Culling Strike

I was in a group with a marauder the other day and for some reason whenever a monster would get to about 20-30% hp it would just die. When asked how he was doing this all he said was "culling good eh?". Is there a way to increase the threshold at which culling culls?

no but it tests its condition after the damage is done.

does gems like this work on summon skeleton? What about spectre? Does it matter which spectre it's linked to? I.E must be 'hit'. Does fireballs hit? Does freezing pulse 'hit'?

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CruS wrote:

does gems like this work on summon skeleton? What about spectre? Does it matter which spectre it's linked to? I.E must be 'hit'. Does fireballs hit? Does freezing pulse 'hit'?

Should work fine on minions like everything else. Everything "hit" when it does damage unless it's a degen(or DoT if you prefer, like poison arrow cloud, fire trap burning ground, ignite burn, viper strike dot, puncture dot etc). So yes fireball/fp hit.

So a skeletotem (spell totem combined with summon skeletons) linked with culling strike should give every skeleton summoned by the totem a chance to kill a foe under 10% on each hit?

i just tested it with totem . 1 just dropped at 19% quality


last 10 % hit by skele always work they dieeee


don't know if useful much

Has culling strike an own animation or is that Power Siphons?

I miss the culling-animation at my Elemental-Hit+Culling-Strike-Combo.

It's awesome, first I didn't thought much of it because (me stupid) I thought my single enemy dps is anyway higher than 10% on most monsters.
But of course on AoE it is a huge boost even on low levels because you make sure you actually kill stuff and not have many low health monsters running around. Especially nasty monkeys and such won't escape. Also it is good fun to finish of tanky rares with extra life or similar. Great skill, don't underestimate.

I'm a fan of the Culling Strike mechanic itself, but design-wise this gem is a disaster.

Despite its name, what it does currently is make all kinds of modifications to your cast/attack speed and damage. Nothing about culling strike itself is changed, which is weird considering it's based on a number (10%)...

Culling Strike itself is the really interesting part of the mechanic. Treating your enemy's health as 10% lower is pretty much the same as 11% more damage... assuming your enemy doesn't have energy shield. What if they do? Things get a lot more interesting. You can try to get around Culling Strike's relative weakness against energy shield by investing heavily in chaos damage; you might even be able to ignore the shields on some monsters by using a chaos damage + Culling Strike combo. Very interesting, very hidden synergy, which reminds me of the way Blind is and the things it synergizes with.

However, it instead gets those unreleated bonuses.

A better design would be:

• Remove all the cast/attack/damage stuff from the gem.
• Have the "insta-kill" percent increase with levels. You definitely wouldn't want to increase that number above 30% though, that's 42.8% more damage against purelife enemies. Maybe 10% to 30%, one per level; maybe 5% to 25% (lower starting value); maybe 10% to 20% (half a point per level).
• Have the quality bonus something along the lines of "Steals 20% of enemy life at time of death" (that would be max quality). Even for a 30% insta-kill percent, that would be equivalent to 6% life leech at perfect efficiency, and efficiency is likely to be far from perfect... but the point is, make it something that actually cares about how much life enemies have at time of death.
• Recalibrate mana cost multiplier accordingly.

That design adds a challenge within the skill itself, and also emphasizes its hidden synergy with chaos damage.