[3.15]Archmage Ball Lightning Hierophant, will it work in Expedition?
"There's a lot to unpack here to be able to explain this to you, but I'll do the best I can. First, you're looking at the wrong thing in PoB to calculate your true DPS. It's NOT the "Total DPS" figure. That thing is nowhere close to correct. The way BL works is each one does multiple lightning strikes every second, and each strike/hit is the "Average Hit" number. The game is hard-coded so that one BL cannot do more than 1 strike/hit every 0.15 seconds. So in 1 second, that's a maximum possible number of hits of 6.67 (1 / 0.15). Now BL's base travel speed is 48 units per second. But with 20/20 Slower Proj, BL only travels 33.6 units per second. The typical mob has a char size/hit-box of 2 units. So this means for any lightning strike to hit your target that 6.67 hit cap, you must have an AoE radius of at least 31.6. Hence why you see that "32 radius" on most people's PoB at endgame. That said, PoB messes this up bigly too. There are currently 2 big errors calculating AoE radius in PoB between the Ball Lightning gem, itself, and the Pledge of Hands staff. First, PoB STILL has not changed the base BL radius from 22 to 18 (-4), which was the announced/posted nerf to BL in the 3.12 notes. Not sure why the community fork guys haven't changed that yet. Second, Pledge of Hands has a feature with Greater Spell Echo where each echo gets a compounding +35% more damage and +50% more AoE. So at echo 3/BL #4 in this build, there's been a total of +210% more damage by the time all 4 BL's have cast. So, when PoB tries to make the calculation for Average Hit, it basically does 210/4, and then adds +52% more damage to every BL. Even though that's not technically what's happening and this actually screws up the true DPS calculation. But the AoE doesn't work the same way. BL #1 has no +AoE. BL #2/echo #1 has +50%, BL #3/echo #2 has +100%, and BL #4/echo #3 has +150%. However, PoB stupidly adds +50% AoE to EVERY BL. Like just an arbitrary +50% to each one for no particular reason. The 1st BL has no such benefit from Pledge of Hands. The 2nd one, sure. The 3rd even more, and the 4th one a lot more. But it's the first one that needs to be at 32 radius, otherwise you're missing out on a bunch of DPS. Needless to say, 50% AoE equates to around 4 radius. This means between BL's base radius error (being at 18 now rather than PoB saying it's still at 22), and the Pledge of Hands error being 4 radius too high, the vast majority of people playing this build have 8 too much radius listed than what they really have. Yes... 8. And the only way to fix these errors right now is to manually edit your Pledge of hands and add "100% reduced Area of Effect" at the bottom of it. This will show you what the real AoE radius is of your BL #1. So while your PoB says you have 29 radius currently, you really only have 21 for your 1st BL, 25 for your second BL, 29 for your 3rd BL, and 33 for your 4th BL. Which equates to approximately 3.8 hits for BL #1, 4.8 hits for BL #2, 5.8 hits for BL #3, and BL #4 reaches the 6.67 hit limit. Needless to say, you're topping out around 21 hits per 4 BL cast cycle. However, you have a cast rate of 5.34 (which literally means you cast 5.34 BL's per second), which means you cast those BL's #1-4, and then you cycle back to the beginning and cast BL #1 again, and BL #2 0.34x. So at 21 radius, your cast cycle is 3.8 hits + 4.8 hits + 5.8 hits + 6.67 hits + 3.8 hits + 1.63 hits = 26.5 lightning strikes per second. Now to get your true DPS, multiply that number by your "Average Hit" number, and that is your actual DPS. However, before you do that, you need to fix your Average Hit in your PoB. First of all, you're not coming close to reaching level 20 shock. You have Elemental Focus on your BL, so it's not shocking. And your Storm Brand sure as hell isn't hitting hard enough to reach level 20 shock threshold. In fact, it's very unlikely it's even hitting the minimum level 5 shock threshold to register a shock at all. So you need to turn shock off completely, unless you want to trade out Ele Focus on BL for something like Lightning Pen. But even then, you're probably only hitting for around level 10 shock at most until you get up over the 1M Average Hit number. Second, we look for how much damage we can do to Sirus, not white trash mobs. So you need to put Sirus in the "Is the enemy a boss" box. After doing that, you should be around 352k Average Hit. So 352,000 * 26.5 = ~9.3M sDPS. If you could get up to around 31-32 AoE radius, this alone would bump you up to around 12.5M sDPS. Going Heirophant instead of Inquisitor would also bump you up about another 20% DPS. You're lacking some serious mana regen, too. You need a belt with +mana recovery rate. Mana recovery rate >>>>> mana regen rate. If you got a belt with 20% mana recovery rate and then added life/mana catalysts to it, bumping it up to 24%, that's like +600 mana regen right there. Anyway, sorry for the long post, but like I said, this was a lot to unpack and explain. Hope this helped. Last edited by SkylerOG#3817 on Oct 5, 2020, 2:04:15 AM
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"It's a glass-cannon. Insane DPS but insanely squishy. It's not designed to get pinned down by a wall of ranged mobs all firing at you at once. You have to use the hell out of flame dash and cast BL's behind mobs while they're stuck in animation/attack lock facing where you just dashed away from. Using a Sire of Shards with GMP and Unleash instead of Pledge of Hands with SP and Spell Echo is very helpful for map clearing and doing Heists. The Sire fires BL's in a nova/circle, so you hit everything around you in all directions. So flame dash past mobs, fire your BL's, flame dash again, fire again... rinse/repeat. Phase Run helps too, as you can run through mobs rather than being blocked by their hit-box/char size. Then just swap back to PoH for bosses. Last edited by SkylerOG#3817 on Oct 5, 2020, 2:10:20 AM
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Thank you so much for ppl posting here, trying to learn and adapt :P (casual player here). For me, trying to get asap unnatural instinct jewel (prio), change curse ring which is really bad + other things like getting a bottled flask (and sort potion setup in general), check build tree and perhaps renounce to large cluster jewel, look for more AOE and life (3.5k actually which is kinda low, aim for 4k).
Last edited by joint77#1400 on Oct 5, 2020, 3:08:13 PM
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Can i play this as Assassin aswell? The tree seems fine to me and it's easier to play crit imo
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Hey SkylerOG,
Thanks for the build. Invested around 23 EX now. Have about 3 ex left, I'll get the bottle of faith and awakened gems later. Would you mind to look into my POB to see what adjustments i could do with the 3 ex i have left? or in general. Thanks.
Spoiler
https://pastebin.com/J6Z7Awxm
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" 1. You didn't add the "100% reduced area of effect" line to your PoH. So while you thought you had 31 radius, you really only have around 23. I explain why this is required in that long ass post I made recently. So you desperately need the Unnatural Instinct jewel near Shaper node to get those 3 AoE nodes, along with the 3 at Enigmatic Reach. Might want to try and get the BL AoE enchant on helmet, too. 2. Your mana regen is probably hurting bad, so you really need to try to get +mana recovery rate on your belt and watcher's eye. (remember mana recovery rate >>> mana regen rate). That's easily +1000 mana regen with just both of those. 3. You need Conductivity curse on your ring or you sorta make Cursed Concoction wheel less effective (and this is a much needed passive wheel for mana sustain). But, to do this, you need to get a +1 curse somewhere (so you can do conductivity AND assassins mark... you also want enfeeble too at some point). Either lvl 5 awakened hextouch or whispers of doom or windshriek boots (or even 2 of those so you can do all 3 curses). If you get the 80% avoid stun lab enchant on windshriek boots, you don't really need skyforth's. 4. You need 21 Arcane Surge added to your Arcane Cloak 4L. It's significantly better than the AS that comes from ascendancy. 5. You need to add Holy Flame Totem in there somewhere. Not only does it give you targeted consecrated ground on demand, but you spam it before/during fights to ramp up power and endurance charges. 6. Make sure phase run is in your movement button (left mouse), so you simply activate it everytime you move. 7. I haven't decided if I like Pinpoint yet. With 3 intensity it does add about 18% damage, which is huge, but at 0 intensity it's about 37% less damage. And this really isn't a char you want to just stand there and machine-gun cast. That usually spells death because it's super glassy. You typical cast 1-2x then move/flame dash... over and over. Which means intensity would be at zero way more than it's at anything else, much less 3. 8. Get some life/mana catalysts on your endgame ammy, conductivity ring, and belt. I wouldn't do it on your current ones as those can certainly be upgraded. Sounds like you've spent a lot already, and what I've proposed is probably quadruple what you've already spent. This isn't a cheap char if you really want to get it to the numbers I have listed, unfortunately. You're about half way to 1M Average Hit, I'd say, but because your AoE radius is low, you're probably just around the 10-12M sDPS range. Which means you're probably shocking around 10-15 level, which is good enough for now and still better than having Ele Focus in there. Mana regen is probably priority #1, and then AoE is definitely #2. Last edited by SkylerOG#3817 on Oct 7, 2020, 5:09:27 PM
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Took a different route and I'm playing this build as CI. Damage is less but survivability is great, especially with the asenath's gentle touch. Still figuring out which ascendancy node is the best for me. Sanctuary of thought gives me about 3.8k more ES, if I take conviction of power I have 7.6k ES left. Sitting on 15k mana with replica kaom's heart. Overal really enjoying the build.
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" Hi, Jonikonas! But MOM does not work with CI |
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" Well oops! Haha, you learn something new every day. That saves me 1 point on the tree. A bit dumb of me, it literally says it in the description :') |
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Hello,
I'm just starting to play the ball lightning build. I have changed passives to tree from the first point. Is it good idea for 3.12? Also I have around 10ex to spend atm, what should be my priority to buy? |
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