Lightning Arrow

Hye, I have not seen this question asked yet and its kinda hard to figure out just from looking at the animation.
I want to know if there is a travel time from the initial hit of the arrow to the lightning hitting another mob. From the little I've been able to watch there is a tiny deley, it may just be my ping though.

This is for use in a CoC build, as long as there is a delay between hits it may be a viable option.

This skill is always a temptation for a crit archer build. I find myself having a tough choice between the pure physical option of rain of arrows or split arrow, or the hybrid physical elemental option of lightning arrow.

Of course, one advantage of lightning arrow is the shock charges, though that is slightly weaker than before when shock stacks were 40% instead of 30%, though I think a good harbinger bow more than makes up for this. The other advantage is that physical and elemental damage combined tends to provide safer results against reflect requiring both kinds of reflect to produce the same or greater amount of danger.

The advantage of physical damage is that it tends to do hugely better against resists to which endgame monsters have tons of it. Physical damage also provides much better leeching and part of the reason of having a ranged physical attack is that you get the leech of physical melee and the safety of range (obviously the damage should be less).

Ondar's guile and immortal call tend to help the physical damage attacks with the reflect issue, while characters heavy on regeneration tend to be better candidates for elemental damage since they need less leeching. Those are my thoughts and its why its a tough call for me.

Of course, I tend to think of burning arrow and ice arrow as more single target attacks than AoE attacks.

I feel LA is meant to be played with 100% pierce. If you get the gem and the 35% passive it becomes strong. If you get the Drillneck unique quiver for it it becomes a MONSTER. A lot better than any ST build in my opinion, but still lags behind a good incinerator.

question about the mechanics of crit and shock here;

Does each Hit (initial and the additional hits) calculace Crit independently?
or is a crit always a crit on all targets?

Same question goes with shock (the one that doesnt come form crit but form shockcance only)

means: does elemental proliferation make sense within a grop of mobs that all are hit by the same LA attack?

"

Vipermagi wrote:

Crit is always per-activation.
On-Hit effects are per Hit.

Elemental Proliferation will mean that the first Shock you inflict will improve the Damage for all subsequent Hits. With a Crit, that means all but one Hit will benefit from Shock. Pretty neat.

But if your crit chance is pretty high, you dont need it, as all enemies will be shocked anyway. Although, it may help to shock boss (that cant be shocked directly)

ive created a mini-guide to Lightning Arrow + pierce concept

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1096271

Pivotal element of it is the Infractem bow (100% pierce, no leech) that although low dps (~220pdps) allows to save on both gems/links and passives (thus picking up more dps from alternative sources)

Lightning Arrow definitely lost a lot with 'shock no longer stacking' change.. but it is still a very potent skill when used correctly

I'm interested in building a character around this skill even though it seems basically dead; when I noticed that my lvl 1 gmp curse on hit lightning arrow setup was occasionally killing things, it piqued my interest.

I noticed that it's weirdly tagged, though; it's an AoE that doesn't scale with AoE damage (I read that above), and it's not a projectile but lmp/gmp work on it. Am I correct to assume that both the primary AND secondary projectiles are scaled by projectile damage modifiers? The tooltip for the primary projectile is easy to check, but not the secondaries. Can we get a confirmation on this?

I'm also curious to know the radius in units within which the secondary projectiles will seek targets. Can we get a reading on this as well so we can judge relatively based on 'known' AoEs of other area skills?