Elemental Proliferation

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Icetruck wrote:

This does not work with Viper Strike, would be groovy if it did. But I'm guessing Viper Strike is not considered an elemental status effect. Viper Strike is a debuff instead of a status effect?

correct for the last question. same for adder's touch passive node (although that shares damage type of poison arrow instead of viper strike so players can stack viper strike with the passive), that too is debuff instead of a status effect.

I've been attempting to use this gem with summons, particularly zombies and skeletons. It seems like I get a lot of critical strikes using my wand, and the summons never get a critical.

I tested this by going through several levels with the support gem attached to both summons, and then going through a few more with the support gem attached directly to my power siphon wand attack.

I don't have the proper access to data needed to tell why this is, it could be that summons have an incredibly low base critical hit chance and the points I spent in sharing power charges to them were wasted; it could also be they have zero critical chance and the same thing would happen. I simply can't tell.

Either way attaching this support gem to a minion appears to have no effect.

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JohnChance wrote:

I've been attempting to use this gem with summons, particularly zombies and skeletons. It seems like I get a lot of critical strikes using my wand, and the summons never get a critical.

I tested this by going through several levels with the support gem attached to both summons, and then going through a few more with the support gem attached directly to my power siphon wand attack.

I don't have the proper access to data needed to tell why this is, it could be that summons have an incredibly low base critical hit chance and the points I spent in sharing power charges to them were wasted; it could also be they have zero critical chance and the same thing would happen. I simply can't tell.

Either way attaching this support gem to a minion appears to have no effect.

do the zombies and skeleton have elemental damage? status effects only happen from elemental damage AND the damage has to be enough of the target(s)' hp to break threshold amounts in duration. 300ms is the threshold amount, for freezing it means 3% of foe's hp for example.

All of my undead are buffed by auras that give them fire and lightning damage, and my specters are usually chosen from elemental damage types. It should be plenty but I'm not sure if it does break the threshold as the damage is coming from multiple undead to kill enemies very quickly rather than from one extremely powerful undead.

If the damage from each individual skeleton, zombie, or specter is balanced in such a way that it isn't able to reach the thresh hold to benefit from critical strikes, but are able to do damage only as a group then this gem, and the critical strike effecting benefits of sharing power surges with your minions via the conduit passive choice are both useless and that should be made apparent somehow so people don't put a lot of points into a build that simply won't work.

So, after reading the entire thread, the essence is that this gem is useless with a frost witch, but decent with high damage fireballs with added lightning damage?

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UnDeaD_CyBorG wrote:

So, after reading the entire thread, the essence is that this gem is useless with a frost witch, but decent with high damage fireballs with added lightning damage?

Yeah, that's pretty much it exactly, but remember that you need focus on crit to get this to work well.

Or chance to ignite/shock.

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UnDeaD_CyBorG wrote:

Or chance to ignite/shock.

That's true, but chance to ignite is harder to come by. Chance to ignite is also much much weaker than chance to crit because chance to ignite only applies to non-crits, which are likely to have no effect since only the strongest burn applies at any given time. On top of all that, ignite damage takes a double resistance penalty - once on the initial fire damage which determines the base ignite damage and once again on the ignite damage itself, making it even less reliable.

Chance to shock, however, does not have any of those problems. You can get tons of chance to shock from the Static Blows nodes, it scales in duration, making weak multi-hit attacks still meaningful and stacks multiple times making weak multi-hit attacks even more meaningful. It doesn't require any waiting for damage over time effects to finish, and doesn't incur any extra penalties or caveats.

So yeah, if you wanna go with ignite, you've pretty much gotta go with crits, but chance to shock is allright.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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JohnChance wrote:

the critical strike effecting benefits of sharing power surges with your minions via the conduit passive choice are both useless and that should be made apparent somehow so people don't put a lot of points into a build that simply won't work.

Conduit explicitly states it shares power charges with party members, not with minions.

The difference between minions and "party members" is a vague distinction that varies between games. World of Warcraft, for example, DOES include minions as party members.