Ethereal Knives

Now, mind you I've only been using this skill for a short time, but I have some feedback on it and this is only related to my experience and I'm sure a lot of what I'm saying has been said before.

Ethereal Knives is a cool skill, BUT
- It only works for shadows because to make it usable at high levels you need to get some cast speed passives which rangers and duelists are nowhere near
- It is a spell, so you would also need some "spell damage" passives to make it interesting.


Perhaps you intended a tradeoff because of the 9+ projectiles, but the skill already punishes itself by having a pretty short distance of effect. Is this intended to be used purely by shadows? If so, then fair enough. It fills that small niche, I guess. But if this is truly supposed to be an overall practical skill to have then some adjustments should probably be made, IMHO. I was planning on building a ranger around it only to realize early on that "Faster Attacks" and attack speed passives as well as my weapon damage had no effect on the skill whatsoever.

It's a spell, it's not meant to be used by attack centric builds like most of the ranger or duellist builds. It's used in caster builds like shadow and witch, as well as marauder blood magic caster builds. You could potentially make a ranger or a duellist using it, but for duellist especially you're gonna have some waste points at the start. It's not "only used by shadows" or designed for shadows. If anything due to the heavy mana cost, it's better designed for witches, but the builds are the same at the end regardless.

That's a bit like complaining that Firestorm isn't working well for Rangers and Duellists. Yes it's a physical spell and you throw daggers, but that doesn't mean it's meant for melees. Otherwise it'd be an attack. And melee based shadows don't use EK. I mean you can kinda make it work, but it's gonna be fairly crappy. The shadow builds that use EK are caster builds, like the cold crit shadow build, but with EK instead of Freezing Pulse.

I think what this skill needs is it's own shotgun formula. While other spells just straight multiply the damage per projectile, EK should add a percentage per knife hit. Maybe something like 10% per knife. If all 9 hit the target, that would make it do 90% more damage. It also forces you to be right in the face of your enemy if you want to do the full shotgun damage. This way you can avoid the black and white of doing way too much damage or too little. I think this will make it easy to balance in the future as well. You can just change the % per knife. Also, it shouldn't make the skill overpowered as the shotgunning will block projectiles from reaching as many targets unless you have pierce chance.

Does this skill receive the bonus from %Increased Physical Damage found on weapons? I equipped Redbeak (+50% Physical damage) and EK showed no damage or dps increase.

makes sense, ty

Hi i posted this in general, but it seems like the thread did not get that much attention so i'll post it here instead which tbh i should had done in the first place, anyways here we go!

I got a question concerning physical damage reflection and ethereal knives, i know that the reflected damage can be blocked, evaded or mitigated through armor if it comes from a physical attack.

So my question is, can the physical damage thats reflected from etheral knives be evaded or blocked? Or does the physical damage reflected back count as a "spell" so it can't be blocked or evaded? If so, can it be blocked if you got spell block?

I'm wondering since it might open up other ways of making an EK build without armor stacking and still be viable in endgame, as in not one shoting yourself.

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Opus93 wrote:

Does this skill receive the bonus from %Increased Physical Damage found on weapons? I equipped Redbeak (+50% Physical damage) and EK showed no damage or dps increase.

%increased physical dmg will only work from non-wpn equip like belts (rustic sash) and some unique ring and helm

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sharkh20 wrote:

I think what this skill needs is it's own shotgun formula

you cannot shotgun w/ physical spells, only 1 primary projectil per enemy will hit, the other fly past. but chain (is it still valuable after the nerv?) and fork working well.

There's a mod that adds 1 level to the gems in the items.

There're many mods that add 1-2 level to bow/fire/cold/lightning/melee/minion gems.


I assume the maximum for EK is only +1 level and not +3 like 90% of the gems.
Any plan on creating a new mod for EK or to include it somewhere ?


ps : if someone has the number for lvl 20 and lvl 21 EK, i'll take it.

Hey there, returning to the game finally. Building up a witch that I was playing, and found that EK works incredibly well early game with a few Iron Rings and some added damage mods on equipment. The way I see it, this skill seems to be very effective early, and very effective later, but I'm not sure about in between.