[1.3] Wanderfully Balanced Kinetic Blaster

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iMbaQ wrote:

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Level 71 with this build in bloodlines.

I have a few questions.

My tooltip dps is like 2.3k. But it feels like I'm doing a 10 times that. Why is that? I think I read that the tooltip damage doesn't reflect the actual damage its doing. I've seen a few other builds with almost the same skill tree and their tooltip dps is like 30k. Does this have to do with different links or something to kinetic blast?

Also, I don't seem to have any problems with reflect, it does no damage to me. Is that because my damage isn't high enough? I'm still farming docks and every group is practically one shot. But my single target seems to be lacking, even with the whole frostwall thing.

Have I just not built up my DPS enough for single target to not be strong enough and reflect not be dangerous?

What is your tooltip dps? (just curious)

edit: oh, and I should say that I don't have much crit. no crit gear yet and I think with 4 power charges, my crit chance is a bit below 30%

I wasn't lying when I said that tooltip DPS does not tell you everything :). See a couple of posts above where I did a 74 map with a 117 pdps wand!

My tooltip DPS with my ~220 pdps wand is 24k with GMP, 34k with LMP.

The tooltip DPS is based only on the initial hit your wand does - so you can see why it is such a bad indicator of DPS.

- It does not add the area damage, just one explosion hitting a target as well as your initial hit means you need to add 75% damage to that tooltip DPS and it is possible they get hit by multiple explosions.
- It does not factor in the additional damage from shock.
- The explosion damage of Herald of Ice and the overkill burn damage of Herald of Fire is completely not factored in.

I feel the tooltip DPS does not even factor in 40% of the actual DPS dealt personally.

alright, so I have a 168 physical dps wand and my dps tool tip is about 1/10th yours.

Is my dps lacking because of my lack of crit or something?

Crit and crit multiplier greatly increase the tooltip DPS of this build, . As you level and acquire gear (I am currently level 86), dps seems to go up quite quickly. Also, gem levels will also make a huge difference.

You mentioned reflect briefly, as you can see in the video I am able to run reflect maps without any issue - and I currently have 522% crit multiplier and over 90% crit chance with power charges up - just incase you was worrying about dying to reflect if you invested in crit.

In all honestly, I can probably drop nodes/gear to get my dps to around 10-15k and get a huge boost to life without noticing a slower clearspeed much at all!

Fantastic replies iMbaQ. Really appreciated how closely you follow this thread and the detail you go into in your responses. One more question for you (for now haha) - Which gems do you feel should be the priority when going for quality? Thanks again!

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Brodrick2527 wrote:

Fantastic replies iMbaQ. Really appreciated how closely you follow this thread and the detail you go into in your responses. One more question for you (for now haha) - Which gems do you feel should be the priority when going for quality? Thanks again!

Kinetic Blast first for the AOE and then Critical Damage for the DPS boost I reckon. I have actually maxed the Critical Damage gem first, but that was just coincidental as I had an 18% one which only needed 2 GCP's to max :).

As for the other gems:

Blood Magic - No need to do quality as we aren't running low life
Life Leech - Vaal pact means we don't benefit from quality
WED - An okay quality bonus but not really necessary, probably quality last.
LMP/GMP - Get 10% attack speed at max quaility, so I'd quality after Critical Damage/Kinetic Blast.

Just tried it out last night with a respec lvl 88 scion. This is my first time playing Kinetic Blast and it clears faster than my Tornado Shot build. The only thing that worries me is the low life, I'm currently at 3.6k life and even with improvement in gears I don't see it going much above 4k. That being said, this is a terrific build and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Thanks.

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IchiMorghulis wrote:

Just tried it out last night with a respec lvl 88 scion. This is my first time playing Kinetic Blast and it clears faster than my Tornado Shot build. The only thing that worries me is the low life, I'm currently at 3.6k life and even with improvement in gears I don't see it going much above 4k. That being said, this is a terrific build and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Thanks.

Here is a 167% life version of the build (takes up the Ondar's guile node for added defenses): http://poeurl.com/zahhhvY - you lose the "Elder Power" and "Throatseeker Ring" and some accuracy/attack speed nodes, but gain the "HeartSeeker Ring".


Can be changed as required. As per my previous post, I think we can probably reduce the DPS a bit on the build as I think the clearspeed would actually not be affected that much - can even add a further 15% life for a total of 182% life via the "Melding" ring if you are happy to further reduce the DPS.

Overall I think there is quite a lot of flexibility on this build, as the clear speed seems to be insane without much DPS.

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iMbaQ wrote:

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IchiMorghulis wrote:

Just tried it out last night with a respec lvl 88 scion. This is my first time playing Kinetic Blast and it clears faster than my Tornado Shot build. The only thing that worries me is the low life, I'm currently at 3.6k life and even with improvement in gears I don't see it going much above 4k. That being said, this is a terrific build and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Thanks.

Here is a 167% life version of the build (takes up the Ondar's guile node for added defenses): http://poeurl.com/zahhhvY - you lose the "Elder Power" and "Throatseeker Ring" and some accuracy/attack speed nodes, but gain the "HeartSeeker Ring".


Can be changed as required. As per my previous post, I think we can probably reduce the DPS a bit on the build as I think the clearspeed would actually not be affected that much - can even add a further 15% life for a total of 182% life via the "Melding" ring if you are happy to further reduce the DPS.

Overall I think there is quite a lot of flexibility on this build, as the clear speed seems to be insane without much DPS.

This build looks really interesting, been trying to find a KB build to try out. Thanks for this extra life and ondar's more defensive variant, will try it out on bloodlines.

The fact that it's a scion on top of all that is just awesome.

I haven't gotten to end game maps or anything yet, but have you tried playing with Life Gain on Hit (prefered quality one) instead of life leech and vaal pact? KB + GMP means your hitting a ton of times. I was finding I didnt even need vaal pact or LL at all for Merc docks. I guess the it depends on if you do a ton of dmg and your life gain on hit cant keep up with a reflect pack or something. Could be something to consider...possibly remove the need to go Scion? Any thoughts?

edit double post

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scalymanfish wrote:

I haven't gotten to end game maps or anything yet, but have you tried playing with Life Gain on Hit (prefered quality one) instead of life leech and vaal pact? KB + GMP means your hitting a ton of times. I was finding I didnt even need vaal pact or LL at all for Merc docks. I guess the it depends on if you do a ton of dmg and your life gain on hit cant keep up with a reflect pack or something. Could be something to consider...possibly remove the need to go Scion? Any thoughts?

Good question. It is something that I had theorycrafted initially and this is what my conclusion was:

Excluding any leech from gear we have:

10.8% Physical Leech (2% from tree)
8.8% Elemental Leech

This becomes 4.32% Physical Leech and 3.52% Elemental Leech after Vaal Pact's 40% penalty.

LGOH provides up to 54 life per target hit.

This means the cross over points per hit are:

Physical damage: 1250
Elemental: 1534

There is both an initial hit and explosion hit, as the explosion hit is 75% of the initial hit, one could argue that the actual cross over DPS is slightly higher in favour of LGOH due to this reason, but then again that assumes you haven't one shot things on the initial hit. It also ignores the delay in the explosion, so for reflect purposes we should go with the initial hit leech as technically you could kill yourself before the explosions have hit anything. The calculation also gets more complicated when it comes to multiple explosions etc.

My damage Breakdown:
341-703 Physical Damage (522 average)
140-289 Fire Damage (214 average)
436-783 Cold Damage (609 average)
201-855 Lightning Damage (528 average)

This equates to 522 physical and 1352 elemental per hit. Clearly it can be seen LGOH seems to be very viable, especially so when it comes to the physical damage portion.

If the target is shocked however, we do need to factor in the 50% increased damage you deal. this will mean you will still be safe when it comes to the physical aspect, but the elemental damage will now benefit more from the life leech gem.

This is ignoring Monster resistances, so one might say that resistances factored in and the explosions dealing 25% less damage, perhaps it won't be that much above the threshold to make it worth investing into Vaal Pact.

But I have yet to factor in criticals, which is where it all changes

I have more than 500% crit multi, but let's just assume one has 400% for the sake of arguement.

That means, that my damage breakdown becomes as follows (NB I have over 90% crit chance).

Physical Damage Average with Crit: 2088
Fire Damage Average with Crit: 856
Cold Damage Average with Crit: 2436
Lightning Damage Average with Crit: 2112

This equates to 2088 physical and 5404 elemental damage per hit. Huge figures now and that is with over 100% less crit multi than I actually have. You could go further and add the fact that Assassins Mark increases the damage by up to 39%. Oh, then there is shock, which would further increase these ridiculous figures. LGOH won't save you from reflect in these scenario's.

So, unless you plan to skip crit multiplier or keep it very low, stick with the Life Leech gem.

Currently I'm on Cruel Act 2. Just beat Merveil.

I started using Blood Magic before the fight to try out how well it works. That had to be be the easiest Merveil fight ever for me. I had to keep my finger on the flask button all the time, but I one shotted the Heir of Flame and Heir of Storm died quickly.

So far game has been quite easy. I have just sneeze in the general direction and everything dies. Some stronger monster can be quite dangerous. I have to get right sockets, so I can start using Spell Totem.