I have a question about Explosive Traps node Trapas instead of Tinkerer's Design.
Both lead to the Cold Conversion for exactly 1 point.
Trapas creates a 35% multiplicative damage penalty and -35% Area.
Tinkerer's Design has +10% Area, so a pretty big difference in area between those 2 nodes.
The extra traps give us some extra Fire and Lightning damage while penalizing damage overall.
That's probably a push since we prefer Cold?
The 2 extra Traps could give us a lot of extra procs (extra Acid Flasks and extra Cold Shred for example) ... but we have a Trap maximum so are they really extras?
I guess it could lead to a Mana savings if you're not zero'd out and never spamming more than 6 traps at a time.
Also is that reduction in Area significant? Against bosses/rares who are stationary, area doesn't matter, but it could matter against Packs and mobile bosses/rares.
Is that significant in Empowered / High Corruption?
Note that with With Snowdrift (Cold Pen) and just one T5 freeze rate plus miscellaneous freeze rate from other items, we have at LEAST 600% Freeze Rate = 120% Cold Pen.
1000% [the default build listed here has 1116%] would be 200% Cold Pen.
The Cold Shred will be additive with that, not multiplicative. If you can maintain 10 stacks of Cold Shred that's "only" +50% which is a decent increase on top of 120%.
50% on top of 200% is only a net 25% improvement. [Then multiplied by the 35% penalty.]
Or are you getting and sustaining a ton of Shred? I can see it proccing heavily...although it only lasts 4 seconds. Maybe that far outweighs the Area detriment and the 35% penalty, I don't know.