Ethereal Knives

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Lionguild wrote:

To me, if you can sustain the mana cost I think Chain would outdo fork since the "chained" projectiles are not limited to an angle so it would be more reliable. Not even counting the fact that chain hits more targets then fork.

It's blatantly obvious that this is how the two supports were designed. Just look at their overall damage:

Chain:
300% more projectiles
40% less damage
TOTAL: 140% More damage


Fork:
200% more projectiles
20% less damage
TOTAL: 140% More damage

The fact that they come out to exactly the same overall damage is certainly not a coincidence. Therefore it's plain to see that Fork was given a drastically lower mana cost because it's less reliable. Of course it's far, far, stronger to just combine both of them at once since they're both far and away the strongest damage options for Ethereal Knives. The multiplicative scaling means their damage together is greater than the sum of their parts.

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Another thing that is interesting, and this goes for spark too. It seems that spells that already start with more then one projectile always seem to do better with fork / chain over LMP / GMP in every way.

Of course. A smaller base number of projectiles means a larger effective damage multiplier from LMP/GMP.

With Fork, EK actually gets stronger the more enemies there are, not like AOE that just hits more, but literally increasing the damage per enemy.
I've come to the habit of luring bosses near minions or barrels to strike them with more damage.

So can some1 confirm that when you hit something with EK and trigger chain/fork the distance resets ? This makes Point Blank pretty good i guess . Im thinking about making EK ranger , with Iron reflexes , Point Blank , all the Projectile dmg passives from Ranger,Duelist,Shadow starting areas.
Something like this
Later on , just add more hp and maybe more int nodes to use best Wands you can find.

It's Projectile Attacks.
Did that mistake, too.

Oki missed that one, well im keeping the ranger character cause i kinda played shadows and witches all the time lately.

 

So chain works fully with EK? IE: If I have 4 targets, and hit all 4 with chain supported EK, each target with a produce a chain that hits each other target? So every target is hit 4 times?

That should be the case.
Of course, the mana cost is just as devastating.

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UnDeaD_CyBorG wrote:

That should be the case.
Of course, the mana cost is just as devastating.

At least that slow cast speed makes up for it, eh? :/

I'm excited about EK due to chain giving it shotgun powers, which puts it more on par with FP...until you realize FP costs way less mana. I don't even know if being a physical spell is any sort of advantage or just unique, since crits don't have a special effect like permafreezing everything forever always.

Well, there are some:

• Mobs on average have less armor than elemental resistance
• Physical Damage profits from added the Fire Damage support and the Hatred Aura
• The spell can be used by casters to kill Elemental Reflect Mobs

Also, Ethereal Knives scale pretty steep with levels, their base damage is quite good.