How To Build The Best Melee League Starter In POE 3.25 On Extremely Low Budget? – Ice Crash Of Cadence Slayer

Hello melee lovers, in Path of Exile 3.25, melee skills are finally getting buffs! I think we can have a great time in the next 3 months.

With this in mind, I want to share a League Starter build for melee players here, which is Crit Ice Crash of Cadence Slayer. It only costs a tiny amount of POE Currency and brings you a great endgame experience. Without further ado, let’s take a deep look at this build.

Main Skill

Ice Crash of Cadence is a melee skill that converts 100% of its physical damage into cold damage. It requires Dual One Handed Melee Weapons to use, and you have to alternate weapons every time you attack. You deal more damage with Main Hand Weapon, but AoE with Off Hand Weapon is greater.

Gameplay

This build is a Frenzy & Endurance Charges Stacker. The idea is to scale max Frenzy Charges, then make our max Endurance Charges the same as our max Frenzy Charges by taking Slayer’s Masterful Form.

Finally, use Ralakesh’s Impatience to get a permanent max Charges, giving us a lot of damage, attack speed, crit, and defense bonuses. This allows for a tanky melee build with high damage, great clear, and solid defense.

Pros And Cons

If I had to say pros for this build, I think it’s fun to freeze and chill enemies, and it’s also a good defensive layer for this build. And as I said before, you only need to buy POE Currency with so small amount to have a good game experience.

But the cons are also obvious. This is a melee build, so obviously you are forced to stay near the enemy. And it requires a lot of active button presses because we use 3 Warcries, so this play style is not suitable for everyone.

Offense & Defense

Ice Crash of Cadence has been greatly buffed in POE 3.25. Now we get 1% attack damage per point of Rage, so the upgrade process will be relatively smooth. In addition, I will use the new Vengeful Cry, which can provide Rage and prevent Rage from draining. Hopefully, this will help our build.

As for defense, besides the aforementioned, the final version of this build also has Block, Fortification, Spell Suppression and about 70% Chaos Resistance.

Gear Setup

For this build, we have 3 sets of gear, for early game, mid game and end game.

Early Game

We want to clear Red Maps with only early game gear, so I chose to make my weapons with Shrieking Essence of Contempt. Among them, the most important mods are to increase Physical Damage, Attack Speed and Crit Chance. Essence of Contempt can guarantee flat physical damage, so once you hit 2 of these 3 mods, you can make the rest of the mods.

I must remind you that Accuracy is scarce, so try to get it on your gear. In addition, Attack Speed  and Elemental Damage with Attacks are also good damage mods. The rest is just to cap your resistances and get the desired stats.

Mid Game

The mid game set isn’t drastically different, mostly just upgrading your weapons and grabbing Heatshiver. Heatshiver costs 40 to 50 Chaos Orbs, but it’s a great upgrade that boosts damage by a large margin. You can roll your Eldritch Implicit on other gear to deal more damage.

If you just want to get comfortable mapping, get some Divine Orbs and move on to the next build, I think you can stop here. You’ll still have plenty of DPS, and will be able to get to around 200 to 300k with just 5-Link and 3 Auras.

End Game

The end game set is for those who want to stick it out to the end and take on some of the hardest content of the game. Ralakesh’s Impatience is kept for the endgame version because it’s expensive. However, it’s the build-defining item and is definitely worth it. Once you have it, you can unspec Sword Mastery, which gives you a chance to hit Frenzy Charge when hitting unique enemies.

We have Spell Suppression on our Body Armour and Gloves. Combined with some passive points on the tree, we can get close to 100% Spell Suppression. Assuming you have OCD and you really want to reach 100%, you can roll it and act as Eldritch Implicit for your Gloves.

Gem Setup

I want to quickly cover Gem Setup. Everything about Gem Setup is self-explanatory, but I want to talk about Warcries in particular.

We use 3 Warcries in this build, but I only listed 2 here. The other one is a new gem that has not been added to PoB yet, Vengeful Cry. It grants Rage and prevents Rage loss. So, I think it should be good for our build.

You can also link Seismic Cry to Autoexertion, since we don’t care about the buff, we just want the attacks we apply to have more range.

Remember that Autoexertion reserves 15% of your mana, so you have to grab Champion of the Cause or get Mana Reservation Efficiency from somewhere. However, Battlemage’s Cry and Vengeful Cry must be cast manually to gain the buff.

Skill Tree

Finally, let’s take a look at the skill tree for this build, so you can focus on it if you don’t know how to develop your passive tree.

Before you get Ralakesh’s Impatience, having Sword Mastery is useful to generate Frenzy Charge on unique bosses. After that, you can unspec this wheel.

In POE 3.25, many melee skills have had their mana costs doubled or even tripled. Ice Crash of Cadence is no exception, and its mana cost has been increased from 6 to 11, almost doubling.

Now, we have 2 rings with minus mana cost, but if you think that’s not enough, here’s a list of things you can do.

• Also Read: How To Get A Head Start In POE 3.25 Settlers Of Kalguur? – Try These 8 Top League Starter Builds

The easiest way is to get all your Jewelry to have minus mana cost. Since they are not very rare, it should be easy.

Another way is to use Inspiration Support, which will also increase our elemental damage and critical chance. Just be careful not to use too many Red Support Gems, or it will be hard to color your gem sockets, since Body Armour is based on Evasion.

You can try to get some reduced mana cost on the skill tree, for example, some passive skills near the starting area of Duelist. Also, Life Mastery “Skills cost Life instead of 15% of Mana Cost” is an option. You can use Ice Crash for all other skills except Ice Crash if you want.

Finally, if you don’t use Heatshiver, you can roll “Reduced Mana Cost of Attacks” Eldritch Implicit on your Rare Helmet.

That’s it for one of my League starter builds to start the game in POE 3.25, Ice Crash of Cadence Slayer. How do you think it performs? Do you have any better way to maximize its potential? Anyway, happy League start, Exiles!