Arc

Before the nerf to arcs base damage and the buff to crit, arc was in a good state if you ask me because
non crit arc was strong but not comparable to crit dps wise and you had to invest quite a bit of currency to make crit stronger than non crit. But now nearly noone plays non crit arc anymore because of several things:

Firstly the base damage nerf and the 25% buff to crit made it way easier for crit arc builds to surpass non crit arc build (i am speaking about a few chaos of gear investment). But not only does crit arcs dps shine brighter than non crit arc it also gives you better survivability to go crit because of herald of ice which lets you even freeze bosses with arc.

My standard witch has 16k dps with non crit arc and she uses lvl 20 gems and empower in a 6l the only choice i have to increase my arc is to buy a lvl 21 arc, lvl 4 empower and a 1+ level 6l. Even with all this investment i wouldnt get more than maybe 24k dps. However i would have use at least 100ex for all of this but if I would use 100ex on a crit arc my dps would be around 40k and i would freeze mobs all the time.

I find it really disturbing that GGG changes everything towards making crit stronger (I am looking at you flask changes + surgeons) and at the same time making the non crit playstyle weaker and weaker. So i always feel like i am gimping myself whenever i play non crit builds.

Therefore I strongly believe that more spells should be unable to crit like incinerate so GGG doesnt have to think about 500% + crit multiplers when balancing spells. Arc could be one of these zero crit chance spells.

I'd like to see the AoE tag added to Arc, to allow AoE increases to apply to it's chaining radius (base 45). I find it somewhat inconsistent that Herald of Thunder has the AoE tag while Arc does not, though both operate within a radius but don't deal AoE damage explicitly.

I think Arc is in a pretty good place right now.


This staff is a great choice. I have 58% lighting penetration and 200% shock duration. It really makes a huge difference in damage.

With my non-crit build, I get around 26k effective dps. Of course crit will have more damage potential, but that's just to be expected. Non-crit is still very strong.

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Baronfuming wrote:

I think Arc is in a pretty good place right now.

This staff is a great choice. I have 58% lighting penetration and 200% shock duration. It really makes a huge difference in damage.

With my non-crit build, I get around 26k effective dps. Of course crit will have more damage potential, but that's just to be expected. Non-crit is still very strong.

The statement that you got 26k dps on your arc build is not true, there is only one way to get that much dps it is having a lvl 21 arc and a lvl 3-4 empower in a 6l. You have a 5l and a lvl 17 arc, so i would say you have around 8-9k dps at best, so please stop spreading lies.

He said 26k effective dps not 26k dps. There is a difference.

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Starxsword wrote:

He said 26k effective dps not 26k dps. There is a difference.

It is saturday and I am bored, so i did the maths:

Increased spell damage: Lets asume he has 450% increased lightning damage from the skill tree coupled with his weapon this is 500% so the basedamage gets multiplied by 6

Cast speed: Let assume he has 40% from tree and 42 percent from faster casting multiplied with spell echo:
1,82*1,66*1,25(arc cast per second) = 3,77 casts per second

Negative multipler from echo is 0,9

So basedamage from lvl 18 arc is 287 + 75,5 (lvl 18 herald of thunder) = 362,5

So all in all his dps is 362,5*3,77*6*0,9 = 7379

He believes that his 58% lightning penetration is a dirct multipler, however this is not true because most mobs in merciless have at least 30% resistances and many have even higher resistances, so lets say this is another multiper 1,28

Shock: His arc ha no quality on it so he probably only has 10% chance to hock from arc and maybe another 20% from tree, so he will only shock enemies every third or so attack. But lets assume he has insane rng and he shocks hundred percent of times, therefor another multiper is 1,5

Effective dps: 7379*1,28*1,5 = 14169 effective dps

As i said before stop spreading lies

Edit:

Forgot that arc has a 50% damage effectiveness, therefor dps is even lower

so then 14 /2 =7 for effectiveness,
then times number of hits it can do, 7 *5 = 35 ,
then 75% of that to indicate how you won't always hit full amount of foes. 35 *.75 = 26

oh cool i should be illuminati.

"

Vipermagi wrote:

"

vangrandson wrote:

He believes that his 58% lightning penetration is a dirct multipler, however this is not true because most mobs in merciless have at least 30% resistances and many have even higher resistances, so lets say this is another multiper 1,28

...
If a monster has any amount of Resistance, it's listed under their name.
Most monsters have no Lightning Resist. Unique monsters tend to have sub-75% Resists unless they have a secondary increase from somewhere.

Thank you very much for this information, I always thought that mobs in merciless have like 40%+ resistances.

However my point remains true, here is the correct calculation of his effective dps:

324,75*3,77*6*0,9*1,58*1,5 = 15668

However this calculation includes the bonus damage from shock, but arc builds usually have sub 30% chance to shock if they dont have 20% arc so the effective damage is in truth even lower.

As you can see non-crit need high investment to get halfway acceptable damage meaning you need a lvl 3+4 empower and a lvl 20 arc plus a 6l to function properly.

"

So basedamage from lvl 18 arc is 287 + 75,5 (lvl 18 herald of thunder) = 362,5

Have you count Herald of Ice? Herald of Ice's explosion and Herald of Thunder's lightning damage?

In either case, the numbers look close enough. So maybe he embellished it a bit, but it doesn't look like it was too much.