Added Lightning Damage

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So I take it the reason this support is so incredibly weak compared to Added Chaos Damage is because the Shocked effect is supposed to balance it out? Even then, the usefulness of this passive is pretty dubious. You only get shocked on a crit, and if you've built for crits, most crits kill enemies instantly. Firestorm is the only thing I can think of offhand that hits often enough for something like Shocked to have any effect and even then it's still pretty meh. Going from Added Lightning Damage lv10 (level 46) to Added Chaos Damage lv6 (Level 41) is about a 46% damage improvement on my current Firestorm. That means I'd have to crit and get Shocked right away on each enemy for Added Lightning Damage to be comparable to Chaos Damage, and that's not very likely with a 15%~ crit rate.

Shocked is just too lackluster to prop up this passive. In fact, even for bosses, the one situation where Shocked might actually take full effect, they still die way too fast for it to be worth anything.

I don't know, maybe for a high attack speed ranger with lots of frenzy charges this skill might be decent, but that's still dubious imo.

And on a tangent, why is Intelligence Lightning and Dexterity Cold? Lightning benefits far more from Dexterity's fast attacks than cold does, and Cold benefits far more from Intelligence's crit than lightning does. Cold is also more important for kiting. It would also make more sense thematically since Dexterity is quick like Lightning and Intelligence is cool like Cold.

Chaos damage adds more because it cannot be buffed via passives.

Cold and lightning can be buffed by weapon elemental damage, or cold or lightning damage passives (and a few other rarer passives) which can improve it's power compared to chaos.

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Xapti wrote:

Chaos damage adds more because it cannot be buffed via passives.

Except that it can. Spell damage passives work totally fine on it, as does cast speed, crit passives, and pretty much everything else but element-specific passives, which are relatively weak anyway imo and not especially common regardless. In any case, it's still nowhere near enough to compensate for the difference in raw power since spell damage stacks additively with element damage, and you can easily get 100%+ spell damage on a single weapon alone, which greatly reduces the relative contribution from elemental damage passives.

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Cold and lightning can be buffed by weapon elemental damage, or cold or lightning damage passives (and a few other rarer passives) which can improve it's power compared to chaos.

A few other rarer passives? Like what? I don't see anything else that would affect elemental damage and not chaos damage.

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Strill wrote:

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Cold and lightning can be buffed by weapon elemental damage, or cold or lightning damage passives (and a few other rarer passives) which can improve it's power compared to chaos.

A few other rarer passives? Like what? I don't see anything else that would affect elemental damage and not chaos damage.

There are few general Elemental damage +% passives in templar tree.

Does it really NEED to be competitive with Added Chaos Damage? You can use this one something like 15 levels earlier.

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SinisterDexter wrote:

Does it really NEED to be competitive with Added Chaos Damage? You can use this one something like 15 levels earlier.

So you think it should only be useful for a span of 15 levels?

Technically, it's 12 levels. And it does have one thing on chaos damage in its ability to cause up to a 120% total damage increase if you can boost its damage a bit and crit with it. It's not much, but it's something.

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UristMcDwarfy wrote:

Technically, it's 12 levels. And it does have one thing on chaos damage in its ability to cause up to a 120% total damage increase if you can boost its damage a bit and crit with it. It's not much, but it's something.

The problem with that is that Shocked benefits most from high attack speed DEX skills, even though for some reason INT is Lightning and DEX is Cold. In practice, my +Lightning Damage Per Power Charge rarely ever gets any benefit from Shocked since I just one-shot anything on a crit regardless.

Oh, lightning damage can be increased by elemental damage passives while chaos cannot. That's another obvious one I should have mentioned.

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Strill wrote:

The problem with that is that Shocked benefits most from high attack speed DEX skills, even though for some reason INT is Lightning and DEX is Cold. In practice, my +Lightning Damage Per Power Charge rarely ever gets any benefit from Shocked since I just one-shot anything on a crit regardless.

Agreed, though (I am guessing) that is more of a reflection on how easy it is to get insane amounts of +%elemental damage on weapons. But if it wasn't so easy to get, it might also be difficult to create shocked effects of reasonable duration in the first place...

Perhaps if the Added Lightning Damage support had an increasing amount of shock duration on it, just like the Cold Damage support has chill duration?