The following is an initial set of ideas that I am interested in forming into a workable build.
I’d like to take the mage tree passive that converts volcanic orb and lightning blast to cold damage as a starting point, and use these as follows:
Orb and its shrapnel helps with clear.
Lightning blast is kept at or close to zero cost to be cast in between castings of orb to help whittle down harder targets. Could I perhaps hold down both of those skill buttons at the same time so whatever is ready fires?
Do this as a mana stacker build so orb hits harder with the +50% mana cost node selected (for 50% more damage from orb costing a little over 100 mana to cast). Aim for 1000+ mana, in the end, so the sorcerer “archmage” passive works particularly well.
Profit? Wonder about why damage is so low? Or …?
Any thoughts about whether this is likely to work well or not, and ideas to make it actually work, would be helpful and most appreciated.
Yes.
No idea, VO tends not to be used & I’ve not even looked at it’s skill tree to see if there are a decent amout of more damage modifiers. You could take the node in Lightning Blast’s tree that makes it chain to a single target & use that on bosses.
Thank you for responding. It’s appreciated. I’m currently leveling up a sorcerer to see how this build might come together. I’m hopeful that it can perform well, perhaps with some adaptations.
Edited: I did some pretty bad math for lighting blast options in an earlier iteration of this post. LLama’s recommendation to have all chains hit a single target is probably the best choice for a cold-based version of lighting blast.
Volcanic orb - VO is the main tool for clearing trash mobs, so shrapnel is more important than the core. Given that, the “more” modifiers I’ll probably focus on the most in an initial, exploratory build are those related to shrapnel.
Piercing embers - shrapnel pierces targets, more enemies are hit
Monolithic eruption - 25% more shrapnel damage per point, but -20% shrapnel frequency per point (needed for piercing embers, though, so it’s hard to avoid taking it)
Glacial might - up to 125% more shrapnel damage against chilled enemies
Volatile emission - 5% more frequency for shrapnel per point
Eruption - 12% more damage for shrapnel per point
