Wolf question

Why disciple? Although I was also thinking of cooking something like this. You coukd get a heart of welll with gain extra damage, could also use more flat damage on rings.

Yea idk, I could see it if you were playing Oracle but if you miss 50% of your Crits against a boss I can understand why they would take forever to die lol.

The combo I was using was.

Lunar Blessing up ✔️

Lunar Assault to prime freeze

Arctic Howl to Freeze

(Your freeze build up decides where you slot a Pounce in to mark, somewhere before the freeze ideally)

Shred combo to build up fragments and do DMG

Cross Slash to detonate fragments and consume mark+freeze for big PP damage.

Support on howl to gain cold damage to attacks on freeze and cause armor break equal to Phys damage taken while frozen. That plus I feel like there's quite a few other questionable supports that I personally wouldn't use.

What's your effective Crit chance with this build?

So from my experience playing wolf. I Absolutely shredded bosses in my first freeze rotation normally outright killing them.

I don't know the support gem names off the top of my head but there were a couple I used that I found to be really strong for this. On Cross Slash I used the Support that grants more damage when consuming freeze and for Shred the support gem that increases detonation time but gives more damage on detonation since Cross Slash just forces all the fragments to detonate.

Granted my build was quite a bit different as I was playing Shaman with no Crit with Berserk and a ton of Rage, definitely was a lot squishier than you probably are with this build.

You could always go for the +1 to cold skills but I guess you'd have to drop something else.

I think an easy change might be that instead of eternal rage, just put rage on shred, and use feral invocation with furious slam + aftershocks. Freeze, break armour, then invocate a bunch of bear slams for the coup-de-grâce, or repeat as necessary.

Lunar blessing and wolfpack works too and all the nodes that gives you dmg per companion surrounding you. The main predator mark that comes with pounce is good when you get a big wolfpack going on. I find that freeze buildup is already good especially with the howl - you get more freeze buildup from the "freeze" support gem on lunar assault than you do the mark. Maybe preference here.

Also I think uruks smelting on ice bite is kinda waste - I guess your "brittle armour" support in the howl is supposed to make it so that when a monster is frozen specifically by the howl, the 2nd monster (which is also frozen) next to it gets armour broken from the explosion of the first monster..? Feels kinda jank lol. I've never used that interaction before though maybe it is smoother than I am imagining.

I think people benefit most from this when there is also the perfect essence prefix on the talisman for "gain 20% of damage as extra physical damage" that way the herald of ice explosion does phys dmg also and then you can just make that phys dmg break armour. I don't think herald of ice has any inherent armour breaking capabilities.

That's probably related to why your damage feels bad for boss fights. They have tons of armour that you're not breaking until you freeze them specifically with the howl and then when their armour is broken and they're frozen you're only seeing a 20% more bonus to your existing sustained attacks.