Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page

No, there is no Life Leech from the tree -- even if this build did somehow pick any of them up, they wouldn't apply to us because none of it applies to spells. The tree currently picks up 3% Life Regeneration instead, which regenerates 3% of your maximum life every second (with 4000 Life, that is 120 Life per second.) I feel that this value is actually quite low unless we can manage to stack much more, and leech from the gem would help to a much higher degree.

@Vaaroth
I certainly welcome less reliance on curses, and want to like Frenzy Charge generation via Blood Rage, but as it stands, I'm quite stumped as to how it really works out -- I only have a single respec right now after all, so I want to make sure I know what I'm getting into before I use it.

Blood Rage here takes the place of Poacher's Mark, which is largely fine because the latter was a curse while the former is standalone and will work through curse immune maps and such. However, it does come with two major downsides:

First, the 4% degen is higher than our passive 3% regen meaning while it's active we are slowly losing Life unless we can supplement the healing somehow, and simultaneously our energy shield will be stripped and prevented from regenerating, exposing us to a myriad of other vulnerabilities.

The other issue is that, although as spellcasters we gain very limited benefits from both skills, Blood Rage doesn't benefit from Poacher's Mark's double flask charge generation. Granted, I'm unsure how much of an impact this really has since I'm not always spamming all my flasks, but it's about the only other thing Poacher's Mark has that we actually benefit from.

As far as I can tell, both require killing an enemy with their respective effects active to trigger a chance at a Frenzy Charge, and the curse has a higher potential chance to grant one. Unfortunately, Poacher's Mark is a curse and is useless in curse-immune maps, whereas Blood Rage will still work. It's a bit of a tossup here, and I can more or less go either way.

The biggest issue for me is the survivability aspect. The degen being greater than the regen is disconcerting, especially when there exists no way I can see of supplementing that via Leech short of using a Flask, or summoning a Rejuvenation Totem.

Regarding Leech on Wands, this is not always an option, particularly if you use uniques such as the Void Battery, but even on Rare wands, you may not have the affix slot open to craft Catarina's leech mod onto it.

The other method, then, is via Warlord's Mark. Unfortunately, this suffers from the same downside as Poacher's mark -- it's a curse, and thus may be unreliable or outright unusable against enemies that are curse-immune, or in maps that make everything curse-immune, or worse yet, reflect curses back at you.

I did a Zana mission just the other day where the entire map had the property of curse-reflection, and I had to disable all four of my curses and just go with Power Charges and Life Leech via their gems.

Even if Warlords Mark solves the 'issues' 90% of the time, there still exists those situations where it won't help, and in those worst-case scenarios, I can't see any way of getting around it.

In this case, Blood Rage and Enduring Cry alongside PCoC would allow us curse-free charge generation, but at the expense of more self-casting / less automation, and the fact that I'm still not certain how the new build is set up to deal with it all.

Finally, none of this helps with my concerns over reflect enemies -- setting aside the reflect maps I'd probably avoid with this character anyway, those random reflect rares walking around are the bigger concern. Since I've learned to spot their auras visually I've been able to react in time and I have not died to a reflect rare since, but there are plenty of times where it was close, between the extra resistances and the Life Leech offsetting what I was losing.

I don't know that Vaal Pact would be the way to go though, at least with the way the build is currently set up, because that would disable all the Life Regeneration nodes that were picked up.

Finally done rewriting this guide from scratch!

@NoLifeMahouny: Would you rather play a half-assed port to Pledge of Hands, or a build optimized to make best use of the staff? Arc is really popular atm, it's just a matter of time for a solid PoH Crit Arc guide to pop up.
However, i won't include it in this guide. The reasons have been stated way too many times already.


@DarkRogue_3: 1. The loss of crit can easily be made up through jewels, which on top also add life and more stats.

2. With CotB our damage is split 50:50 into two elements of which we both mitigate 75%, or 85% of one part with Topaz up. Together with the mana buff and higher life achievable through jewel sockets, reflect won't kill you if there's enemies around to leech from.
A single enemy is more dangerous, but there's always the option to skip that one.

3. That 1% is less than it sounds and can easily be outflasked. You will also leech enough back with Warlords Mark, Catarinas mod is more convenience and because i could, but it's not needed. If you feel Blood Rage degen becomes a problem, turn it off. Especially in bossfights without adds you don't need it anyway.

4. That, and because it's easier to get 4off than 4off on Lightning Coil and because the green slot enables us to run no regen maps.

5. Arctic Armour is great, especially with Coil and a good Granite or Taste of Hate.
You can always switch out Vaal haste + Inc Dur for CwDt Forst Wall if you feel like it.


@namkro: Included a leveling section. Basically, level with Firestorm + Flame Totem until Lv16 Arc.


@memberx: Read my reply to DarkRogue_3. With a pack around the reflect rare we leech enough to not one shot us. If it's a single enemy with too much life, just skip it.
Vaal Pact wouldn't really change any of this.


@Nishrek: While the double curse was good, it wasn't good enough to be worth the investment. If there's any form of double curse jewel coming, the setup will find its way back to this build.


@ne0xin: Flasks and leech from Warlord's Mark.


@Vaaroth: This is correct observation.

Seems way to risky for me on reflect :/ I'll just use leech for the moment until i figure something out :)

@DarkRogue

I've been playing with a life leech gem instead of an empower as I don't have one yet so I can't say I've been following the build as it stands now, but with life leech socketted it's more than enough to sustain the blood rage degeneration, just as long as your constantly hitting things. If you do have an empower though, I've tried taking out my life leech gem and used a doryani's invitation belt for just the .2% life leech and it's able to keep me topped, obviously slower than the life leech gem but it still works. Adding Catarina life leech would make it even better but like you brought up that's not a possibility for some people. The loss of our energy shield is pretty unfortunate though, as that for me was a large part of my EHP.

I have no problems maintaining flasks even without the witch flask nodes, the 7 chains from my level 20 arc makes sure that I have lots of monsters to feed flasks off of.

Warlord's mark being on HoT/HoI as a curse on hit does make it unreliable for curse immune and reflect maps, however I believe we can forgo the use of it in those maps and run enduring cry instead for endurance charges and its small life regen buff, although I don't think the life regen is really needed.

I haven't had many serious problems with reflect mobs, so long as I'm popping my topaz flask before attacking them. I'd assume with a small amount of leech like just using doryani's invitation you'd have to do some kiting. Worst comes to worst you could always just keep a life leech gem in your inventory and swap it out when fighting scary mobs, but I don't think this is really necessary.

Thanks for the responses, I think I'm seeing the reasoning behind your choices. I don't know that I agree with all of them, though, but as I'm not yet experienced enough with the game's mechanics, I hope you don't mind my discussing it a bit more for a better understanding.

1. Regarding Jewels, I suppose I need to try to look into this more. I know we discussed this a little while ago but most of the Jewels I find are complete crap, or can't decide what class/playstyle they want to support. Still, with four Jewel slots available, and I believe the highest Crit Chance roll on Jewels is 14% for Spells, that would only be 56% worth of Crit, although as you say, we could potentially get many other benefits from them. I've just never seen any Jewels that are any good drop so I put very little stock into them personally.

2. CotB does indeed split the damage in half, but due to the conversion, the Cold part gets all of the Lightning Damage modifiers, plus the Cold Damage modifiers, does it not? This would make the Cold Portion technically more than 50% of the total resulting damage, but either way it seems like this wasn't the primary reason for your switch to Cold Penetration. Still, I was under the impression that resistances were much more useful the closer you could get them to 100%. Reflect aside, I imagine getting an extra 3% resist for other elements could be useful against specific enemies.

3. The reliance on flasking and Warlord's Mark is one of the reasons I was feeling a bit iffy about this change. I'll agree for boss fights, the couple Frenzy Charges probably aren't necessary (and it wasn't something I could really count on before anyway.)

4. This I think makes the most sense to me. Having that green slot there offers extra versatility for swapping in Mana Leech, which I did not think about, and works well since Cold Penetration with the CotB should function essentially exactly the same as Lightning Penetration does. However, I don't know that I'll ever have a Lightning Coil, and I'm pretty invested in the Kingsguard at this point, so I'll see how that goes.

5. I'll have to look into Arctic Armor. I was under the impression that it only really "worked" while you were stationary (for how long, I have no idea) which kind of conflicts with this build's playstyle of cast and run.

Taking it all together, along with the points I've made to Vaaroth, I suppose I simply like more potential consistency in survivability? Curses are great when they work, but I don't like the idea that a major part of self-recovery is tied to Warlord's Mark and becomes disabled when you run into curse-immunity/curse-reflection. Reflect also seems dicier, although I can see how you could potentially pull through with a pack of Warlords Marked enemies.

Considering I don't have a level 3 or 4 Empower yet (only have a level 2 one and it takes forever to level up) I think I will continue to run Life Leech gem for now, primarily for more 'peace of mind' as I feel safer with it, even given your changes. I feel like I want to play with a modified build that merges your current tree with parts of your previous build -- I'm okay with dropping to a single curse setup, but until I have some actual decent Jewels, I'll probably pick up the Crit nodes and Flask nodes for the time being.

I am wondering about the switch from Cast Speed nodes to Spell Damage nodes, though -- was there specific math involved in this change, or did you simply decide that as long as you achieved over 5 casts per second there was no longer any point to more Cast Speed?

One thing I want to consider from this conversation, though, is the other alternative method of Frenzy Charge generation. It's currently bugged so we can't test it until GGG fixes it, but considering over half our damage is cold, and we Crit often enough to reliably freeze, what do you think about Herald of Ice + Curse on Hit + Warlord's Mark + Ice Bite? Ice Bite should perform the same task of providing charges on kill without being a Curse and without the degeneration of Blood Rage.

Regarding Vaal Storm Call and 'regular' Storm Call -- what is the difference between these two skills? I've not used either of them before, so I'm not sure how they differ, but does the Vaal version do significantly more single target damage than Storm Call? My reasoning is that the Vaal version can only be cast once per boss fight (typically) while regular Storm Call can probably be used as the 'main' spell cast in place of Arc against single target bosses.

@Vaaroth
I'm more or less doing the same; Running Life Leech and using lots of Energy Shield to increase effective HP, especially since the high amount of INT naturally provides us a good bonus to Energy Shield. Not having ES is tricky, as I had issues with my previous Witch when she went EB/MoM.

I'll agree that Warlords Mark is easily swapped out for Enduring Cry, though, and is my plan for specific fights.

As far as reflect goes, I haven't had any issues either, but that's because of both the flask and the Life Leech gem currently, and I'm afraid that will change if I alter this. I cannot utilize leech from anywhere else (certainly cannot use the belt) because I am just barely going to be able to cap my resists as it is with each of my gear basically being tri-res at this point. My belt is also the only thing giving me 30% Chaos resist right now, haha.

One of the best guides I've read, you can tell you've put a lot of effort and time into creating this so just wanted to say you've done a good job making this guide will definitely try it in the talisman league

this should also work with spark as my main skill right? The new spark is working pretty good for me.

Ok, so how important are links with this build? I have a choice to run Tabula Rasa or 5L rare (I have a 5L white armor, and I plan to alchem it).
I suppose rare will be better, because for now, as some other folks, I use Life Leech gem (because I have no Empower lv 2+ yet).
But still I want to ask some betetr players

@Nishrek I would use the 5L rare. Running a tabula is good for damage output but you have no defensive affixes on the one piece of gear that's supposed to give you the most. If you think you can out damage enemies before they can kill you then run the tabula, but I would play it safe with the 5l rare.

It's great to see how this guide got a complete and indept update, and so soon after the 2.1 patch release! I will definitely build my witch around this guide again!

I see you changed Alira for Oak on normal. Well, time to farm some orb of regrets :D

In the 2.0 guide, you also had a list which gems need quality the most (or at all). Will you add this again in a future update? Or maybe, which spells are especially rewarding when getting a corrupted lvl21 version of them? Are there any which are worth the investment except for arc?

BR and thanks for such a great guide!