Elemental Hit

Only way I see this being viable is taking all of the reduced mana nodes on the passive skill tree. Last I checked it was about a 50%ish reduction, which would bring it into reasonable range. Thing is, you're spending an awful lot of skill points just to make it mana efficient, you still have to worry about life/mana/regen/damage.

It was reduced in the new patch 1.3, but it said it was only by "around 1 mana per level" does anybody have a confirmed new mana cost yet for this skill?

Ele Hit might not really be viable as a main skill at the moment, but I have found one use for it where it outperforms all my alternatives.

I'm running an Ele wander with Piscator's, using Kinetic Blast as my main skill. I used to use Power Siphon as a secondary for single target, but i switched to Elemental Hit because my calculations show that the flat added elemental damage is much more impactful than Power Siphon's 125% damage effectiveness in this build. I actually did the math, and in my case Ele Hit at level 20 does about 20-25% more Base damage than Power Siphon (which doesn't even include the additional 80% crit chance from a 20% quality ele hit). I don't need the charges from Power Siphon as I run PCoC with KB anyways.

Mana cost isn't much of an issue because I only run it on a 4 Link as it's not my main skill. The mana cost however is ridiculous for a 4 Link, it's the same as my main skill on a 5 Link.

It is kind of under-climatic that my entire poe career is going to come up to one small forum post on a small corner of the forum.

Across multiple accounts (that I used one at a time, none of that unhonorable bot farming) I have played since closed beta, donated over 100$ to GGG for is amazing game, around 800 hours (I stopped keeping track at 600, that's just a rough estimate), leveled my fair share of characters past 80.

I understand those numbers will look quite small when compared to some people, I can't dedicated all my time to this game. Academics, sports, and other general commitments do have priority over path.

Now this is starting to look like just another ramble that will be deleted or moved to general discussion and forgotten. Please bear with me. This post is about Elemental Hit.

For me Elemental hit was love on first sight. It has a fascinating concept, unique scaling, and it was tossed in the garbage can by the community and most importantly: GGG. I have dedicated my path of exile career to this diamond in the rough.

Call me suborn but it took me those 800 hours to concede to the fact every one else knew right from the start.

If you want to have fun or reliable level past 60 or accumulate wealth or consider a 3% attack speed node bad, if you want to achieve at least one of those things DO NOT USE ELEMENTAL HIT.

I have lost track of how many characters I have tried to use this skill with. Low life, wander, old Templar tree, new Templar tree, bm bow, ranger using the ambiguous "projectile damage" nodes that boost the elemental damage of Elemental Hit. I even sat my butt down, made a boring incinerater, spent a month farming up a Drill-neck, used that and Infractem to double the damage of Elemental hit. That character actually killed stuff. However it had 1500 life in merciless and act bosses were killed using a tactical cast on death portal. If I gave it defense from the tree the damage dropped to the point were split arrow aura stack would be better in every situation.

I am currently trying to get my hands on a decent Empower gem, a +3 melee gem 2hander that has a little attack speed and try a get a level 26-28 Elemental hit. It does not give me confidence that the wiki does not have levels past 22. If that does not work I will put it in a +3 melee gem shield with the Empower and a Weapon Elemental Damage. Combine that with a fast attacking high crit wand and try and kill stuff with triple herald and the overkill burn. If that does not work I will have exhausted every possible build and have to put the gem down until GGG fixes it.

I could be wrong, and I would love finding people with similar tastes, but as it stands I consider myself the most experienced user of elemental hit.

If you are still reading my wall of text you should be sufficiently board out of your mind and be more open to suggestion about the gem. I might be preaching to the choir with my suggestion for changes but as it stands these are the factor that I have singled out that make the gem unusable.

Rotate Elements.
This has been talked to death. The only input that I feel needs to be added is if your character is powerful enough to summon millions of damage via Cast on Crit or Mjolner they should at least be able to influence the element they cast. Also, how cool would it be if you knew you were going to fight a cold res monster so before the fight you attacked the wall a few times so your first two attacks would not be cold. You could also use down time or time not attacking the mob to rotate cold to last in line. Doesn't GGG support the little things that separate the good players from the best players?

Give it Area of Effect.
This is the single most reason why Elemental Hit is bad. Ninety-nine percent of situations Elemental hit is outclassed for single target. "Cere_" may Chris rain Shavronne's and Mirrors upon you for actually finding a use for it. Since it is outclassed for single target for ever other player in the game the only alternative is as crowd control. This requires lmp or melee splash. Right off the bat you lose a skill gem spot that could be used for leach or damage. On top of that they innately hinder Elemental hit. Melee splash reduce damage done and increase physical damage done. Its as good at level one as it is at level 20. My suggestion is they vary the AoE for the different elements. Ice uses the Ice Shot cone, Lightning uses the Lightning Arrow effect of striking three nearby enemies with lightning and fire creating a circle of fire in-between static strike and fireball.

Mana Cost.
Not much new things to say. To put it into perspective my most anticipated change in 1.3 was the one mana reduction. One new option we have is take advantage of those mana flask nodes and make some kiss ass mana flasks. Everyone forgets about them, doing that is on my to-do list.

Damage.
Its not entirely fair comparing it to a spell since spells don't get bonus physical damage for the weapon. I can see this becoming a balance nightmare. How can you balance a spell that's damage changes for every player? I actually say leave it the same. If it becomes an AoE and gains another damage gem I think it could map with decent speeds. (please don't crucify me)

Passive Skill tree
Very difficult to give damage to Elemental Hit without having trash defense. Lets just say that before the new Templar my favorite node of the tree was the 8% Elemental damage you pass when leaving Witch.

Physical to elemental damage.
Please don't make this go way of the Viper strike. You scared my senseless with that change. How it is now is unique, diverse and interesting, things games should strive to be.

My closing thoughts: A reasonable clear speed could probably be reached using Elemental Hit with a Shavronne's, Crown a eyes and a few mirrored daggers. The problem is the clear speed would go up if you replaced the 20/20 Elemental Hit with a 1/0 Spectral throw.

~Have a nice day.

So after being redirected here by a post of Charan, i would like to make some suggestions.

Firstly

"

CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Balance team: You should seriously consider splitting this skill into two: Elemental Blow, and Elemental Shot. This would make it much easier to balance regarding the ranged and melee disparity.

This deserves to be highlighted.

I believe depending on a rework and what exactly get's put onto this gem will lead to conflicting results
in-game due to it's double utility nature (ranged vs melee)

For example, the difference between a pointblank chin-sol elemental hit build and a melee is enormous.

This creates a very hard situation to implement changes without splitting the gem up.

This aside, some suggestions.







That's what i came up with atm, note these are all based around "melee" variants and are easily abused by rangers.

I also think, given some of the bonuses i suggest an increase in mana cost is justified if these should ever be implemented.

I think there is nothing wrong with having a very strong "base skill gem" with a similarly strong mana cost attached to it to reign it in and allow it to perform extremely well in builds dedicated to it.

Peace and hope you enjoyed this read, whoever you are :),

-Boem-

"

CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Okay, I'm level 62. I'm using Elemental Hit as melee. And I'm mapping.

Who are you and what did you do to Charan?!

tried this on facebreaker.

The problem to me was you could not get enough damages to freeze/shock with enough duration when playing melee. Most of the time it was fire damage that killed monsters because most of the melee gems are fire based.

Did not try it with the new phy to light.

Dps was Ok but for it s mana cost I would expect this skill to do something special like Dominating blow does.