Elemental Hit

Projectile, not weapon.
There is a thread about Quillrain where it was clarified again.

Back then, the popular combination was EA+LMP+GMP with QR.
When Projectile damage applied, that combination suddenly did 65% less damage.
Though we should really not discuss this in the feedback thread for EH.^^

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

The explosion of the fuses is non-weapon, projectile damage, and is thus not affected by weapon damage modifiers, such as Quill Rain's "50% less Weapon Damage". It is affected by projectile damage modifiers.
The damage from the arrows themselves is projectile weapon damage, so is affected.

oops didn't mean to post this here

The exciting thing for me about this skill isn't the actual added damage, it's the fact that you're giving us a weapon attack gem at 100% damage effectiveness that costs only 4 mana. You could stack a ridiculous amount of support on it, and the mana cost would still be very modest compared to any other skill.

In fact, which is better - high level unsupported Elemental Hit, or level 1 Elemental Hit with one or more high-level Adds Elemental Damage supports? It seems to me that the latter would have a much lower mana cost, so it might be a bad idea to level up the base skill even on characters that focus on weapon elemental damage, depending on how they plan to support the gem.

EH scales pretty decently though, IIRC around lvl 15 it can hit for 500-600. Where as Added Chaos and Added Lightning won't add nearly as much.

With how much more common and how huge multiplicative modifiers are (Critical Damage, Weapon Elemental Damage, Attack Speed), the base damage that this gives is on a completely different scale than any other skill in the game.

"

Lezli wrote:

With how much more common and how huge multiplicative modifiers are (Critical Damage, Weapon Elemental Damage, Attack Speed), the base damage that this gives is on a completely different scale than any other skill in the game.

yeah, in conjunction will quill rain (even with the massive penalty to overall damage) you will put more damage on a single target than anyone else in the game in as much time.

my build was heatshiver, quill rain, blood magic (duelist) with as much health as i could get, in addition to iron grip+str. socketted in the heatshiver (which ups ele hit by 2 levels, adding an absurd amount of damage) was inc critical damage, weapon elemental damage, and faster attacks. the cost was somewhere around 50 per shot, or roughly 200-300hp per second just spent attacking, depending on whether or not you also build up some frenzy charges first.

with around 700% critical strike damage, 1200 hp @ 65, 4.4 APS without frenzy and a base crit of 22 this build was absolutely ridiculous in terms of killing a single target. I downed kraityn in 2 seconds. on merciless.

diamond flasks are, of course, still absurdly broken, but when you see how hard this crits (and also freezes, burns, and shocks the target multiple times per second) your health and 'lack' of aoe become completely irrelevant.

hell i didn't even have problems with aoe as i had piercing shots, i'd just run back a bit, pop diamond and fire in the direction of the group and everything died in short order. haven't played it since chain was introduced, can't even imagine the kind of pain that would put out now.