Static Strike is awesome

I don't know about duelist, but as a Templar I'm finding my location on the tree to be very complimentary to the skill. Basically, use Physical to Lightning and:

-You can invest in lightning and elemental damage instead of physical damage

-It's worthwhile to go for those nodes that give a high chance to shock, so you're always shocking

-When you're always shocking, Herald of Thunder becomes really good additional damage.

-Because most of your damage comes from increased elemental, you can use lightning spells as a ranged attack.

-Vaal Spark, yo.

-Since you're only dealing lightning damage, you can stack resist penalties (from the tree, penetration gem, and multiple curses) to really rack up your damage.

So, I tested this out. I didn't really like the feel of the skill, molten strike/infernal blow feel far more visceral and fun to me. Its also not the BiS melee skill in terms of damage/clear speed.

In my own testing I easily beat it with cyclone, for both clear speed and single target dps. Cyclone tooltip is msleading, does way more damage. Clear speed wise, you have to go and hit on an enemy to start it, and then wait for the lightning to proc, which feels like a big delay to me.

Of course, my build might not be helping in this regard. I'm a crit based build with herald of ash in doryani, which means that most everything dies from prolif overkill before static strike even procs.

One last thing, increasing area of effect seems like it would be OP for this skill's effectiveness and efficency. It seems to be a very good skill for levelling, and for non-overkill based builds, directly superior to molten strike, though in endgame it is outclassed by cyclone/reave/flicker as well as other things like infernal blow.

Definitely not in need of a nerf. Though I will be playing around with it more :P

.

I'm working on a crit variant that runs:

Static Strike + WED + Melee Phys + Multistrike + Physical to Lightning + Life Leech
Hatred + Purity of Lightning

The idea is to scale the elemental damage high with Melee Physical, then take full advantage of WED with 100% conversion. Shock and Freeze everything

Life Leech with Vaal Pact for elemental reflect

I really like the new Static Strike skill very much. Finally it's fun to play melee again. And no, I defintily don't think Static Strike should get nerfed. In my opinion melee playstyle should be more rewarding dmg-wise than casting or ranged playstyle, since you have to face much more difficult and dangerous situation in close combat range. Spell casters and ranged players are in general way too OP compared to melee playstyle...

And don't forget about desync problems, melee playstyle (also) has to be satisfying. I don't want to be frustrated all the time dying to desync and have no fun in fighting melee. So in my opinion GGG did with Static Strike a very good job to improve the long needed balance between melee and casting/ranged.

And btw, I don't get where some people have this insane dmg numbers with Static Strike from. Do you all play glass cannons builds and only specc into dmg nodes?! My templar is now on lvl 44 in Cruel and does a bit more than 1k dmg with a nice onehanded axe and with all 3 Heralds up. I like to be more tanky and to be able to face most possible situations, instead of simply having high dmg and dying here and there because of no good defense or reflect. The dmg from Static Strike is good as it is at the moment and feels very balanced to me. It makes no sense (to me) to specc only into dmg nodes and crying about certain skills are OP and all. ;)

I also hope for improvement of older melee skills to be more attractive to play different melee playstyles. :)

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SorakPoE wrote:

[
If it's going to get nerfed eventually, I'd rather have it nerfed soon before I invest a lot of time or gear into building around it....

I can promise you it's going to get nerfed eventually. However, I see two options:

(1) it gets nerfed by the end of week 2 in the league
(2) it gets nerfed when 1.4.0 hits

As GGG have said, the beginning of a new league is when they do the most rebalancing.

However, there's literally no way they will let this skill stay as powerful as it is long-term. If you care about investing time and gear into building around it _for standard_, give up now. If you just want to make sure it'll last you the league, you'll probably be fine if it last 1 week without a patch, much less 2.

(personally, I am planning to make a Static Strike build starting in week 3 of the league if it lasts until after Christmas. But until I get confirmation that they're not nerfing it, I'm trying DD, which everyone knows was nerfed in 1.2 but has killed Uber Atziri since then and wasn't noticeably nerfed between 1.2 and 1.3)

It's definitely good for leveling - without any investment you got decent aoe without worrying for LMP/GMP stuff that just lowers your damage.
However later in game ... not so sure. Im running 4L for static and cyclone and while static tooltip damage is almost 2.5 of the latter it doesn't feel that way. I guess it is because like everything got ele resist and i don't heve light pen gem yet so i will reserve my verdict till i get 5L for it.
The other part is that you are siting duck with static strike while cyclone has movement element that lets you dodge projectiles.

But geting some static charges up and then cycloning in definetly feels nice - maybe it is something worth going for with ele prolif and increased duration to get the shocks rolling as you spin.

Anyone building a FB build with this?

Lightning boxer ftw! lol

"

Anyone building a FB build with this?

Lightning boxer ftw! lol

Would if could. It didn't work with FB last I checked.

I'm really enjoying being able to deal high-damage hits with this and get shocks. It feels nice perma-shocking Piety without Elemental Proliferation shenanigans.