Elemental Hit

You'll need Soul Taker to sustain its mana cost.

I would actually like to reiterate that the mana costs on this are extremely high for practically no reason. Infernal Blow builds (another elemental attack gem) are still fairly cheap manawise and are very effective, but to use this with any links skyrockets the mana used. Nobody can sustain such a thing without Soul Taker (which isn't the easiest thing to get). I would love to use this, but currently its not possible. Please lower the mana cost, if you have to lower the damage by all means, but do SOMETHING to make this gem usable. Thank you.

It seems, this gem is supposed to be used with wands. Wands are the only weapon, that benefits from it, and wanders usually have a lot of mana anyways.

Why the hell is this skill so bad with mana resources? Oh man, its absurd!

Shhh, keep a silent vigil for the fallen.

I wanted to build a Ranger around EH and thought I should get as much elemental damage as I can, so I was naturally also going to include Wrath and Anger in my build. The setup for 4L would be: Elemental Hit + Weapon Elemental Damage + Life Leech + Blood Magic (+Faster Attacks), this is for single target of course.

I had two problems with that:
1) The damage is low
2) The life cost here was larger than the amount I leeched back, so I was slowly killing myself every time I fought a boss.

The way around this was to simply use Frenzy instead of Elemental Hit which has a lower mana (life) cost and because of the increased attack speed more damage, even with 0% quality and 3 frenzy charges.

Of course this isn't bad in itself if there are other better uses for the Gem. I remember in the old days of CB that I once felt very powerful with such a setup, but now it looks like it has been nerfed too much.



tl;dr wanted to build a ranger around EH but frenzy has better dps and lower mana cost, which I don't like

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blurgh wrote:

tree

You built this wrong. You want Projectile%, you don't go out of your way to avoid it.

You also ignore the Templar area as it is merely a pipe dream. You can expand into the Shadow for Projectile% and his massive Aura node. Those 5% elemental damage nodes at the shadow area? More efficient than than the ~4.44% damage per point getting Catalyse gives you. And even they are garbage tier - you're much better off grabbing Crit instead if you want moar damage.

With the Anger and Wrath auras up, you can get into the 5,000 dp's with even jank gear. The damage isn't amazing, no, especially with LITERALLY EVERY MONSTER IN ACT 3 SHRUGGING OFF 75% OF YOUR DAMAGE... But it can actually kill things.

The major weakness in the build besides Act 3, is that Ranger+Shadow is the ideal combination for raw damage, but is completely anemic in life%. You're basically locked into Energy Shield and using Evasion (and therefore one supposed benefit of Dex) is a complete farce. Acrobatics could be located into a worse location, but just barely.

If you had the mana with which to actually use Elemental Hit more than one time in a row. Which no one does. Frankly I'm astonished it's still even possible to use with Blood Magic without killing yourself immediately.

Frenzy is indeed completely better in every way. God knows - especially with Ranged Physical Damage now in the game.

I turned this thing all around, there is no way to get half decent end game dps with this skill without having huge mana problems. You're literally locked in using mana leech + life leech meaning you have to settle with a measly 3 dps support gems at best. It can then perform decently against bosses, but is then unusable against packs (using melee splash would mean only 2 damages support). I don't get why even offer the option to use it on melee if it has to be so trash tier with melee weapons.

I kinda wish it would just do all three elements at once instead of just only doing one of the three types randomly. Maybe then it would be worth the high mana cost when elemental boosts come into play with all three types at once.

RIP.
I've never heard anybody say that EH is overpowered yet you nerf the DMG lower than any flat damage in the game AND it cost nearly 500 Mana to cast with a 6L. Terrible nerf GGG.