Lightning Strike

Having tried LS on my Elemental Damage Templar, I can say I am not very fond of it. It's not the damage, but the fact that usually the majority of projectiles miss the targets and that makes the skill kind of useless for crowd control.

I would love to see the projectiles changed to something like a lightning arc, so I can do a chainlightning (something I really miss :( I had tons of fun in Sacred 1 with a chainlightning battlemage).

The Chainlightning could do 2 jumps (thus hitting 3 targets) to preserve the number of projectiles. The MultiProj Support Gem could simply add more jumps.

I wonder what the effect of Pierce would be though, as currently the lightning beams are considered projectiles.

I have run this on a lvl 29 Claw spec duelist and a lvl 28 Projectile Damage ranger. My favourite spec for it is probably Pierce + Added Fire Damage + Increased Critical Chance. On a six link I'd probably add Weapon Elemental Damage and Mana Leech (if I ever find a copy of the latter :S). Quite excited that it offers aoe clear for the weapons that otherwise don't have any. Rather disappointed at the way the damage scales.

The fact is, the cumulative reduction in effectiveness (between level up damage only scaling on half the skill, and that the aoe damage is only half) is simply far too much. The base mana cost is far too steep to allow the skill to be worthwhile and sustainable when options like Cleave and Ground Slam are so much more efficient.

There are a few different ways this could be fixed.
* Reduce the base mana cost - I'm a fan of this option. The single target DPS is not utterly terrible on this skill, and with a reasonable cost you could just count the AOE effect as being a bonus.
* Change the 'Reduced Projectile Damage' effect to being something like 'Reduced Lightning Damage on Projectiles'. If you're not going to make the mana scale reasonably this would be a strong option, giving us enough AOE damage to make it worth the trouble.
* Change the 'Increased Lightning Damage' on level-up to 'Increased Physical Damage' or even just 'Increased Damage' (to benefit alternate sources of bonus damage). The fact that we're only scaling on half the damage as this levels up means that it gets outpaced very quickly by the melee AOE alternatives I mentioned. This would help a lot.

First off, I admit I only skimmed this thread, so if I'm repeating stuff just ignore me :)

I must disagree with the negative reviews of this skill. I personally love it. I don't use it to kite, I simply use it as an AoE skill for the mobs clumped up behind the one I'm attacking. I find it very powerful with stacked elemental damage passives and mods.

However, I find it interesting that it seems to hit 100% of the time... I'm not complaining, as missing is very annoying, but the character sheet says I have about 78% chance to hit, yet this skill seems to hit every single time. Is this intentional?

Overall awesome skill in my opinion. It just takes some getting used to as far as positioning goes.

Also, I haven't gotten a chance to use it with more than 3 projectiles (I'm assuming/hoping it can get more with a support gem, as the "2 extra projectiles" is in blue).

I guarantee most of the people posting in here don't know about Shift click with this skill. Well at least the people complaining about it. That's what makes the skill unique to me. You pretty much become a ranged melee with this skill. Especially when you shift click. I like the skill just because of that. For it being viable. I don't know... It just seems like it soaks up mana super fast.

Would it be possible to change the lightning on this skill to be more of a chain lightning effect? Kind of like the new Lightning Arrow attack were it will actually target mobs instead of traveling in a straight line. Would make the skill much more useful. You can also keep the "piercing" stat and make it a check to see if it will bounce again after the first target.

New player here from the open weekend only (great job though, looking forward to the release :D). Played around with this on my Avatar Templar. It looks great visually, but that seems to be about it. The V-spread of the 2 extra bolts seems to be too wide to make it much use when kiting. More over, it doesn't seem to go past the first enemy it hits, which makes it much weaker than Ground Slam for AOE clearing. I was thinking the same as a few above posters, that turning the extra bolts into Chain Lightning types would probably make it a lot more effective, both in terms of aiming and group-clearing.

It also seemed to be harder to use than Ground Slam, since Slam can be cast right at the ground like a spell, whereas Lightning Strike behaves like an attack and needs a lot more shift-casting. Changing that would make it more fun too.

This skill seems like it'd be pretty badass using the new Point Blank support...

edit: also Iron Grip as well.