Yeah might be possible to replace crit chance on the sceptre with spell damage/mana cost, I’m experimenting some build changes right now that might incorporate this.
That’s a nice item you got there, you’d get some additional damage with the extra point in EN, but the armour and health regen aren’t the best suffixes and you miss out on a lot of HP. The implicit is also nice as well but you miss out on ward for bigger tankiness. End game you’re killing stuff so quickly with this build you can sacrifice damage to improve survivability.
I did some math on crit chance, used your gear from planner but with all crit chance rolls T5 and average numbers. (Lightning Nova chance in brackets)
Nova no crit weapon and 2/3 charged destruction: 61,6% (73,9%)
Nova with crit weapon and 2/3 charged destruction: 72,6% (87,1%)
Nova no crit weapon and 3/3 charged destruction: 78,4% (94,1%)
Nova with crit weapon and 3/3 charged destruction: 92,4% (110,9%)
Lightning Blast with crit weapon: 46,4%
Lightning Blast no crit weapon: 38,4%
I think 3/3 charged destruction is overkill, probably bettter to put that point in fiery destruction. But for lightning blast with no crit affix on weapon, im not sure if thats enough crit. Since we stack crit multi shouldnt LB crit be atleast 50%? What do you think?
Yeah it’s about right. Unfortunately, crit rate is too low on LB to make the recommendation to ditch the crit rate on the sceptre. I tried playing around with the Closed Circuit node on LB which gives 15% increased damage and 40% increased crit chance when LB chains to you. Unfortunately, there isn’t indepth stats about this node but it seems like every time LB chains to you it stacks up the bonuses above for a few seconds. I was able to stack up an additional ~14% crit rate while using it and have 2 points in Arcing Power. I haven’t tried it yet but I wonder if adding more points to Arcing Power/Chain Lightning could stack these bonuses further? Will have to try tomorrow.
With 2/3 in crit nodes for EN I’m getting 100% crits and I’d guess about 50-70% with 3/3 nodes on LB. I wouldn’t go any lower on the crit rate as you mention, having above 50%+ would be a good recommendation.
One alternative that came to mind, could maybe switch to Unread Scroll off-hand. With 6% implicit, Lightning Blast gets to 67,2% with no crit chance roll on weapon. Could also drop charged destruction to 1/3 or even 0/3. Get 35% more crit multi and/or Star Prism(channel cost) Just tested 2 points in star prism. Get channel cost down to 29 with spell damage/mana affix on weapon. Channeling for daays How much ward would you lose? Im only at 3405 and 3220 with unread scroll. Seems like that could be a decent option.
Yeah originally when the build was HP + Leech the Unread Scroll made more sense to use but then it switched to ward based and damage was still so high I tried to grab any extra implicit/affix/passive to allow more tankiness, so the Unread Scroll changed to Bloodrust Aegis for the ward per second.
I tried that out today taking points out from Charged Destruction but even dropping 1 point from it I started hitting non-crits which was disappointing. If you take an Undead Scroll you could definitely take points out from Charged Destruction and Storm Razor and play around elsewhere for more damage, at the cost of a bit of ward.
At the moment I’m sitting on about 5700 ward, in combat up to 7300 with a Bloodrust Aegis. Lots of room to play and make some substantial damage gains by changing the catalyst.
I hit arena 405 today for a personal best with this build, putting it at 2nd in the game at the moment. I don’t imagine that’ll last too long but could see it staying top 100 for the remainder of 0.8.2!
Hi! build looks amazing, I’m gattering the gear for it.
Just have a question from a build creator perspective if you don’t mind:
How you know when it’s better to go for Crit multiplier on the prefix or just dmg?
In this build for example, do you test if going crit multi on wand is better than elemental dmg?
Or do you just pick 1 and go all in on it?
Hope I’m clear
I ran some calculations after you posted this and it doesn’t actually make sense to go crit multiplier if you have other choices - basically ever if you’re critting 100% of the time. And then I tested it in game and it’s true, crit multiplier leads to less damage.
What you would want though is % Increased Spell damage instead of % Elemental damage. Elemental damage rolls lower values and affects each element individually (fire, ice, lightning). If you go spell damage you have higher rolls and it affects the spell damage as a whole.
I’ll adjust the build accordingly, clearly I’m still learning as well. Thanks for the input.
I always find myself doubting about what’s better, clearly I didn’t know and that’s why I said elemental dmg. Thanks for the Spell damage correction!
I know that if you have 100$ crit chance is pointless to have more crit chance but my doubt is between adding raw damage with Spell damage for example and adding crit strike multiplier.
I guess the only way to find out which do more dmg is to have two of the same item one with crit multi mod and the other with spell dmg mod and see the DPS
Cheers! Thx for the build. What is the drop rate on the belt? Just finished abomination at the empowered level again and got yet another chest piece Is there a suitable alternative?
Hm, I swear lastepochtools used to mention the % drop rate, can’t see it now though. Anyway, it’s a rare drop so if I remember correctly I think around 10-15% chance to drop.
I haven’t played my sorc in about a year, but this build looks interesting. A few questions:
How much of the damage is coming from the ailment stacking of different types? Basically the reason I ask is I’m wondering how much damage you lose by dropping all the elements and sticking with lightning only on EM.
It’s great that you’ve managed to use the invokers set in a way to make a reliable build, as this set is very easy to come by. But if you went pure lightning EN, you wouldn’t need invokers… being able to drop those 3 set items for rares would give you a ton more survivability. You could swap the two rings for Ivory’s, which would give you another 50% ward retention. It would also let you even out your resists on gear, letting you put +health on every item, or more which would obviously greatly boost your ward. It would also let you move about 20-30 points of passives around to get more crit/lightning damage, which might let you swap crit chance off a few items for something else (like more int for even more ward retention).
How important is the slow from AA? You could drop the slow and put 3 points into AA closed circuit (why are there two abilities with this name?!) which would increase the lightning blast dps by 60%.
Shouldn’t you drop a point from Fiery Destruction to Charged Destruction in EN?? Using average from the builder you’re quite aways off 100% crit with LN, surely the +3% base crit is much more average damage?
Wouldn’t +2 LB +60% ED be better on the helm than +int? Especially if you want to experiment with using closed circuit from LB (closed circuit part 2), having the 2 extra points here would be nice. I guess you’d lose ward retention, but see question 1 about going full lightning.
I don’t have any exact numbers, but probably a lot if you spec only into lightning. The only other damage is spark charges if you go lightning, and then you’d have a lot of extra points left over for things non damage related. You’d also lose out on making EN targetable unless you go Ashen Crown. So basically the benefit of going 3 elements is more utility, higher levels and more points to invest into damage nodes.
You’re right in saying that a no set build would have more survivability, I did add an additional build planner for this but it still encompasses 3x elements on EN. Ward goes up significantly, you have room for poison resistances and you can shuffle some passives around. In my testing it was doing about 1/2 the damage of the set build though. If you insist on going lightning you’re still going to have trouble with the lack of making the build targetable. Targeting is limited to either the fire branch of EN or using The Ashen Crown, if you go The Ashen Crown you’re only going to have a maximum of 20 points in EN, but maybe that would be fine if you pick up other lightning damage passives elsewhere.
If I remember correctly the only way we have slow in this build is through AA, and slow is really important if you’re into Arena. From my understanding all Superconductor does it allow LB to be procced more often, but there’s no need for that when a single proc activates the channelled form of LB since we specced into Insidious Conduction. You’d be investing points for no gain.
The build planner doesn’t accurately represent all stats and is quite inaccurate compared to the game character sheet and actual combat. In game I’m critting 100% of the time with EN.
You can absolutely drop the int and pop on LB but you’d have hard luck crafting T5 LB and T5 EN on one item. They’re quite rare shards to begin with, and T5 LB and T5 EN would likely mean you sacrifice health suffix levels. You could also just pop on a T1 LB for 1 extra point. I think two T5’s is more realistic to craft on one item than three or four T5’s - those are much harder to achieve, and for that reason I value T5 EN and T5 % health on the helmet. But even without the +1 or +2 points in LB I think we hit the most important nodes and any additional points would be of limited value.
hey chillbear, just in case you missed it, like FoE has explained in his post here there is currently a bug regarding EN’s crit chance. So this might also explain why EN crits more than expected.
Oh that’s interesting, thanks for linking that. It did seem a bit strange how EN was perma crit but LB was struggling, but I put that down to 3% crit chance through nodes on LB.
Will be interesting to see what it’ll be like when it gets fixed. I imagine having to relocate a point in EN for extra crit chance or changing the catalyst
Yeah, I suspected a potentially significant dps loss, I wish there was a pob equivalent here so we could really see the exact numbers without having to have 10 million pieces of equipment and doing testing by hand. Note there is another damage node lightning could get- there’s a 5 point dump on arcana elementorum, which while not great is a multiplicative damage node, so you could recover a bit of damage there.
Not having targetable EN is a bit of a downer too, and perhaps the bigger issue in terms of survivability. The area would be more than double the targeted version though, because of the afore mentioned arcanum node as well as having 5/5 in elemental expanse, so some testing would be required on just how (un)comfortable that would be. You’d also not have as many mana problems, as EN would be 30% cheaper. Combined with being able to put cheaper spellcost on your weapon since you’d have a lot more crit options on other pieces of gear, you’d be using focus a lot less often.
Ahhh I see. This is my ignorance on how AA works. So does LB channel as long as you’re channelling EN?
How much ward would you lose? Im only at 3405 and 3220 with unread scroll. Seems like that could be a decent option.
Is there a suitable alternative?