[Arena 484][0.8.2]Bear’s Arcane Elemental Blast - 3 elements, 7+ ailments, 5k+ ward, up to 500k+ DPS

Hey really enjoying this build for now, just returned and converted my LB mage to this. But was wondering, any other reason than 3 extra spell damage for sceptre over wand? I have a good max rolled implicit prophecy wand im using at the moment. Mana reduction seems nice over sceptre.

When can you switch to this build currently only have Exsanguinous and both green rings I do I need Strands of Souls and Last Steps of the Living to be able to swap over thanks :smiley:

Welcome to the community!

I mean, you’re not wrong in using a prophecy wand. The difference between the wand and sceptre are so little damage wise you could go with either. Back in 0.8.1 mana regen was better which could actually give validity to prefer the prophecy wand now. I’ll change the build planner over to use the prophecy wand. In quick tests it took me about 6.9 seconds to waste my mana with the sceptre and about 7.8 seconds with the prophecy wand, doesn’t seem like much but should be more impactful than a little less adaptive spell damage.

Edit: On second thought, it might make more sense to stay with the sceptre and replace increased spell chance with ‘spell damage and mana cost’ since Elemental Nova has increased critical chance with the Melting Nova node now. How this will impact LB I’m not sure, though if I remember correctly LB has a higher crit chance than EN naturally. I’ll do some testing later and update the build accordingly.

I think the best time to swap over from an HP/leech build is when you have Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living. If you’re still in early content you could try the Exsanguinous on its own but you’ll be missing quite a bit of ward; you could make up for some of it with some high HP boots.

Strands of Souls is just icing on the cake and a T5+T5 +HP/%HP belt gives almost the same ward pool. Strand of Souls has some extra benefits that potions give ward, you get ward on kills and your mana spent also gives ward.

1 Like

Do you mean replace crit chance with spell damage/mana cost? Will have to do the math on it, but still missing good crit chance on off hand and catalyst. Maybe it makes sense to go 3 points in charged destruction then? Thanks for the reply btw in my other topic, guess I could have asked here. But thought to maybe reach a broader audience and maybe get some feedback on my idea on spell specific stats. Also I just found this, what do I do?? I really want to anull but do i dare?
https://i.imgur.com/TyqT8C7.png

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 :smiley: 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!

Here’s some footage of the tail end of that run:

4 Likes

Have filterloot?? i need it!!! ajajjajajaja

he posted it a little below the main post.

Thank you very much,I did not see it :wink:

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 :smiley:

1 Like

You know what’s funny, you’re right.

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.

1 Like

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

Thanks for the response man! awesome build

1 Like

The build has been updated to the 0.8.2 build planner :slight_smile:

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 :rage: 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’ll post what I wrote earlier in the thread: