Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page

how much mana/mana reg is require for MoM?

@DarkRogue_3: 1. Jewels are something you have to buy just like gear. There's simply too many affixes on them to be lucky enough and find multiple ones for this build through drops.

Cobalt Jewels can roll 14-18% crit with lightning skills (prefix), 8-12% global crit (suffix), 10-14% crit chance for spells (suffix) and 10-14% crit chance with elemental skills (suffix), which all affect this build. Here's a complete list of Cobalt Jewel mods, i'll add it somewhere later in the guide: http://poeaffix.net/jw-cobalt.html

2. What i meant is that due to splitting damage nearly 50:50 into cold and lightning, the additional 3% on one element got less effective for reflect mitigation. It surely is still good to tank some specific enemies, but if they can kill you with 85% res, they could also with 88%. You get more by spending the points for almost 2 jewel sockets, which can grant you 14% life and damage to burst down said enemies faster.

5. That is true, but we are most vulnerable while casting, at which we happen to stand still.

The build has more survivability than before, reflect is about as likely to kill you as it was in the last patch. This new setup is more laid out for situational gem switches, such as what you need to counter curse immunity etc. but also offers an even more fluent playstyle while you don't need to adapt to these specific situations.

The spell damage nodes give us more raw damage, which translates into higher shock and freeze duration and enables us to simply freeze higher content. It also puts a bit more ease on mana cost per second, but that wasn't much of a problem anyway.

Vaal Storm Call is basically free damage for ~6s for one cast, while you can continue arcing. With normal Storm Call you'd have to manually cast each of the markers, and can't deal additional damage with Arc in the meantime.
The one use per boss is not perfect i agree, but it's just the way it is. It will still deal a good amount of damage in the longest bossfights to be worth it.

I'll have a look on Ice Bite once it's fixed, thanks!


@TheImmortal: Thanks! Hope you'll have a blast with this build.


@kylelurty: Yeah should work. You may want some projectile speed on the tree, but i can't say for sure, haven't played around with the new Spark yet.


@Nishrek: I agree with Vaaroth here, a 5L with defensive stats is better. Tabula is only a temporary chest to use until you can afford something better.


@Chieftain_Joe: Thanks! Basically any of the gems, with exception of the non-max level (CwDt setup) are worth corrupting, but only Arc and Empower are worth buying corrupted with +1 lvl, anything else is not worth the money for little gain. You could level a copy of the more impactful gems in your second weapon slot, so you have a backup if the corruption hits worst case.

I'll somehow include tomorrow which gems to put quality and which not, for now i badly need some sleep.


@namkro: I'd say about 650 unreserved mana and 130 mana regen.

What about dual curse and dropping bloodrage/frenzy charges all together. Can free up some of the life regen/mana nodes you grab from the templar starter. You can then add assassin's mark or enfeeble for group play. Seems like it would add alot more surviability for minimal dps loss. You could also swap in power charge on critical only for solo boss fights and use another gem in your main arc attack for clearing.

Would swapping out Arc for Ball Lightning for boss fights be a bad idea? I feel Arc is good for clearing packs but for tough boss fights with lots of kiting, Ball Lightning would be the better choice.

Thanks again for the comments, I appreciate it and enjoy the discussion.

With regard to the Jewels, I somehow thought they obeyed the same rules as equipment did, and assumed that every Crit-related modifier was a Suffix, but based on that link, it appears some of the ones for Jewels are prefixes, and they also get a lot more variety in elemental sub-types. Very interesting. I'll try to look up some better Jewels, but as you say, getting one via a drop is next to impossible, but trying to buy one with the appropriate affixes to be considered 'good' for this build is also fairly expensive (random search on poe.trade with a couple crit/life/mana/spell damage affixes yielded only a handful of results, all in the multi-exalted range -- way outside of my budget.)

I just burned about 300 Fuses trying to 6L unsuccessfully as well. :/
It will take some time to replenish that stock for another attempt.

Regarding the flasks, I can see both sides here -- on one hand, there is the view that "It's only 3%" but on the other, "It's 3% closer to immunity." by the time we're at 85% resistance, that extra 3% reduces the remaining 15% damage by a relative 20%. I'll have to try it, though, since you are indicating that it is not necessary, and would be 3 very valuable skill points we can use.

On the topic of Arctic Armor, I've never used it before, so I had no idea if it required you to be standing still for X seconds before the damage reduction kicked in, or if even just the short time spent in a casting animation qualified. It sounds to me like you are saying it's the latter?

Thanks for the explanation on the Spell Damage and Vaal Storm Call. For the latter, I suppose that makes sense, in that you're using it as an additional burst of damage on top of Arc; I had originally thought you meant to have Storm Call exclusively for single target bosses where Arc was at a disadvantage because it couldn't chain off a single enemy.

For the former, for some reason I thought we had more Spell Damage, but it looks like we only have 204% total Lightning Damage, or 174% if we switch those Witch nodes to Cast Speed. As long as the DPS stays about the same, I suppose it's fine to go for slower but heavier hitting hits. It's easier on Mana, after all, although I do recall you saying that high Cast Speed was necessary to overcome Lightning's inherently large damage range.

As to Ice Bite, it looks like a patch was just deployed to fix it, along with some other bugfixes and nerfing of some particularly nasty enemies. The wording on it seems a bit vague to me, as I'm not sure if it requires HoI itself to make the kill to count, but if it works, it'll provide the highest chance of granting Frenzy Charges. Please let me know how your testing goes in that regard; I would love to not have to deal with Blood Rage's degen, haha.

@Oldswole
The dual cursing setup was part of the 2.0 version of this build, but I always feel that curses are unreliable -- once you encounter curse immunity or curse reflection, all the defensive mechanics you've placed on it become useless. That's my issue with it at least.

How much has this build improved in 2.1 now with more chains and more mana overall?

Also, what are the pro/con to using a low life variant arc build with shavs?

So you're now relying solely on Warlord's Mark for life leech, am I seeing this right? How does that work in boss fights?
I'd really like to use a lvl4 Empower (just using level 3 boosts my tooltip dps from 65k to 77k) but I don't feel safe at all without Life Leech. What are your thoughts on that?

What are your thoughts about the new Skyforth Sorcerer Boots? Do you think that dropping PCoC for more dmg and relying on their inherent 25% PCoC could be a viable choice? True, we'd lose a lot of life and resistances, but I think you could make up for those somewhere else.

@Oldswole: Like DarkRogue_3 pointed out, dualcurse was a part of this build last patch but i removed it due to more flexibility. There was also the possibility of some +1 curse jewel mentioned, so in hindsight of that i took out Whispers of Doom and would get dual curse if that jewel ever makes it into the game.

@fooloo: I don't feel that it's required, but you can of course do that if you want to.

@DarkRogue_3: Good life jewels are unfortunately expensive. Even for the pretty basic jewels i got linked in guide i've paid about an ex each. But it's something you can try rolling yourself easily, alt for life, aug and if you hit a good mod, regal.

Arctic Armour works whenever you're standing still, no matter how long, and even while moving the chilling trails you leave can be used for your advantage. It's more effective physical reduction than the bonus we got to our Granite through flask nodes.
Especially once you get a Coil, we are far more durable to physical damage now.

The thing about cast speed is correct, but i feel we still get enough even without those 9% and it was a compromise to be made for better high level mapping.

I will check out Ice Bite once i'm high enough in Talisman. I know for sure that the HoI explosion has to land the killing blow because i already tested this on multiple occassions, but i haven't tested yet how well it works with this particular setup.

@Nephalim: I've gained about 200 unreserved mana and ~30 mana regen while investing 3 points less into mana. The extra chains and damage are sure noticeable, especially the fact that people can reach 7 chains now without needing a Lv21 Arc or leveled Empower.
With all the other changes i've made i can say this build is substantially better than in the last patch.

I've played around with this gear and gems setup before the patch on a test char in standard and had no problems in 80+ maps, highlight was probably deathless -max dual conservatory vaal. I'll work on some videos once i'm less busy in Talisman, for now this league got me hooked too much.

The pros of low life are obviously more damage, more auras and possibly slightly higher hitpool, though i'm not so sure about that without a shield. You'll also have an excuse to take the +1 max Light Res + ES node. Cons are no flasks, status ailment vulnerability, no Mind over Matter and Blood Rage would conflict with ES recharge, though i may drop it anyway if HoI + Ice Bite works good enough.
All in all, i'm definitely more comfortable playing a life version.

@BundesHeinz: That's correct. I've laid out the build for more flexibility and the ability to easily switch gems for certain situations, while offering a better result than in last patch when you don't need these situational adaptions.

If the bossfight requires it, you could always take out CoH and cast Warlords manually, or switch Empower with Life Leech. Though in my experience running 80+ maps with the weaker version before patch, you'll often get away with Warlords applied from the packs around the boss. Some bosses should be skipped with this build anyway such as all T15, maybe Excavation and a few others. I'll include a list once i'm less hooked on Talisman.

Skyforth boots are insane and would work extremely well in this build. But they're said to be ilvl84 restricted, thus we won't see many on the market and their price will be high.
I think someone who can afford them though, will also be able to adapt the build around them.

Hi there,

first of all, thank you for this guide!

I'm planning to use this build for Talisman HC league.
Since I'm a noob and not very experienced I have a rather simple question:

You say in your progression guide:
"Once you've entered the Cavern of Wrath, go to town to claim Firestorm and craft yourself a +1 Fire gems weapon."
According to the Quest rewards in the wiki, I'd also have the option to get the Arc gem as a reward.
Shouldn't I be getting that?

At which point am I switching to the Arc gem?


Thank you in advance for your reply!

Kyle1911: Hey there! You'll get both gems, one from quest reward and the other from gem vendor, which is unlocked there after this quest.

Switch to Arc when the gem hits around Lv16 (for 6th chain), but keep Flame Totem as single target.

Goodluck in HC!