Arc

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zharmad wrote:

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mr48 wrote:

Thats pretty confusing. Why would you give high damage numbers in the description but then cut them in half later? Wouldn't it be much more straightforward just to give you lower damage numbers to begin with?

Yes, for some people - there should be threads in the suggestions forums remodelling the description of damage effectiveness.

Namely, if you just changed the values on the gem to take that into account, you'd still get confusion. This is because now the damage description on gems no longer lines up with anything else in the game using the same description box. Imagine Rain of Arrows, which says 80% effectiveness. That % is meant to apply to all item-mods on gear, and added flat-damage gems, all of which appears in exactly the same place in the description as the damage on the gem itself.

It could work better if damage effectiveness says "all supports are at x-% effectiveness" along with your suggestion, and then I'd be asking e.g. "what happens with Heavy Strike, which has %-bonuses per level on the gem itself?" The point of 'damage effectiveness' is to influence the effectiveness of everything, including supports. If you can find a better way to describe that, please post it in the suggestions forum. :)

Oh, so you mean the 50% damage effectiveness is added multiplicatively on top of the damage numbers AFTER all other modifiers (e.g. conductivity and elemental weakness)?

Lets say my Arc gets a 65 damage roll on a target with 0% lightning resist, with the conductivity curse on it (say 32% lowered resist) then would the damage calculation be 65*1.32*0.5= 42.9 ?

Essentially yes, although technically the order of operations is slightly different:

( ( damage range after support )* effectiveness ) * enemy resistance.
( 65 * 0.5 )* 1.32

Since the game doesn't know what resistance the target will be, your DPS on the skill bar calculates the first two. If you added a lightning penetration gem, your DPS probably won't change for this reason.

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mr48 wrote:

Thats pretty confusing. Why would you give high damage numbers in the description but then cut them in half later? Wouldnt it be much more straightforward just to give you lower damage numbers to begin with?


I'd like to see this changed, because its a pointless complication and only adds confusion.

Its to balance support gems, at least I think. take Firestorm or Flame totem as examples. Extreme amounts of hits per second and if something like an added chaos support got full damage on each one of those hits, it would be to much to powerful.

Gotcha, makes more sense now.

They need to buff this spell, and badly. because currently, it's shit.

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Northanui wrote:

They need to buff this spell, and badly. because currently, it's shit.

Well, I've been using it since normal up to merciless Act 2 now and it's at 1k+dps (Gem is currently lvl 14 coupled with Faster Casting of 31%). It has been awesome all the way through, I just wish it'd chain more to handle some of the bigger groups.

I can't comment on the endgame part yet, but so far it has been totally destroying everything I encountered.

I'm really disapointed by this skill. I started my witch around this skill, i'm not so high level so i can respec some points to change my main skill spam. But it's sad ....

My arc skill is lvl 6 with and support gem (increased critical strike multiplicater = 130% mana).

good points : can hit multiple target relatively far from each other, instant skill = never fail hit, auto search of target.

bad points : Very low damage single target, mediocre damage multiple target (not as good a simple fireball), high mana cost.

I think the solution is to increased the first hit to 100% of the damage (100% effectiveness) and incresed the effectiveness from 50% to 70% for the another chain to improve multiple target damage. This way single and multiple target are improve without overpowered multiple target damage. Slightly lower the mana cost.

Maybe a whole impovement of the damage could be also add.

I can't compare with other electrical spell because i don't use them a lot : spark projectiles are too random, shock nova no drop since a while so never use before but i prefer keep ice nova for CaC aoe ( my only ice spell).

but after readind this thread i will definitively tried spark for damage effectiveness.

I'm also sad because my fireball with a new lesser projectiles support gem almmost 1 shot mob in CaC while i need 5 arc for single target ...

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Mark_GGG wrote:

It will change eventaully to damage effectiveness not applying to the base damage on the skill, only to added damage from other sources (and base damage being lower to compensate). But that can't happen until we redo stats because there's currently no difference at all between damage added from a support or gear and damage base on the gem.

Hi
Would be awesome if this issue could get pushed up a few zots on your list of things to improve.

I'm currently using this skill linked to a spell totem, which already takes a good chunk of effective damage, now add to that damage effectiveness.
It's no longer reliably proccing shock status in Merciless (running the Static Blows cluster too).
I don't know what else to do to make minions deal a little bit more damage other than going for Shock status, so Arcing was my best bet.
Usual coments from mates go along the line of: "Arc? Oh that was good to break pots in CB! lol"
Also I'd like to see an exception for either Fork or Chain to be a viable support for this gem. Pretty sure it would look stunning, too! (I'm aware about how tightly you keep the mechanics in check, projectiles in particular, so this may just be wishful thinking here)

edit Chain works as for a support gem, nvm :)

Dropping by some feedback. I'm sure most of this has been covered by others, hopefully another voice adds some more weight to the issues.

I've been using it as a Witch up through Act 3 Normal. I've had to drop it due to ineffectiveness.

This is a great skill, in potential. It's auto-aiming, can't be dodged, handles small groups and single target equally well (with proper supports), it's very spammable and it looks and sounds AWESOME. This is fun to use and I wish I could make it my main attack, but it's just not competitive with the other spells.

On the downside, it's mana cost is way too high for the damage it does. It also does far too little damage- this is due to the huge damage range, which averages out the DPS to "really low" even though it seems good because one or two lucky rolls will devastate a group. As enemy HP pools get higher, it's failure in overall DPS becomes much more apparent.

On a side note, look carefully at the enemies that use this skill (Piety, blackguards). Because it's undodgeable, it's only counter is to damage soak with HP and resist gear. It can bounce of pots, crates, minions, and such to hit the player multiple times, resulting in an enormous and unavoidable damage spike. Not fun. Make sure that these enemies don't come packed in groups.