At first I thought you were talking about Blade Vortex but you are talking about the new Cold skill. I am lvl 69 now, hmm maybe I can find a high level Vortex skill gem and try it.
Just buy the gem from Clarrisa, it will probably be level 13 already, so just put it in a free socket (or a socket in weapon that you have on weapon swap, its a good way to level gems!) and it will level up to 18 pretty quickly, it slows down after level 18 a bit, like with any other skill gem.
Yea I did that. I also bought a 12 quality version that I am leveling up now. Spell does more base damage than Frost Nova but it is slightly slower and has smaller AoE.
Oh shit, I didnt realize the first Mjolner was only 50%. That is really funny, and makes me less angry that RNG gave me two Mjolniers last league!
Remember that when you shape a map, the shaped version will only drop from maps of appropriate level, the higher one. I mean, if you shape tier 5 map to tier 10 map, the shaped tier 10 map will only drop from bosses of tier 8 maps, blue/yellow tier 9 mobs and tier 10 white mobs (And higher). So you wont be able to get tier 10 shaped maps from normal tier 5 maps or anything silly like that.
Wouldn't this imply it's better not to shape any maps at all? The higher tier maps are going to be the ones that innately drop better gear anyways right? Why would you want to dilute that pool? Kinda lame, really only makes it worthwhile if you have an entire build based around farming a single type of map, which would be boring as fuck and even if that was your plan, why not build around one of the existing tier 15 maps?
When a map is shaped, it will drop the better gear as far as I am aware (In the sense that it will drop shaped map tier ilevel items). So the only difference between having a lot of shaped maps and none is the variety. So if you only shape the layout you like, then you should have no problems as you will get maps with the layouts you like that are 5 level higher and give higher ilevel loot.
This is the biggest problem with maps in my opionion: everyone is comfortable with the same layouts: the ones that don't require backtracking to get to the boss and clear most of the map. No character is so much better at movement than others that they'd be willing to forego a significant portion of time simply moving around when they could be murdering shit and generating loot and xp. The only possible caveat to this would be if the loopy maps simply had more monsters or IIQ on them than the straightforward ones. Then there'd at least be a tradeoff between more wealth per map spent vs more wealth per time spent.
I heard good things about Pathfinder Blade vortex, because of all the flask buffs, and all her nodes being applicable to blade vortex attacks too. Also, there is the thing about poison in this ascendancy, it was probably good too.
The question is how they changed the density though. Did they add more monsters or make the map smaller?
I believe I read on reddit that it was more in vein of adding more monsters to the less popular maps so as to make the xp per hour similar to gorges all day.
