This is the next build I want to try soon but I haven’t been hearing good things about Spirit Thorns. Not sure if I want to use it as a clear skill or boss skill but it sounds like it’s on the weaker side compared to other Spriggin builds?
Not getting enough cast speed or flat damage. For me, it’s nuking the #### out of pretty much everything as well as stunlocking (especially with ~20 Maelstrom stacks) everything that’s not a monolith quest echo boss.
Though I also have a sealed t4 spell crit chance affix on the staff.
Indeed. Tooltip damage is way off.
I think i had like 11k dps on my mage (ages ago) with that channeling abilty Disintegrate in the early 30s but it felt like 2k max, looking at the damage ticks and how slow the channaling itself was.
Another construction site in the userinterface and tooltips in general that needs to be fixed.
The best way currently to gauge damge is still the target dummy.
Well, Dummy is also useless for Spirit Thorns because Homing ability don’t target him. 
Yeah sure i know this, same as for totems or some other skills.
So its double uselesss. Tooltip wise and for the fact you cant test for real numbers on target dummies.
IMO the game is basically still in the same situation like 1 year ago before DMG tooltips where introduced. Yeah sure, the numbers increase if you put better shite on but it still makes no sense.
I asked a dev 3-4 months ago on stream and they acknowledged it needed more optimization, but who knows how long this process will take, if ever (because reasons).
It’s not even slightly that bad. Before the tooltip was introduced, the only damage figure we had for skills was for the basic attack with no skill modifiers included. The tooltip dps is to allow you to judge the relative effect of changes in your gear.
As I understand it, it’s somewhat hardcoded & can’t include a lot of effects due to the game not knowing about the status of the target for conditional effects (target is stunned/slowed/chilled/shocked/etc) or how many stacks of shred you might be able to apply & keep up, or how many seconds Umbral Blades has been on the ground before exploding & so on.
Mike is working on redoing the character screen, hopefully for 0.8.5 which will give us all the data we want (though this is also hardcoded I believe).
Ok iam going to this flat damage more then! iam 72 myself
i dont want to play with totems haha i hate that playstyle
I didn’t play a totem playstyle. The totems are just auto summoned on hit with idols for the extra cold damage per active totem. Those totem also help to shred some armour and act as distraction.
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oh that exactly sounds interesting. Iam going to look out for those.
Is the cold damage per active totem a passive node you have to take or?
Spirit Thorns clear is really good, bossing isn’t bad either with 8 thorns shotgunning the boss. The only downside is bad mobility if perma spriggan form, since no fury leap. I seen some other build using vine and thorn shield, but I haven’t personally tried those. I am just trying to go for chill auto homing build with spriggan form.
It’s a affix on Ornate Heorot Idols, x% increased cold damage per active totem. It can roll up to 22% max, so having plenty of totem means a lot of free cold damage. I feels like spirit thorns doesn’t seems to scale well with adaptive damage, so I opt for more cast speed and crit multiplier.
I found it terrible for bossing since multiple projectiles are missing the boss.
but i clearly didnt build enough flat, looking at the comments.
Thanks a lot for the explanation and about the name of the totem idol 
I think the hitbox of the spirit thorns seems to be a bit off sometime on smaller target. So far I don’t really feel much issue yet on bossing, and just open empowered monolith. Will try and see if the build fall off later.
Build link if you are interested in what I build.
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Thanks for the build, now i only need an important the build and passive points to my ingame character button 
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No, it’s per totem that’s active, regardless of how it got there (manually cast or proc’d). There’s also a Shaman passive at the top of the tree that does the same.
They generally don’t miss the boss unless there’s other targets for them to home to. If you have the pierce node then any Spirit Thorns will hit the initial target then go on to home on something behind it.
Cold Spirit thorns is definitely very sick personally I am doing a non crit focused shaman because I had one which I respecced. Breezes thru monos and the single target is passable (not great but manageble). Shaman, Level 89 (LE Beta 0.8.4b) - Last Epoch Build Planner
My gear is kinda off but ideally it would be more like : Shaman, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.4b) - Last Epoch Build Planner
The best part about shaman is it works off very little gear, You can cap resists with just the right bases and the legendary belt (since you will always have totems up) and spriggan fills out most of the crit avoidance so you can get by on bad gear. Stacking cast speed makes it feel like a channeled homing flurry. I have a bit more freeze multi with current setup which makes it pretty much unkillable against most regular enemies. Easily hits 30-40% dodge on my weak gear, with the right blessings can hit way more.
Of course crit based druid beats it in terms of damage and has way more potential.
I was also thinking of something similar for a druid (ideal build : Druid, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.4b) - Last Epoch Build Planner)
Do you feel you need the rage gen from the belt or would the rage on crit be enough to sustain if you hit close to 100% crit?
Definitely don’t need the belt for rage sustain, it is just easy way to ignore rage and get tons of resists. Rage on hit from Ancestral Call node (1 or 2 points) is more than enough to sustain during boss fight with enough cast speed. Might want to take Ranchor passive to prevent rage degen when out of combat, but with huge amount of bonus rage from Attunement, I think it takes a very long time to empty the rage bar.
I am not sure if the rage gain on crit passives is per crit or per cast, if it is per crit, then there is definitely no issue with rage sustain, since I have 8 thorns per cast = 16 rages per cast, with multiple cast per second. I think my build have too much rage sustain. 
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