I play a build with volcanic orb and i dropped the unique spear; Lament of the Lost refuge Lament of the Lost Refuge
I have problems finding synergies since i couldnt find other skills on sorcerer that do void damage. Iam scaling fire, damage overtime and generic spell damage/intelligence.
Now that i use a void staff i lose a lot of spell damage for my other fire skill because it doesnt do void damage.
Volcanic orb its damage isnt that amazing with this new unique so i need more support for it. I found some other items which can do that but i hoped there are better options.
It doesnt feel like all those hoops are worth the damage iam getting out of it.
So my question is does somebody has idea’s to tackle those problems?
Is this unique even worth it for Sorcerer. Dont get me wrong i love the idea of the unique, i just can’t find out how to justify using it instead of keeping volcanic orb a fire skill.
Your best bet is to stay away from this piece of crap. Its poorly designed from the ground up and you need a legendary version of at least 2 or 3 LP to be even closely competitive to a regular yellow staff.
But if you insist - just grab a dark shroud of cinders on a spellblade and stack fire auras via Surge.
the fact that Ignivar’s Head couldnt be worn either makes it either makes it even harder to justify the spear.
Also if they allowed still being able to scale trough fire damage or convert the fire damage you invest or something like that the spear would be more than viable
it feels like the most fun/niche items in ARPG’s often lack damage/viabilitty.
Well when you remove all the fancy complicated words from the spear its basically a 160 flat damage weapon with a lot of ms and and some mana regen. But you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get there.
The void conversion is also more curse then a blessing. Nothing in mage supports void damage at all, which forces you to use the Dark Shroud. It being a spear means you get no crit, so you have to put a prismatic gaze. The this point you helmet and armor are fixed, you got no defensive options and you do barely any damage. This weapon absolutely needs flat crit to even function.
Picking a random staff from the ground nets you 100 flat damage, 600+ increased damage and doesn’t lock your armor slot.
Which is quite a lot. A high end staff will give somewhere up to 122 (if you can accept a significant mana cost increase) or ~100 if not.
And you can use the movement speed, not sure why you think you can’t.
While it’s not as optimal, you can stack generic % spell modifiers as well as % void. There arent many and it won’t be as easy as being able to stack element specific modifiers.
I’m not sure if up to 4% flat crit would be worth it given it locks your helm slot and you won’t be able to use anf of the class specific affixes.
A high end staff can get you 100 flat and your tree gets you another 20.
A fully stacked Refuge gets you 160 plus another 20 on tree
Thus you get roughly 50% more damage from having 50% more flat damage. To get there you have to:
Use VO, which is fairly subpar skill
Mix in melee attacks which further lowers your DPS
Are forced to use a rather bad armor
Give up crit
All these downsides are NOT worth it. Basically not doing crit is a disaster on its own for any build that is not DOT. And mage has only one DOT skill - Black Hole - which is quite underwhelming.
If the spear gave like 6% flat chance to crit it would be a worthwhile item. Right now its garbage
The problem in this is that nothing else benefits from increasing %void which locks you automaticly into generic spell mods.
Beside that the flat damage is void only so other skills do potato damage because of it.
The staff would be sort of fixed in my opinion if they changed the void spell flat damage into generic spell damage so other skills still benefit from the staff.
to me volcanic orb feels more like a support skill more often than not.
It helps clearing pretty good and you can get pretty good numbers with the fire variant atleast in my opinion. But against bosses etc its pretty meh so far.
I have to admit that i have some nodes in ward support aswell. So maybe if i drop those it would perform better at bosses. Atleast for the fire variant again.
The void version is simply underwhelming so far in my opinion.
I really don’t get the negativity around this item.
Items like these are what makes Uniques interesting.
Thinking outside the box. Finding creative ways to make it work.
It is not a simply slap it onto a build and go.
You do have to put in some work.
I am currently running a decently successful Sorcerer build with quite the unique playstyle.
Having 70-90% movement speed at all times while not needing to use a movement skill.
Meteor slaps the crap out of every boss and rare with the help of the Stardust Node (80% more dmg from non-fire damage)
Sacrificial Embrace for another big flat damage boost and 100% void pen.
did you actually read? I love this item or else i wouldnt ask about it.
I love going trough hoops thats why i stumbled on this item in the first place.
I just dont like having to finding creative ways and actually finding them and afterwards finding out the damage is so underwhelming.
We are not asking for a simply slap and go lol.
The problem is that the damage feels underwhelming for the work you have to put in (with thinking out of the box).
Beside this by giving Spell void damage you exclude all the other skills since they have 0 void damage support. The amount you lose with the flat spell damage for another skill which i use for bossing (since volcanic orb doesnt enough damage) is a fire damage skill. I need the flat damage for fire damage on the spear to justify putting it on at all.
Did you actually tried this spear at all?? It doesnt feel like it. What a strange response in my opinion.
But enlighten us please with your build which shows otherwise.
Iam happy to see that iam/we are wrong or that we are not approaching it good enough…
I really want to use this spear…
Edit: someone mentioned on my other thread that spell void damage those add up with fire skills etc. I didnt knew this. Despite that i find it strange that the damage numbers are still really low compared to the fire variant.
And yes i use fire aura stacks and the chest etc to benefit from the extra damage…
The void conversion is not really thinking outside the box. Its thinking inside the box, because of basically no void support on sorc aside from the Dark Shroud of Cinders.
And when you cut down the stats on the staff and compare it with a white staff you got off the vendor with 100 base damage that your class actually supports…
Further - the added damage is this item’s only strength. Adding another 100 on it is not that great of a deal. And sacrificial embrace builds charges SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWLY
Mana strike can get 100% chance to crit easily. but you need 40 melee hits on an item with no atk speed and slow base attack speed to cap the bonus.
i dont agree with that, you can get decent crits and generic spell damage on a sorc passive tree
Use VO, which is fairly subpar skill
Mix in melee attacks which further lowers your DPS
Are forced to use a rather bad armor
Give up crit
you absolutly dont need melee attacks to be able to spam the skill, you can lower it failry easily via the skill nodes and the unique Eye of Orexia relic, if your focus solely on Volcanic orb it can be a really good dmg carry, not the best one by any means, but the build idea isnt as bad as you make it sound. Yes it wont clear 400+ corruptions but it more than capable to handle 200ish with decent investment (and no LP whatsoever).
I totally agree and understand the flaws of the staff, but with a bit of thinking you can make a decent boss killer with it, and a good enough map clearer to progress with it.
The more problematic issue i have with this so far is leeching as i dont have a decent Siphon of anguish with 2 or more LP and its the only source of leech i could think of
Here an exemple of what i aim for the build: Build planner
Im sure it can be improved in many ways i cant think of and it wont be a top meta build in any means, but not being able to farm 400+ corruption isnt the end of the world to me and the build is fun enough of its own to keep me going
You can farm 200 corruption using random items from the gambler and using basically any skill in the tree, including basic attacks (with fire aura). If that is your metric for a successful build by all means Refuge is a great item
I am not saying its unplayable - far from that. It does however creates a lot of problems for no meaningful upsides, aside from turning your VO purple.
Not having the unique and knowing its existence mainly. If i ever get a decent one with LP i may change some things in the build for sure, need some testing
