Arc

I took Arc as a quest reward on my level 20-something caster templar, and it seems really nice so far. Does good damage, especially to pairs of monsters. It is pretty hard on the mana pool though.

I noticed a weird thing with it too. When I mouse over the Arc gem in my inventory, it says it has 4% crit chance, but when I look at it on my offense tab in the character screen, it says it has 5% crit chance. This is weird because I have no crit chance on passives or gear. I use fireball and frost nova on that character, and in the offense tab the crit chances on those are the same as the base crit chances listed on their respective gems.

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Vipermagi wrote:

If you're going to be critting a lot, indeed. 4% base Crit chance does not make for a lot of Crits. That "some extra damage" is up to 120%, which comes after all other modifiers. I don't know about you, but more than doubling damage output is a fair lot in my books, and with Proliferation, it's easy to hit the three-stack cap.

In theory, this makes sense. In reality, we have diamond flasks. As I don't abuse diamond flasks, I love stacking shock chance :)

I'm calling dibs on the name "Sharker" for a build that uses Arc to max out on shock stacks, and "Sharkler" (to parody the name "Sparkler") for builds that use Arc Totems to support their main cast with shock statuses. ^-^

Something occurred to me about this spell, that might make a pretty damn good build. But this isn't the place to go into details, and I have other things in queue to be tested by the end of CB... Maybe when OB comes :)

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Vipermagi wrote:

If you're going to be critting a lot, indeed. 4% base Crit chance does not make for a lot of Crits. That "some extra damage" is up to 120%, which comes after all other modifiers. I don't know about you, but more than doubling damage output is a fair lot in my books, and with Proliferation, it's easy to hit the three-stack cap.

I currently have a 27% chance to crit just playing normally and then use diamond flasks whenever I feel that I need one, so ya I am critting a lot.

I just tried the arc and I love it. I'm a bit confused though because tooltip says that it will deal 3-59 lightning damage but character screen says that it only does 2-39 damage. What's up with that?

damage effectiveness, the skill has 50% because it is actually hitting multiple foes.

Still trying...
I made a minion witch and mana cost at mid-high levels is just ridiculous.

Level 11 Arc + Lightning Penetration + Faster Casting = 103 mana/sec
That's just 2 supports. It's not even that powerful, character screen says 308 dps (I'm level 50).
Do I absolutely have to use it with reduced mana cost and mana leech?