Experimenting w/ Elemental Hit

(Edit: On second thought... Perhaps 'Gameplay Help' would've been a more suitable place for this topic? If that's the case, could a mod please move it there? Sorry, and thanks.)



First of all, while I have been playing PoE (standard, solo) for a while now, I'm sure many of you endgamers would still consider me a newb, so I just ask that you take it easy on me, if I'm missing any vital details in game mechanics and whatnot. ^^; I'm not sure this would even handle well in endgame content, but... well, lemme know what you think of it.

After hearing some concerns with attack speed-centric characters (esp. w/ Multistrike), I came up with an idea (albeit doubtfully a particularly original one) to try to work around the impact that enemy armor values have against low physical damage output. The basic idea is a fast Elemental Hit with reductions to enemy resistances, but here's a more specific idea of what I had in mind:

Ver. 1: Curse On Hit
- Elemental Hit + Multistrike + Curse On Hit + Elemental Weakness (sub. Multi w/ Faster Attacks?)
-- For 5/6 linked sockets, add 1+ of the following: Weapon Elemental Damage, Faster Attacks, Added Chaos Damage, Increased Critical Strikes
- Elemental Equilibrium keystone (preferably with purely phys. weapon)

Ver. 2: Manual Curse
- Elemental Hit + Multistrike + Faster Attacks + Weapon Elemental Damage
-- For 5/6 linked sockets, add 1+ of the following: Added Chaos Damage, Increased Critical Strikes
- Elemental Equilibrium keystone (preferably with purely phys. weapon)
- Cast Elemental Weakness manually as needed

...So the idea here is to jump in with a really fast attack that's constantly changing its element (for the sake of resistant/immune enemies) and keeping enemy res down for all elements. (-20+% for EW, and -50% for EE on opposing elements, so roughly -70+%, under ideal circumstances.) I don't really have any specific items in mind for this build, although a decent scepter could obviously give some extra elemental damage via innate mods. After looking around at some higher-end uniques, though, I think Soul Taker or Doryani's Catalyst would be an ideal weapon for this build, but I'm not really at a point where I could seriously consider items like that, haha. So, just generally speaking, does this sound like a reasonably competent (partial) build? Or would I be better off sticking to one or two elements in particular, and trying to focus on more ranged/AoE attacks? (Lord knows Lightning Strike sees plenty of use these days.)

If you need any other details on the rest of my current build in order to evaluate this portion of it, just let me know, and I'll share whatever else.

Hi there.

First of all I would like to say props for the will to experiment!

Myself have done a lot of experimenting with elemental hit, trying to figure out a way to make it viable, here are the issues I have ran into:

- Elemental reflect is a pain
- Mana cost require EB / gg jewelry and/or subpar passive tree
- The damage is subpar without anger and wrath (which you would skip out on seeing as you want to make use of the EE keystone.
- As every melee elemental build you want a fast attacking one-handed sword with multiple elemental rolls, which would again counteract your idea about the EE, the soul taker idea is interesting but the investment will simply not match the outcome of your damage.

If you want to make elemental hit work, I would wait for some buffs to totems :)

Cool idea's nonetheless :)

Thanks for the response!

"The will to experiment," eh? I do rather dislike when a game as diverse as this gets narrowed down to a select few builds that everyone uses, so yes, I do try to stray from the super-trendy builds when I can. ^^;

As far as elemental reflect goes, are there enemies who reflect any and all elemental damage, as opposed to just a particular element? Have yet to encounter any, myself, so I've been acting under the assumption that reflection didn't go beyond a single element. In theory, this would be nice for EH, since it would only do one element per hit, thus reducing the number of hits that get reflected, as opposed to a single element getting reflected with every hit. But if I'm wrong and there are full-spectrum reflectors out there, then this is somewhat of a moot point. (However, if using a purely-physical weapon, like suggested in my original post, then one could simply have a backup physical attack ready for such an occasion.)

I did notice that EH definitely has a high cost, although I'm using Blood Magic (keystone), and with minimal skill cost reduction (10%, I think?) and some life leech/gain per hit/regen, it seems relatively easy to mitigate.

Yes, the base damage values of EH do seem a bit questionable... Goodness, I wish the DPS was calculated in-game, hah. I've done a few rough estimates, but it's still a bit of a pain to really get a good idea of what kind of output you're getting. I'd planned on using Weapon Elemental Damage (and perhaps the innate Elemental Damage bonus of scepters) to boost the output of EH, but, again, too much math involved, heh. WED gives a nice percentage, though, for sure, effectively giving a ~1.5x multiplier to any elemental damage, so I imagine that'd make a significant difference.

In later thoughts, I did ponder about the effect of using a weapon with 2-3 innate elements on top of EH's elemental damage, after reading that each element counts as a separate hit and thus triggers EE... Made my whole pure-phys weapon idea seem somewhat pointless, heh. I liked the idea of switching up the output element constantly, and thus constantly changing the EE's choices for the -50% res, but I guess even with that stacked with EW, the output simply wouldn't be as high as stacking elemental damage values all at once, per attack, eh?



Whatever the case, in hindsight, I can't help but wonder why I didn't think about doing a build like this on a templar, rather than a duelist, haha. Seeing as the templar's got all of those elemental damage bonuses and all... Then again, I was looking at this as a sort of "fix" for my current duelist build, since his output was seeming pretty low, and I was concerned that the phys-dmg-vs-armor scaling was the reason why (especially since I was using rapiers up until recently). For the record, though, I was putting this idea to use in a less-than-ideal setup, and it did at least appear to be doing some pretty decent damage -- possibly better than my primary attack (Double Strike + Multistrike + Melee Physical Damage). However, generally speaking, it seems like I still have a lot to learn when it comes to DPS in this game. ^^; I'll have to keep in mind all that's been tested and said here. Thanks for the tip(s).

I really would like to see EH as a more commonly-used attack, though, as it's a pretty interesting one, I think. Curious to see what kinds of developments could be done to improve it.