Glacial Bolt Amazon Build Guide
The Glacial Bolt Amazon is a great Crossbow build for people who want a safe but also explosive and fast playstyle. You shoot Glacial Bolts, which spawn Ice Crystals that you explode for extra damage.
In order to explode your Glacial Bolts Ice Crystals in one hit, use Cast on Freeze to automate Freezing Mark and watch those explosion chains go.
You can use this build as soon as Level 31 and take it all the way to kill pinnacle bosses, with no need for any specific Unique Items to function. It's therefore Solo-Self Found friendly and has a high power-level on even entry-level gear.
Since you block enemy movements with the Ice Crystals and freeze them as well, this build is also deceptively good at surviving and never letting anything hit you.
This build guide has an extensive F.A.Q section, use it to educate yourself on the main skill interactions!
You do not need specific resistances on any item, just get the required total resistances amongst all gear combined. You need to cap your Resistances at 75% unless otherwise specified in the guide!
Path of Exile 2 is currently in early access, this means rapid development including frequent changes to builds as there are balance fixes and we learn more. Pin this page to be notified of any updates.
Skills
- Glacial Bolt shoots one Crossbow Projectile that then explodes and spawns Ice Crystals.
- If those Ice Crystals are destroyed, they explode in a Cold AoE, dealing attack damage and scaling with your weapon and any other attack- related damage stats. In order for this to work, you want to aim your Glacial Bolt on top of enemies!
- Try shooting and traversing in a way that doesn't leave you blocked by your own Ice Crystals. This is something you get used to over time but takes some planning.
- Make sure to have 20% Quality on your Glacial Bolt as soon as possible so you can reload 3 bolts instead of 1!
- Usually you have to explode Cast on Freeze's Ice Crystals manually with a second skill. However, this build opts for the more fun solution, with an automated Cast on Freeze + Freezing Mark.
- After aiming your Glacial Bolt at one or more enemies and freezing them, the energy generated by your Cast on Freeze results in Freezing Mark exploding on top of the enemies.
- This results in the Ice Crystals that just spawned to immediately explode. This results in explosion chains in combination with your Herald of Ice.
- Herald of Ice explodes frozen enemies, chaining with the Explosions from Freezing Mark for impressive clearspeed.
- Wind Dancer gives you more Evasion Rating. With some help from support Gems, it also knocks back enemies when hit by melee enemies.
- Ghost Dance recovers Energy Shield based on your Evasion Rating. This helps mitigate lots of small attacks.
- Precision is a support for one of your Auras. Do note that it takes 10 Spirit to use for a total of 160 with all the Auras. If you don't have that much, just cut it from your setup. 150 Spirit is a lot easier to get with Spirit on either your Body Armour or Amulet.
- Your Artillery Ballistas help clear out Icy Crystals against Freeze Immune or highly resistant enemies.
- Place at least one Ballista every screen or so, to make sure that outliers don't just get knocked back and never get the damage from exploding Ice Crystals.
- Artillery Ballista also helps on Bosses that have a buggy hitbox, for example Bosses that aren't actually "on the ground" and can't have your Icy Crystals spawn. This is hard to describe but you know when it happens.
- Make sure Eye of Winter is disabled for your Weapon-Set 1. This enables you to automatically swap to Weapon-Set 2 whenever using it.
- Use Effigy of Cruelty to apply Critical Weakness with your Eye of Winter
- This is important as it increases your Boss damage by approximately 60%.
- Thunderous Leap is only there to jump over our Icy Crystals when they block your way. It is especially good indoors.
- Place Lightning Rods into the ground and then target the enemy with Lightning Arrow.
- It's not the most comfortable leveling but unfortunately, the best we got.
- You can start this build at Level 31, once you get Artillery Ballista to easily destroy your Ice Crystals, since you don't have access to enough Spirit for Cast on Freeze early on.
- While Leveling, put down 2x Artillery Ballista's, shoot your Ice Crystals, move and repeat.
Use the <Prev and Next> arrows to navigate.
Gem Engraving Priority
Skill Rotation
- Use Hypothermia on the Boss spawn location.
- Put your Artillery Ballista down nearby.
- As the Boss is about to activate, use Eye of Winter to apply Critical Weakness with Effigy of Cruelty
- Fire Glacial Bolt on top of the enemy exactly. Make sure to not fire in front of him, otherwise the Ice Crystals might block the next shots and deny your explosions. If you screwed this up fire from another angle or reposition if necessary.
- Use your Glacial Bolt to explode enemies, with the help of your Freezing Mark-Setup.
- Place an Artillery Ballista sometimes to blow up remaining Ice Crystals or to kill enemies that are Freeze Immune.
- Be mindful where you aim, otherwise it makes your running awkward and you might get blocked.
- Use Thunderous Leap if you need to jump over Ice Crystals or terrain.
- Use a Sapphire with 2% mana gained on Kill to fix your Mana while clearing completely!
Amazon Ascendancy
Learn how to complete the Trial of the Sekhemas and Trial of Chaos to earn your first 2 Ascensions with our Ascension Guide!
- Critical Strike drastically increases your Critical Hit Chance, granted you scale Accuracy on your weapon and gear. To use this fully, stand near the enemy to not waste any of your Accuracy.
- Penetrate allows you to gain massive Added Physical Damage from your weapon. This is a boost in damage but also makes it easier to find a high-dps weapon.
- Stalking Panther drastically increases your Evasion Rating. Make sure to use an Energy Shield body armor to gain more defenses while avoiding this node's downside.
- Predatory Instinct adds the last bit of extra Boss damage to the build. This helps massively on extremely hard encounters like Pinnacle Bosses but also saves you time on Map Bosses and Rares.
Passives
Click the arrows to open the full tree in a new tab.
- For the attribute nodes take enough Intelligence and Dexterity to meet gear, skill gem and support gem requirements, then use the rest on Strength for more life.
- You can use your Gold at the Hooded one or Doryani to respec and change your Attributes if a new skill or gear upgrade leaves you unable to use your skills/items.
- Leveling Tree - During the campaign, you play Lightning Arrow + Lightning Rod. Early on, all you care about is %increased Attack & Elemental Damage, followed by some Accuracy & Attack Speed nodes.
- Respec the starting area into Accuracy once you have your first Ascendancy and get Critical Strike.
- Critical Hit Chance and Critical Damage Bonus aren't all that useful during campaign, but play a huge role later on.
- Use a Sapphire with 2% mana gained on Kill to fix your Mana while clearing completely!
- After entering Maps, your main priority is to get enough Spirit to use both Wind Dancer and Ghost Dance. To do this, you need +50 Spirit from either your Amulet or your Body Armour. Make sure that your Body Armour has enough Energy Shield to support this defensive setup.
- Your Boots, Gloves and Helmet all should have a healthy amount of Evasion Rating to support Stalking Panther. Do not get any Evasion on your Body Armour, focus on Energy Shield instead.
Stat Priorities
Offensive Scaling
- Increased Attack/Elemental Damage with Attacks.
- Increased Accuracy Rating
- Increased Attack Speed
- Increased Critical Hit Chance & Increased Critical Damage Bonus
- + to Projectile Levels but only once you're in late endgame, since it gives your Ice Crystals health, making it harder to explode them.
Defensive Scaling
- Sufficient +#% to Fire, Cold and Lightning Resistance to cap your Resistances.
- + to maximum Life
- Maximum Energy Shield.
- Evasion Rating.
- Ghost Dance & Wind Dancer
Since it doesn't matter where you get what Resistance or Attribute, the following priorities are made without them in mind. You should always keep them in mind when buying/crafting new items!
If you're struggling to survive, or want to learn more about damage and defenses in Path of Exile 2 check out these additional resources:
Gearing
- During the campaign, try to get life and Resistances on most of your Items. Upgrade your Bow constantly by either gambling or crafting and keep the Bows with the highest DPS.
- Since you respec to Crossbows at Level 31, make sure you already have a Weapon to boot once you make the swap. Upgrade constantly from there. It is normal to have a new weapon every 10 levels.
- Use Runes to solve Attribute problems until later.
- As you enter the Atlas of Worlds and begin mapping, your first goal is to cap your resistances and meet Attribute requirements. You want your Helmet, Gloves & Boots to have as much Evasion as possible to combo with Stalking Panther. Make sure you have as much Movement Speed as possible on your Boots though, at the cost of everything else. It's the most vital stat on all your gear pieces.
- Use a Sapphire with 2% mana gained on Kill to fix your Mana while clearing completely!
- Valako's Vice can be huge early on for it's stats. We are NOT using this for it's conversion, but make sure to replace Fire Infusion with Lightning Infusion on your Artillery Ballista and to swap back once you replace the Gloves later.
- The Black Insignia is a fantastic item for early maps, granting you extra Movement Speed through Tailwind. Make sure you have enough Evasion to not get hit though, otherwise you lose your stacks too quickly!
- Once you achieve great Rare Items, there are some items that can technically make you even stronger.
A GG crossbow with as much DPS as possible and 800+ Accuracy can drastically increase your damage and is worth it. - Leopold's Applause + The Pandemonius is an incredible Endgame Combo that shreds your enemies Resistances. To use this, make sure you can still get Resistance & Attribute capped + have the +60 Spirit necessary to use all your Auras.
- Heatshiver allows for extra damage, depending on your Chill Magnitude. Without scaling any Chill, this is 25% more damage, scaling up to a lot more if you happen to get any more.
- Do note that while the above items increase your builds damage drastically, they also remove vital Evasion & Life. It's still worth it, just don't get hit!
FAQ
This can have a lot of reasons, here are some tips in general:
- If you aimlessly shoot your Glacial Bolt, you block your pathing, which can be awkward while traversing especially in indoor layouts.
- When fighting Bosses, try to stand point blank next to them.
- When fighting Bosses, if an Ice Crystals is blocking your shot, take a shot from a different angle that isn't blocked.
- When fighting Bosses or longer encounters, put down your Artillery Ballista to let it blow up Ice Crystals. This is especially important on certain bugged hitbox Bosses that you can't spawn Crystals on.
- If you have trouble destroying your Ice Walls, that means your Skill Gem Level is too high. Make sure you only upgrade whenever you have a damage upgrade.
- If you level up your gem too high by accident or trial and error, you can use Icicle to compensate for the time being. Try to remove it later once you get more damage as it does cost you a support Gem that could otherwise add damage.
- 20% Quality on Glacial Boltfor +2 Bolts loaded to make the skill feel less awkward.
In order to blow up Glacial Bolt's Ice Shards without having to use a secondary skill, we automate with Cast on Freeze linked to Freezing Mark.
Here's what happens:
- You target one or more enemies with your Glacial Bolt.
- At least one enemy gets frozen + Ice Crystals are spawned
- Freezing Mark immediately triggers and destroys the Crystals for overlapping AoE explosions
Make sure to keep the Level of Freezing Mark up as high as possible, it also scales with anything Attack and Elemental on the Passive Tree.
Weapon Prefixes dictate how much dps your weapon has. You can get a total of 3 prefixes which increase the base Physical/Cold/Fire/Lightning Damage on your Weapon.
However, with Amazon, it gets a little more intricate, because of Penetrate.
If you take Penetrate, the base Accuracy you get on your Weapon gets added as global physical damage. However, it also occupies a slot of the listed modifiers on top, so in order to be worth it, make sure you get around 500+ Accuracy.
Example: 500 Accuracy + 2xGreater Vision Rune = 700 Accuracy total on Weapon with 1.6 Attack Speed.
--> Penetrate damage = 700x0.25 = 175 Global Physical Damage
--> 175x 1.6 = 280 = DPS the Accuracy adds to the Weapon.
Don't dismiss suffixes though, as + to Critical Damage Bonus is a multiplier to all the other %increased critical strike bonus you get on the passive tree. Attack Speed is also decent, do note though that it doesn't help your damage per hit and can therefore make it awkward to destroy your Ice Crystals.
Some enemies are inherently Immune/highly resistant and will just get knocked back without ever getting frozen.
Some Bosses have a bugged/awkward hitbox and won't destroy Ice Crystals.
Both of these scenarios are extremely annoying but can be mitigated by placing a Artillery Ballista to target and destroy those Ice Crystals.
If this happens to you a lot, make it a habit to place an Artillery Ballista every screen somewhere, just in case. Otherwise you have to wait for the Ballista to fire after you place it.
However, do not mistake this problem for you not being able to destroy your Ice Crystals in the first place, this might have to do with your Glacial Bolt level being too high.
Make sure you finished all the side-quests that reward Spirit during the Campaign, which gives you 100 Spirit total. After that, your setup for a while is going to be: Cast on Freeze + Herald of Ice + Precision.
Once you enter higher tier Maps, defenses become relevant. This is where you need to get Wind Dancer & Ghost Dance into the build. Here are 3 options on how to achieve this:
- Get 60 Spirit total from a Solar Amulet implicit + the + to Spirit mod itself. This can give you up to 65 Spirit if perfectly rolled. (Endgame)
- Get 60 Spirit from your Body Armour alone, which is hard to roll (Endgame)
- Get 60 Spirit from your Body Armour + Solar Amulet Implicit. (Midgame)
- Get 50 Spirit from your Body Armour or Amulet and remove Precision for now. (Early Game, suboptimal)
Make sure to not level your skill gems at every stage, especially the ones requiring high Intelligence and Dexterity. Hybrid Dex/Int Gems are always fine to always upgrade.
Use Item mods to get most of your Attributes, factor them in when buying/crafting new gear.
You can temporarily fix your Attributes with Runes, but that should never be a permanent solution.
Video
Summary
- The Glacial Bolt is a great Crossbow allrounder, combining explosive offensive power with Freezes and other crowd-control mechanics.
- Evasion + Energy Shield makes for a great defensive bullwark on a ranged character.
- The overlapping Ice Crystals from Glacial Bolt are perfect to shotgun and delete bosses and shatter hordes of monsters. Also, it's a fun sound.
Credits
Written by: Palsteron
Content Reviewed by: Crouching_Tuna
Language Reviewed by: Tenkiei