Hello everyone.
I’m playing Sentinel as a Void Knight for the first time.
My main skill is Warpath, I’ve converted all Physical damage into Void, and for stronger damage and bosses I use Erasing Strike.
Now, here’s the part that really confuses me.
The game itself says that damage over time does not use critical damage.
But when I look online, I see some builds relying on it.
Does it even make sense for me to invest into critical then?
Any advice is welcome.
Thanks in advance.
You’re doing a hit-based build, so yes, crit damage is good for your build. You should also get some more time rot chance (for the node that gives more hit damage per time rot) & echo chance (for void warpath’s chance to echo).
Thanks.
And on which item is it best to put crit chance and multipliers?
On the ring and amulet?
I’m having a hard time balancing all of that with resistances and health shards.
You can get flat crit on your weapon which will then make hitting crit cap much easier (since it’s added to the base 5% crit before any % modifiers are applied).
Yup, welcome to the rng that is LE gearing.
For specifics, I’d probably have a look at other guides for similar builds & use them as suggestions on that affixes to take where.
1 Like
You can always use blessings to patch up some missing resistances. When you manage to fix them in gear, then you can switch the blessing back to whichever is most useful to you in that monolith. It’s easier now with the blessings respec NPC.
2 Likes
There are 3 different stats related to crit:
added Base Crit Chance (+X% Critical Strike Chance)
increased critical chance (X% increased Critical Strike Chance)
added Critical Multiplier (+X% Critcal Strike Multiplier)
added Base Crit is the rarest and most powerful stat from those 3 and largely influences how much increasd critical strike chance you need to get to good crit values.
For you as Void Knight you can get +5% Critcal Strike Chance from the Mortal Cleave Passive, which effectively doubles your crit chances already (5% Base Crit is default).
Other sources of flat are very rare and limited. For Melee Builds a weapon prefix is the most obvious one, but also the largest investment, because there are many other powerful prefixes on weapons. Then there are also some unique or set items which give added base crit (e.g. Locket of the Forgotten Knight or Phantom Grip)
Then also Skill Spec Trees for individual skills often have added base crit. In the case of Erasing Strike, you cna get up to 9% added base crit and Warpath only has a node if you are using a Sword.
Generall speaking Prefixes are offensive and suffixes are defensive (with a few exceptions). So you don’t really have to balance resistances with crit for the most part.
There are also slots that have only %inc crit, but no crit multi (gloves and rings) and some slots have both (Amulet and Relic).
So depending on your build and what items you are using you want to balance the crit chance and crit multi.
General rule of thumb for crits:
Having a bit of everything is better than only having one stat a lot.
e.g. its ok to not be crit capped while already having a bit of crit multi investment.
Many people try to go for 100% crit before investing into crit multi, but that is actually not good. Your average dps doesn’t increase that much going from 90% crit to 100% crit.
So instead of trying to get the last few % crit having a few crit multi affixes will increase your average damage a lot more.
1 Like
I was looking at some builds and found people online mentioning how strong base crit is.
Honestly, that confused me because I didn’t know it was so much stronger than regular crit.
Thanks for the detailed explanation and the pointers.
Yeah, good idea to use blessings until I sort out my gear. Thanks.
1 Like
The main reason why base crit is so strong is mostly math. If you have a base 5% chance and add 100% increased chance, you’re left with 10%. If you instead add +5% to the base, you’re left with the same 10%.
With 5% base you need 1900% increased crit to reach 100%. If you add +15% to base and reach 20% base chance you only need 400% increased crit to reach 100%.
You need both, but base crit is stronger, especially because there are a lot more increased crit sources than base crit ones.
It’s the same principle as with flat damage vs increased damage.
1 Like
They mean flat crit. As I mentioned, all flat crit (from gear, passives & the skill tree, plus the skill’s base 5%) is added together then multiplied by your total % increased crit chance.
3 Likes
Thank you all for the help.
I’m curious about one more thing.
If I have a passive skill that converts all my Physical damage into Void, does it even make sense to use gear that increases Physical damage?
Will that also increase my Void damage, or do I strictly need to look for items with Void damage?
No, LE treats conversions differently to PoE. In LE conversions happen before any % modifiers are applied. If you’re converting a thing then any % modifiers to the original thing are ignored & only % modifiers for the new thing are used.
1 Like
To expand on what Llama said:
What conversions do in LE is to transform the initial base damage. If you have a skill with base 20 fire damage and you convert it to cold, then the skill will now have a 20 cold base damage.
Modifiers to the skill will only take into account the ones that apply to the base damage type after conversion. So fire damage wouldn’t apply, cold damage would and elemental damage would apply to both.
The exception to this is nodes within the skill tree. Almost always they will also be converted. So nodes that specified fire damage will apply to cold damage. There is usually text indicating that this is the case on the conversion node as well.
Ailments are trickier, since they don’t always get converted (ignite to chill, in this example). If the node doesn’t specify that, it’s usually a sign that they don’t get converted.
2 Likes
% Fire damage wouldn’t apply, flat fire damage still would & that flat added fire damage would be affected by % fire modifiers. Any flat damage that doesn’t specify an element (phys, fire, void, etc) uses the skill tags to determine which element it is.
2 Likes
Ok. So if my gear gives me for example 20 physical dmg, i will have 20 void dmg after conversion ?
No. The affixes in your gear never get converted. Your example falls into what Llama was talking about.
If you have a skill that has 20 base physical damage and you have +20 physical damage in your gear, the skill now does 40 physical damage. Increased physical damage will apply to it.
If you convert the skill to void, then the skill now only does 20 base void damage. Your +20 physical in your gear means that your skill now does 20 void and 20 physical. Increased physical damage will apply only to the 20 physical, increased void will apply only to the 20 void and the general “increased damage” will apply to both.
1 Like
Ok. Thanks again for the explanation. 
I understand it better now.
1 Like