Lightning Trap

I suggest use pierce/fork support gems to make Lightning Trap penetrate group of enemies. This skill is very bad against single target if you cannot throw it at the right direction.

I'm using it on a 5-link: Lightning Trap, Lightning Penetration, Multiple Traps, Reduced Duration, Pierce. Also I use Projectile Weakness curse to make it 100% piercing. The aim is medium to large enemy groups -- My Lightning Trapper with 600 avg. skill damage can clear docks about 1.5 times faster than my Freezing Pulser(5.5k dps) but 0.5 times faster than my split arrow archer(17k dps). Maybe I should try another setup Fork+Elemental Weakness for its effectiveness.

This skill has a major flaw that most AOE skills haven't: it cannot kill every mob in its blast radius(like the thunder javelin skill in d2, yet mechanics different). The combat scenes are just same for them: gathering monsters to an extent, kill 90% of them and repeat... Not to say to throw traps into mobs you need to appear at a melee distance. The actual fight is very exciting but I worried about my survivability when progressing into maps.

p.s. The near useless gem quality on Lighting Trap is better to change into "2% chance of projectiles piercing per gem quality".

Was just playing around with this skill earlier and noticed it's damage effectiveness is pretty high (90%), stuck Added Chaos/Cold/Lightning Damage and wow the damage boost is huge lol.

Probably going to make a build based completely around Lightning Trap at some point, the Added x damage supports are really good on it (and pretty much mandatory) now.

I'm playing around this with gem, and so far so bad.

If, like some cold spells and their chance to freeze, this had a blanket chance to shock with a minimum time to stay shocked, then I'd use it.

It's worthless single-target, which is fine. However, I can't clear a pack properly with it.. even with chain. So.. how is this used? To mildly annoy mobs?

As a trapper.. literally just casting a spell is better than this. Traps should be *better* than spells because of cooldown and placement mechanics making them harder/slower to use.

Maybe with a 7 or 8-link item I could pack enough crap into .. oh nevermind, the mana cost.

I've been playing with this as my main crowd control skill on a shadow trapper in the Domination race and so far it's pretty decent.

I'm level 34 in act 3 normal using Fork + Lightning Penetration and a bunch of trap damage passives, with the "shock" notable taken for the 5% chance of shock. Three traps is enough to clear most rooms, even with elemental resistant monsters.

On the other hand, I'm very well aware that this is not going to last. Lightning trap's damage in the upper levels is HIDEOUS and is not going to keep up with the monster health, even with damage passives taken.

A very unpopular skill and definitely in need of a buff towards the lategame.

EDIT: also, do something about that mana cost.

My first domi-char was a lightning-trapper and at lv74 I've decided it's a waste of time ...

The only use for a LT is to shock-stack a full screen, with proliferation. So maybe in partygaming it has a "little" use, but alone and vs single targed it's absolutely underpowered.

Compared to a Fire Trap you have:
- no full AOE (only projectiles)
- much less DMG (esp at high lvls)
# no DOT; no chance to ignite
- an absolutely useless quality (you still have to wait for the cooldown)
# FT hast max 30% increased burning DMG
- lower base-crit (4% is insufficient for a crit-build)
- no sup-items such as The Searing Touch for fire; or Taryn's Shiver for cold
- ...

To make this gem playable, it needs some BIG changes (other/improved quality, DMG, sup-items?, crit, ...?). Maybe abilities/sup like Point Blank (attack only), to give it a use vs single target.
At the moment it's only a "support", but nothing to build something on it.

ps.: I've never seen someone (ingame) playing LT in the endgame.

Edit: That's the tree for my shock-stack-build (low life, but enough DMG to test the LT)



Sorry for my engl, but i think you get the point.

So with Nemesis near it's end, I decided to yolo play a toon with lightning trap as a main skill because I like seeing balls of lightning going everywhere. I also wanted to see if it was viable with low currency + self-found drops. My character was a 51 Scion. I did RIP, though, but it was mainly due to bad gear and really low life for the level - 1k hp in cruel act 3 (didn't farm much for better gear and didn't take many health passives)

GEM setup ; LT + multi-trap + added chaos + fast proj (LT lvl was at 12, forgot the others)

PROS:

- Light show
- Fun skill to use because you always had to be active with it (if that's what you like to do)
- It clears white and blue packs pretty effectively. My tooltip dps was around 450 and I'm assuming that it is per trap and per projectile. Not sure if it can "shotgun" but it seemed to kill rares faster when grouped in packs.

Now, someone mentioned before that single target is crap, and, well, it is. But this is how I dealt with most single target rares and it worked pretty well. I ran away in a straight line and threw LT (6) straight in front of me and as soon as 3 traps were triggered I threw another set of LT (6 total LT at any given time (not sure if all +1 trap passives gives you the ability to throw 9 LT with multi-traps)).

CONS:

- Mana can get high
- The only real problems I ran into were the more stationary/slow rares; titty bishes, rare carrions, shroud walkers (more annoying than a problem), and having to deal with the cooldown when throwing LT again to make them trigger it. It wasn't efficient because not all traps were being triggered constantly (wasted dps) like running and throwing and I HAD TO CHASE them instead. I had to rely on bear trap + ek to deal with this.

COMMENTS:

Maybe buff its damage a little and give it some other property for quality like others have suggested; chance to shock, higher base crit, inherit pierce (?), wall bounce, or even give mutli-traps the ability to throw in a triangle or lesser spread so they can all be triggered at once for single target dps.

My personal suggestion would be to give LT the ability to shotgun the enemy who triggers it according to where it was triggered (maybe have it pierce at first so all projectiles still shoot out). If you threw the trap right in the middle of an enemy and it proc'ed, all projectiles would hit. If it was triggered outside its outer radius, maybe 3 or 4 projectiles would hit. Bigger enemies get hit with more projectiles.

I mained this skill until level 85-86 (I even got the Rampage challenge with it) and after I changed to Fire Trap the difference felt like night and day. (I used it in my 5L chest with crit dmg as the 4th support gem, means: Light.Trap,Crit Chance, Crit Damage, Chain, Multi-Traps)

Here you can see the difference of the crit chance:


current gear (LvL 88 Shadow):


current skill tree:


Just a small buff to this Skill will make playing with Lightning Trap as the main Skil in end-game more viable. Fire Trap only supported by Lightning Trap is 100 times better than the other way round. Of course Fire Trap could be just op as always xD

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