Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page

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AlterCrash wrote:

hi guys,

another question,
i can enchant my boots, thought of going for 50+ mana,
but now i can craft the veiled mod "non vaal skills deal 51-60% increased dmg during soul gain prevention"

isnt this a crazy dmg boost for arc in some cases?
like when my vaal RF expires or when Ive used my vaal arc?

the numbers see so much bigger then a little mana!

thanks in advance

Well, for starters, you're talking about a crafted mod versus an enchantment--so you don't have to pick and choose. You can have them both!

Second, 70% increased mana regen is extremely strong in a build like this one that depends so much on mana regen for both offense and defense. It's applied to your flat mana regen, which we stack as much as possible via inherent 1% regen, Cloak of Defiance, Clarity, Arcane Surge, Mastermind of Discord, and Pure Talent (and probably other sources I'm forgetting to mention). Just the enchantment by itself would take you from regenerating 5% of your base mana per second to 8.5%. That's 12 seconds versus 20 seconds to refill your mana from 0% to 100%. There aren't many places in the game you can find that kind of boost in mana regen with practically no strings attached.

Next, 50% increased damage is good...but this game distinguishes between "increased" damage and "more" damage in its calculations. The difference is astronomical, and far from just semantic in this case. 50% increased damage is a little boost; 50% more damage is HUGE.

Finally, unless you're actively and frequently using your Vaal skills when mapping, which I personally don't, the amount of time you spend in soul gain prevention is negligible.

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WorderMostFoul wrote:

I'm pretty sure your crit is only rolled once per cast, so chains and repeats from spell echo don't count toward your chance to crit. So if you have to cast Arc an average of 6-7 times to proc EO, to me, that's a big drag on being able to frontload your damage against a boss. I just tried running a map without using SB at all, and with my 13% chance to crit, I was not super-impressed. EO was up at most 60% of the time, compared with 98% of the time if I just drop a SB every 8 seconds. Honestly, my Wave of Conviction with its 22% crit seemed to be responsible for a sizeable majority of the EO uptime.

I checked it and you are right.

Crit chance is rolled per action, not per target.
That also implies that 'extra' copies of an action (by Spell Echo, Multistrike, ...) inherit the roll from your own action.

I haven't mapped it out completely, but I often check if my EO is up and I don't find that many cases where it is not.

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WorderMostFoul wrote:

Next, 50% increased damage is good...but this game distinguishes between "increased" damage and "more" damage in its calculations. The difference is astronomical, and far from just semantic in this case. 50% increased damage is a little boost; 50% more damage is HUGE.

Finally, unless you're actively and frequently using your Vaal skills when mapping, which I personally don't, the amount of time you spend in soul gain prevention is negligible.

Exactly, and the extra damage is needed at boss fights most of the time instead of the trash.
If you're lucky you can use your vaal skill once in those fights, let alone multiple times.
So we're speaking about a marginal increase that only happens when you generally don't need it.

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Reechaani wrote:

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WorderMostFoul wrote:

Wave of Conviction applies an elemental exposure.
Elemental is defined as either fire, cold or lightning damage so Chaos damage won't affect your exposure.

The reason flat added fire or cold damage can ruin your exposure setup is that Wave of Conviction is a a spell that deals damage based on your modifiers and applies exposure of the highest damage type.
It is possible that you added fire or cold damage could be the highest damage that is dealt by Wave of Conviction, since it converts 25% of its physical damage to lightning but we keep it at lvl 1.
It would take either a lot of % increased lightning damage or a source of added flat lightning damage to overcome that cold or fire damage.

OR--Arcane Cloak!

I don't think the cold damage is really a concern, but I could see fire damage upsetting the balance, especially at lower levels. Had never really given it any serious thought before...

If your Arcane Cloak is up, this will indeed not be a problem.
But if you are unlucky and it happens when Arcane Cloak is recharging that added modifier can screw things up.

Wave of Conviction gives 32 to 48 physical damage at lvl 1.
25% gets converted to lightning and 25% to fire damage.

1 cast of WoC at lvl 1 deals in base:
-> 16 to 24 physical damage
-> 8 to 12 fire damage
-> 8 to 12 lightning damage

The calculations quickly become way more complicated than that since most of our modifiers are for elemental damage (not only lightning damage) so cold and fire damage get improved too.

If I take my setup in account (and disregarding the effects of spell damage, since it then becomes really hard to follow):

Lightning damage:
- 97% increased elemental damage
- 129% increased lightning damage
- 40% more elemental damage
- 29% more lightning damage
-> Lower bound: 8*(1+0.97+1.29)*1.4*1.29 = 47 damage
-> Upper bound: 12*(1+0.97+1.29)*1.4*1.29 = 71 damage

If we want to be completely sure, we don't want to cross the lower bound of our lightning damage with the upper bound of our cold/fire damage.

Fire damage:
- 97% increased elemental damage
- 40% more elemental damage
-> Upper bound: (x+12)*(1+0.97)*1.4 < 47 damage -> x < 5 flat added fire damage on the upper bound of that mod

Cold damage:
- 97% increased elemental damage
- 40% more elemental damage
-> Upper bound: (x)*(1+0.97)*1.4 < 47 damage -> x < 17 flat added cold damage on the upper bound of that mod

Before anyone tries to adapt their gear remember though, this is an example with my gear and without taking % increased and more (spell) damage in account.

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Reechaani wrote:

I'm doing the math atm for a Hierophant Arc Archmage build with much of the same gear and tree, since GGG is about to deploy a fix for the Arcane Surge problem.

With the same gear (except 1 wand -> 1 shield) I seem to be doing 15% more damage, with (I think) more defences:
- +10% Mind over Matter
- 4 permanent Endurance charges
- Shield with %mana on block + glancing blows for 70/75 permanent block chance and instant 450-500 mana 75% of the hits to refill mana pool after Mind over Matter and The Agnostic drains
- Shield charge to apply Fortify

Added bonusses of full use of:
- Pure Talent (Templar + Scion + Witch)
- Transcendent Mind 24% recovery
- 4 permanent Power Charges to solve my crit problem for EO
- 5 'free' gemslots from golems (Shield charge 3/4 link + Enlighten on my aura's)

I'm really considering to test it out after the upcoming bugfixes.
Only the swap from Flame Dash to Shield Charge isn't a nice QoL, but I could run both if I drop Increased Duration on my Arcane Cloak setup...

Another option is a CWDT taken setup instead of 4-link shield charge, but I need to think about what to put in it (Tempest Shield + ? + ?).

I do think it has a lower theoritical maximum dps with mirror gear, but I don't think I'll get 2 mirror worthy wands in a league anyway.

Interested to see where this takes you. A lot of the tradeoffs seem largely tit-for-tat to me, but the idea of not having to rely on golems is attractive. The biggest upsides to me are the 10% extra MoM and the control of incoming damage afforded by Glancing Blows (although there's nothing keeping us from doing this with the witch, is there?), and the biggest downsides are probably losing the effects of Elemental Bastion and Mastermind of Discord.

I was also thinking it might even be better to use Arcane Surge in your Arc setup (swapping out CD) if you're going Hierophant, since you'll have 130% increased effect of it instead of just 60%. That is, assuming that the on you part of "effect of Arcane Surge on you" applies to both more damage multipliers granted by AS (great) and not just the global one (not great). Can't be sure from the wording and don't know if PoB would accurately represent that. I'm also not sure if the game treats them like two separate multipliers (crazy good) or if it stacks them additively before multiplying (less good). The answers to those questions would have a HUGE impact on where the right place for Arcane Surge is. In the worst-case scenario between those two questions, swapping in AS for CD would be a net damage loss, but in the best-case scenario, it would be at least a small net gain in DPS, give back 100% increased Arc crit chance, and it would open up a gem slot in the AC setup.

I would definitely go for the CwDT setup over Shield Charge. I think I'd rather deal with golems than have to SC constantly. CwDT could be Tempest Shield, (Anomalous) Blood Rage (12% more damage), and...WoC? Man, those extra gem sockets sound nice.

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Reechaani wrote:

If your Arcane Cloak is up, this will indeed not be a problem.
But if you are unlucky and it happens when Arcane Cloak is recharging that added modifier can screw things up.

Wave of Conviction gives 32 to 48 physical damage at lvl 1.
25% gets converted to lightning and 25% to fire damage.

1 cast of WoC at lvl 1 deals in base:
-> 16 to 24 physical damage
-> 8 to 12 fire damage
-> 8 to 12 lightning damage

The calculations quickly become way more complicated than that since most of our modifiers are for elemental damage (not only lightning damage) so cold and fire damage get improved too.

If I take my setup in account (and disregarding the effects of spell damage, since it then becomes really hard to follow):

Lightning damage:
- 97% increased elemental damage
- 129% increased lightning damage
- 40% more elemental damage
- 29% more lightning damage
-> Lower bound: 8*(1+0.97+1.29)*1.4*1.29 = 47 damage
-> Upper bound: 12*(1+0.97+1.29)*1.4*1.29 = 71 damage

If we want to be completely sure, we don't want to cross the lower bound of our lightning damage with the upper bound of our cold/fire damage.

Fire damage:
- 97% increased elemental damage
- 40% more elemental damage
-> Upper bound: (x+12)*(1+0.97)*1.4 < 47 damage -> x < 5 flat added fire damage on the upper bound of that mod

Cold damage:
- 97% increased elemental damage
- 40% more elemental damage
-> Upper bound: (x)*(1+0.97)*1.4 < 47 damage -> x < 17 flat added cold damage on the upper bound of that mod

Before anyone tries to adapt their gear remember though, this is an example with my gear and without taking % increased and more (spell) damage in account.

I definitely won't question your math here. I guess I will just admit I fully level up WoC and have never had problems with phys reflect doing even noticeable damage to me, not with all the crazy life sustain we have going on. So at that level, cold damage is really not a concern. But looking at my WoC tooltip, it seems absolutely true that I am inflicting fire exposure at least a small fraction of the time. Supercharge makes it less likely generally less likely, and ancillary lightning penetration makes it pretty improbable against a unique boss--and essentially impossible if they're still suffering from lightning exposure from a previous WoC--but I'm pretty sure I have occasionally noticed WoC not providing the immediate and huge damage boost it should. I guess I figured we had more sources of increased lightning damage in our build than we actually do.

So you have changed my mind! Cancel added fire damage! And cold damage, too, if you're keeping your WoC at level 1! Boooo!

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UtherSRG wrote:

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Reechaani wrote:

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MrXtrm wrote:

So, this isn't a question specifically about Arc, but related.

I'm trying to get the "Trigger a Socketed Spell when you use a Skill" recipe from Unveiling. From doing research, it's randomly on 1H and 2H weapons, three times before you get it on the bench. However, this is what I do not understand, on the PoE Wiki, it has the level required as 75, so I assume this means you can only get this option on monster level 75 or higher (which would be T8 maps or higher)? Am I understanding the veiled item system correctly?

You got almost completely right.
It is indeed only possible to unveil that mod from items with an ilvl of 75 or higher. Those itemlevels start to drop from rare/unique monsters starting from T6 (monster lvl 73) though.

Rules for iLvl:
- Normal monsters drop items with a level equal to the monster level of the area.
- Magic monsters drop items with monster level +1.
- Rare and Unique Monsters drop items with monster level +2.

One note I'd add here is that the Syndicate folks are all Uniques, and you more often get veiled items from Syndicate folks, at least in the yellow maps...

Much appreciated to both of you, seems I was doing the correct thing by doing Jun missions on higher tiered yellow maps. I know it's a fairly rare unveil, so I'll just keep grinding it out.

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WorderMostFoul wrote:

Interested to see where this takes you. A lot of the tradeoffs seem largely tit-for-tat to me, but the idea of not having to rely on golems is attractive. The biggest upsides to me are the 10% extra MoM and the control of incoming damage afforded by Glancing Blows (although there's nothing keeping us from doing this with the witch, is there?), and the biggest downsides are probably losing the effects of Elemental Bastion and Mastermind of Discord.

I was also thinking it might even be better to use Arcane Surge in your Arc setup (swapping out CD) if you're going Hierophant, since you'll have 130% increased effect of it instead of just 60%. That is, assuming that the on you part of "effect of Arcane Surge on you" applies to both more damage multipliers granted by AS (great) and not just the global one (not great). Can't be sure from the wording and don't know if PoB would accurately represent that. I'm also not sure if the game treats them like two separate multipliers (crazy good) or if it stacks them additively before multiplying (less good). The answers to those questions would have a HUGE impact on where the right place for Arcane Surge is. In the worst-case scenario between those two questions, swapping in AS for CD would be a net damage loss, but in the best-case scenario, it would be at least a small net gain in DPS, give back 100% increased Arc crit chance, and it would open up a gem slot in the AC setup.

I would definitely go for the CwDT setup over Shield Charge. I think I'd rather deal with golems than have to SC constantly. CwDT could be Tempest Shield, (Anomalous) Blood Rage (12% more damage), and...WoC? Man, those extra gem sockets sound nice.

Hmm, good points.

If I place my AS in my 6-link I'm losing alot of damage, so I linked it with my Arcane Cloak atm.
I should have 100% uptime (either from my gem, the rest from notables with a weaker variant).

I think, since they are all the same wording and so should be the same mod, all the %increased get added together.

CWDT sounds nice indeed, though WoC is placed in my trigger setup indentical to Enki's. Blood Rage is a good pick though, but still not sure about the 3rd one.
Maybe a better Aoe skill instead of Tempest Shield with culling strike support?

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Reechaani wrote:

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WorderMostFoul wrote:

Interested to see where this takes you. A lot of the tradeoffs seem largely tit-for-tat to me, but the idea of not having to rely on golems is attractive. The biggest upsides to me are the 10% extra MoM and the control of incoming damage afforded by Glancing Blows (although there's nothing keeping us from doing this with the witch, is there?), and the biggest downsides are probably losing the effects of Elemental Bastion and Mastermind of Discord.

I was also thinking it might even be better to use Arcane Surge in your Arc setup (swapping out CD) if you're going Hierophant, since you'll have 130% increased effect of it instead of just 60%. That is, assuming that the on you part of "effect of Arcane Surge on you" applies to both more damage multipliers granted by AS (great) and not just the global one (not great). Can't be sure from the wording and don't know if PoB would accurately represent that. I'm also not sure if the game treats them like two separate multipliers (crazy good) or if it stacks them additively before multiplying (less good). The answers to those questions would have a HUGE impact on where the right place for Arcane Surge is. In the worst-case scenario between those two questions, swapping in AS for CD would be a net damage loss, but in the best-case scenario, it would be at least a small net gain in DPS, give back 100% increased Arc crit chance, and it would open up a gem slot in the AC setup.

I would definitely go for the CwDT setup over Shield Charge. I think I'd rather deal with golems than have to SC constantly. CwDT could be Tempest Shield, (Anomalous) Blood Rage (12% more damage), and...WoC? Man, those extra gem sockets sound nice.

Hmm, good points.

If I place my AS in my 6-link I'm losing alot of damage, so I linked it with my Arcane Cloak atm.
I should have 100% uptime (either from my gem, the rest from notables with a weaker variant).

I think, since they are all the same wording and so should be the same mod, all the %increased get added together.

CWDT sounds nice indeed, though WoC is placed in my trigger setup indentical to Enki's. Blood Rage is a good pick though, but still not sure about the 3rd one.
Maybe a better Aoe skill instead of Tempest Shield with culling strike support?

I wonder how exactly how the game is calculating AS's bonuses and the buffs to the skill. I looked around a little for the answer, but couldn't find anything that really addressed the question. To me, I read "Arcane Surge grants [x]% more spell damage" as different from "supported skills deal [x]% more spell damage while you have Arcane Surge", but as specific as GGG is with their wording, sometimes you never fucking know. For instance, I'd think that 3 power charges would each provide their their own 4% more multiplier, granting you a 1.124864 damage multiplier, but PoB just stacks them and applies a 1.12 damage multiplier. So I have no idea. But AS would be pretty insanely overpowered if it worked like it did in my "ideal" scenario, so even without you having testing it, I'd be more likely to believe your setup is better as-is.

Yeah, I figured you'd say that about WoC in the trigger wand. If you're dropping Tempest Shield, you have a few options. Not sure how you're planning on getting Culling Strike and Unnerve into the build--they're both necessary luxuries if you're really trying to push damage, in my opinion--but between CwDT and the trigger wand, you could do some combination of WoC, Blade Blast, Sigil of Power (I just cannot swallow that it deserves its own dedicated setup), Increased AoE (works very well with the three aforementioned skills), and Culling Strike. You could also try an Awakened Hextouch setup with something like Storm Brand (LOL, yes I'm a broken record) where the Sigil was. Tons of possible permutations, plus way more additional options than I can think of.

Maybe Phase Run would be good in that mix, too, if there's room. A hierophant will be generally slower than an elementalist because of less cast speed, so even just more movement speed will probably make him feel better to play.

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Mind Drinker is a great anointment for cheap, on higher budgets go with either Crusader if not wearing Crown of the Inward Eye, or Mana Flows or Aqueous Accelerant if you do.

So if I wear crown of the inward eye, should I use Mind Drinker or Crusader?