Level 95 Vortex Elementalist^3.21

Notes

> FAQ <
I'm having mana issues, how do I solve this?
You can pick up some mana on the tree for 2 points, like Mind Drinker. You can also roll -7 mana cost on a ring (or 2) for all your skills to cost a bit less.
Also make sure your clarity is not too highly leveled. You want to be able to cost Vortex and Creeping Frost at the same time.
Worst case you temporarily replace your Jade flask with a mana flask

Can I press less buttons somehow?
While you could technically replace Creeping Frost in your chest with a damage link like Swift Affliction, I wouldn't recommend doing this.
You could remove Hexbloom from your weapon, put Frost Bomb in there and craft "socketed spells trigger" on there, this cooldown makes it so you have much less dps though.
You could remove Frost Bomb entirely and roll Exposure on your gloves using the Eater of Worlds implicit, this is slightly weaker but does mean one less button to press.

How does the non-armour version survive? Why does it exist?
We stack physical damage taken as elemental damage to mitigate most of the incoming physical damage from big hits. For small hits we just get a bit more evasion.
Doing this enables us to get a lot more energy shield(and thus a larger total life pool) and allows us to run Malevolence over Determination.
With Molten Shell being nerfed this is a really interesting option, but only switch to it when you have the gear for it, or you might die to something like a Drox auto attack.

Why is there no life on your chest?
We use the mastery that gives us 15% life when there are no life mods on your chest.
This is slightly weaker than a good life roll on your chest, BUT it means we can much more easily get a chest with a bunch of defensive prefixes on it.

Huh, Eye of Malice increases enemy resistances, why do we use it?
Because Path of Exile works in funny ways. If enemy resistances are negative, and you increase them, you increase a negative. So this makes the resistances go even more into the negatives!

> LEVELING <
When leveling this in SSF, start out by making a ranger, getting past mud flats and picking up sniper's mark. If you can trade just ask a friend to give it to you!

When you're on the witch we're going to start out with freezing pulse and frost bomb. Use frost bomb on  packs of mobs whenever you can, it could very well one shot them.
Spam freezing pulse when you need a bit more damage or "Momentum"(at the time of writing this guide it was not completely clear what Momentum does yet).

After level 12 we slowly transition into damage over time.
The general principle here is that any damage link you can add to your cold dot skills are good, and that we stack all the cold dot skills we can on single target(2 creeping frosts won't stack, but 1 creeping frost and 1 cold snap will)

Flat damage to spells on gear won't really matter after act 1, so try to get some % spell damage if you can. cap your resists, overlevel if your damage is falling behind, and you should be good to go!

> CRAFTING <
+2 amulet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoyLvvx6S7o

Endgame Chest
Best way is probably just to reforge defence in Harvest until you get something decent.
If you're going for the armour version using reforge phys can work as well, as this will make physical damage reduction more likely.
Remember that if the chest rolls life that you should either unspec the life mastery that gives you life if your chest has life, or roll over it.

Endgame Shield
Roll the shield WITHOUT INFLUENCE with essences. When you have an open prefix you now fill up the suffixes, then use a Hunter Exalt on the shield.
This guarantees the % life as this is the only Hunter prefix on shields.