Lightning Tendrils

I presume that Tendrils were designed this way to avoid CoCS in a 'legit' way..

When will ggg understand that CoCS is one of the biggest issues preventing intersting spells

Ball lighyning cannot shotgun because of it. Now tendrils..

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

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Heartsease wrote:

It is better to split LT into a single-wave skill like Incinerate -

Lightning Tendril(s)
0.2 sec cast time
4-98 lightning damage at lvl20

We may not yet know it, but I gurantee there is a reason why GGG chose the locked quadra cast over short single bursts. CoCS may be it, but I hope not. I suspect it's more about committed tactical play.

Meh. We'll see how it performs once the collision issues are addressed.

Even if CoCS were the case, who uses incinerate with CoCS? CoCS works best with slower, harder hitting skills and would be useless with the suggested cast speed.

No, this definitely doesn't work well as it is. Compared to my incinerate character that can turn around instantly or get back to running around as soon as a monster is dead, this skill stinks. It's like my character is made of wood and can't bend any limbs.

The only reason I can imagine the skill was made this way was due to the way crits roll per-action. Incinerate can't crit, so it can cast 100000 times a second and never grant a surgeon charge, power charge on crit or whatever other on-crit effects there are. The current tendrils means you only get 1 on-crit trigger per 4 'casts', which I think must be why.

However, that's a bad limitation to have on your skill development. If it's possible, then it should definitely be changed so that you can turn around while channeling the 4 casts of this skill. Sadly moving without waiting for the 4 casts to finish would still be impossible without having some kind of cooldown on the skill to prevent animation cancelling allowing fast on-crit triggers.

I'm hoping this skill sees some improvements. Its damage is fine, but using it just feels clunky and slow.

Feedback is for a new witch now at level 37 who is not self found (had starter gear ready to go with some gems).

Current Tree:

I will say I am absolutely steam rolling content. I happened to find a really nice +1 lightning es shield in A1 with almost 30% spell damage. I managed to link together Lightning Tendrils and Added Lightning Damage with the +1 shield. With the help of a level 1 Elron ring, early content was a joke. While initially I was planning on doing a power charge build, I tested to learn that you can only generate 1 power charge per crit even with the 4 hits. So needless to say I was a bit sad. However, when this skill crits, it is death on the screen.

Now I am going w/ a 4L:
Tendrils + Spell Echo + Added Lightning + Lightning Penetration

I plan on picking up all the shock nodes + Eldritch Battery, then going into the Templar tree for the AoE and elemental nodes. Tendrils goes absolutely perfectly with Herald of Thunder. Amount of shock kills synergies perfectly with the proximity of Tendrils cast range. After I make it to Merciless, I will post a follow up review.

PS - I haven't been experiencing desync like other people have been posting. The skill feels powerful and fast.

While I initially loved LT, it allready reminded me why crit is so much better then noncrit.

I need to invest 12 points into Shockduration/chance. Still doesnt shock consistently enough since the hits are fast, but small.

makes me sad panda : (

Aoe - It is cleave shaped. Pumping aoe nodes into a build results in a wide arc with medium depth. Allows for concentrated effect while keeping some semblance of aoe (if you want).

Opinion - The aoe portion works, but not my favorite. A deep arc with a medium width sounds better.

Damage - It can do pretty good damage. It can also do pretty crappy damage. The 4 hits being tied together makes this into an uncontrollable burst damage skill. The low critical chance further fits the uncontrollable burst genre.

Opinion - A negative for me. I had to use pcoc and assassins mark just to keep my 5 power charges up. Got up to ~50% critical chance, but the way the 4 hits function started to show much more. The damage is technically pretty good, but the way the skill works just kept me from enjoying it.

Support gems - Not very many options, but that can be a good thing. Making a 4 link with curse on hit or life leech and mana leech, seemed like a viable option. In other words, the gem functions pretty well on it's own, leaving the support gems to a more personal flavor role.

Final thoughts - Solid trash mob clearer. Lackluster boss killer. Not the best at anything, but not the worst at anything. I think the channel and aoe are going to turn more people away than it attracts. The graphics are pretty (as always, go art team!).

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elboyo wrote:

I know that it doesn't work with CoC and other triggers, but -

Does this gem work when supported by the Trap gem?

It appears that it does not, to my great dismay. Tried shoving it in fencoil, nothing happened. tried regular trap gem, still wasn't getting trapped.
For a bit I thought "Does Trap only work with attacks now??" but then after some looking it seems that Trap just will not cast spells that emit 'From your hands' ala the description of Lightning Tendrils and Incinerate.

Pretty disappointing, since, while i assumed an incinerate trap would be pretty shit, and hence never tried it. I didn't think it would be kept from being trapped up. And now lightning tendrils comes out, and it seems like an actually interesting candidate for traps. And apparently traps have a hidden restriction about the spells you can use!

LT does enough damage to stun even rare mobs and mobs are like getting shocks. I like it !
I prefer fat and jagged lightning trail rather than thin and supple though.

I've just tried Vaal Oversoul with LT and being smashed on ultra-desync (I knew it lol). It's impossible to control.

Currently testing Lightning Tendrils as the main skill on my lvl 58 Scion with the main focus on AoE without crit. Currently i use it a 4L with Lightning Penetration, Faster Casting and Added Chaos but i have several other support gems leveling offhand for testing. Also testing synergies with Herald of Ice and of course Thunder.
So far i mostly agree with what Opinionated wrote (except on the support gems) and the following is a summary of my own experience:

Damage:
*Low base damage: Its own damage is pretty low and only about half of what LMP or even GMP Incinerate can pump out but you have the benefit of doing 2/3 of your full damage from the start (before shock) compared to only 1/4 for Incinerate (only considering AoE since single target isn't even comparable).
*Shock is mandatory: Aquiring shock chance and duration via either crits or passive shock nodes is not an option but a must to get a decent damage output. The upside is that this synergizes very well with the also new HoT.
*Damage Range: I generally really like the high damage range of lightning skills but in this case it doesn't work out well. The damage seems to be rolled once per cast so you are often stuck with doing almost no damage at all for a while until you get a higher roll and a crit/shock going, which can be insanely annoying (literally took me 5+ seconds a few times to kill a trash mob and no, i was not desynced at that time and was dealing just a tiny bit of damage ;)).
I would highly recommend closing the damage range for this skill a little to avoid the frustration this often causes. Instead of 21-392 at lvl 20 maybe tune it to 41-372. This would still keep the flavour of lightning = high damage range but make it just a little bit more consistent. Alternatively, the damage could be rolled per hit and not per cast, of course.

AoE Coverage:
*Angle: The angle looks like ~120° from the visuals most of the time, feels like ~150° but a lot of tests with totems in the Vaal ruins have shown it to be around 180°. Generally i'd say it is just about right and even a little bit less (~165°) would still feel ok.
*Range: The range falls just a little bit short of being ok (pun intended). With a considerable investment in AoE nodes and/or gear you can gain a decent range but personally i think it should be just a bit larger. About +2-4 to its base range would seem ideal from what i can tell so far but as an alternative to buffing the base range, i'd love to see a slight range increase from gem quality.
Although to a lesser extent, it too seems to suffer from the same issues with client/server synchronization as Cleave.

Synergy with different Support Gems and Heralds:
*Lightning Penetration: Mandatory if you mainly focus on lightning damage as for all single element skill combinations.
*Faster Casting vs Spell Echo: FC shortens the animation and gives a medium to high DpS increase depending on your build so this works really well. Echo gives a much bigger DpS increase but locks you in the animation for a longer time (+33% animation time @ lvl 1) so it acts like a double-edged sword.
*Added X Damage and Heralds: Lightning simply increases your base damage but keeps the huge range between min and max damage so i personally don't like it here but HoT has awesome synergies with a sufficient chance to shock.
Cold and HoI work well for builds that mostly scale elemental or spell damage and are great for crit buids.
Chaos works well for builds that mostly scale spell damage, especially since it gives the greatest boost to min damage which makes it great for leveling in mid levels. Later on you will most likely scale either lightning damage or crit so it might be less effective for endgame.
*Crit Chance/Damage and Power Charge on Crit: Not much to say besides that they are pretty much mandatory for a crit build if you want to scale from just 5% base critchance so it's well in line with other lightning spells.
*Life Leech: Havn't really tested it but for leveling Cybil's seems much more effective although LL should work decently well when used with Conc. Effect.
*Increased AoE vs Concentrated Effect: Because of the rather small base range, conc. effect is barely usable if you want to keep it as an AoE unless you have a significant investment in range increase from other sources.
Increased AoE, on the other hand, might even be mandatory for builds that want to focus on other passives (see above in the AoE section).
Currently my take would be to use inc. aoe for clearing when i get a 5L and swith to conc. effect for bosses and tough rare mobs.


Current Conclusion:
The skill is fun to play but you seem to really have to build around it to make it work decently. Clearing is fast and mostly enjoyable solo but the just a little bit too small base AoE, the lack of punch against tougher mobs with just a 4L and the sometimes overly long duration of doing abysmally low damage because of the damage roll per cast make it feel lackluster in some points, especially in party play.
Maybe i just havn't found out yet how to use it more efficiently and my build is far from finished so my view on some of the issues may change and i will either update this post or post again later.

I like the skill, damage seems ok so far for it's AOE, sound can be better and graphics and animation are cool (although I would have loved real lightning) only it should fire from the hands and not the armpits ;)

Two things I suppose will get fixed soon:

Damage collision: as other players stated, clicking on a mob doesn't get the character close enough to hit with the spell, instead it gets close and fires the spell into the air. I don't really notice this as I always use stand still attack.

Desync: this is a strange one, some players have it others don't. Since I started using this skill I desync like crazy..and I mean complete packs out of their position etc..not the usual lone mob that is desynced. Really strange this did go unnoticed during testing?

One thing I hope they change in the future:

4 casts counted as one: this takes a lot of the enjoyment from many skills for me. Either you crit/shock/deal high or low dps four times in a row or don't. It just adds more RNG to the RNG fest. Absolutely bad for lightning where, in my opinion, having fast cast time should flatten the low-high dps range. For crit and shock maybe even worse as the gap between no crit/shock streaks gets bigger..it also makes spell echo a no no for this skill. Man I really hope GGG changes this in the future

All in all a cool and nice addition to the arsenal, in my opinion balanced between AOE and damage, but needs some immediate attention wrt to desync and damage collision.

Cheers, Necro

LEVELING GEAR



I'm leveling my last few characters to 65 in rampage at the moment.....

My observation using my crap leveling gear:

LT is awesome, I have 4.2K dps at level 38, this guy is currently level 60 with 11.5K tooltip dps. I can imagine the damage would be spectacular with real gear and a level 20 gem set-up.

It basically 1 shots any trash mob up to docks merc.... I started farming merc docks at level 54 easily haha