maps, start looking to buy items for the next stage.

Midrange/Transition

Some builds require a transition stage because levelling with our desired skill is not viable. If transitioning is required there will be a list of items to gather before doing it, and then you build towards the next PoB like always.

You will probably unlock most of your atlas while gearing out this stage, so don’t be afraid to spend on incremental upgrades. The faster you kill monsters the faster you make money.

Midrange will add more expensive uniques and any build-defining items. Usually not much crafting yet, but all rares should have the required life/resists/attributes plus good other mods. Flasks should also be decently rolled.

Endgame

Pushing past the final atlas bosses and into the post-campaign content, this is where you add those final millions of DPS to finish off the build.

Upgrades will become more expensive overall, and may require some basic to intermediate crafting. If a difficult craft is required, instructions will be given on the Gear page of the guide.

The cost of this stage is different for every build and changes with every patch. If a build is generally very cheap or very expensive I will mention it in the Pros/Cons section.