Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page

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Ratsneve wrote:
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ScaryAtheist wrote:
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Ratsneve wrote:
I accidentally took 3 spell damage nodes instead of 3 cast speed nodes. Why not keep them and take the 3 energy shields too. If I need them later on take 3+ respecs then?


Cast speed is more important than the flat spell damage. Energy shield is useless for this build, you want flat life & mana.
Why? And thank you much for explaining.


Cast speed is essentially a damage multiplier because it increases the number of times you can hit an enemy before you need to move. It's also incredibly important from a defensive standpoint because it allows you to cast and get out of the way that much faster. It also helps your movement speed if you're using Lightning Warp. I'm not saying 4% increased cast speed is more valuable than, say, 80% increased spell damage, but ScaryAtheist is certainly right here that 12% increased cast speed is more valuable than 30% increased spell damage. The cast speed is multiplicative and the increased damage is additive (with other types of applicable increased damage, of which there are plenty available). You should refund 3 passives elsewhere on your tree, allocate the points to the cast speed nodes, refund the 3 spell damage nodes, and allocate them back to the first 3 you refunded.

Energy shield isn't useless for this build, per se--it's more useful than armour or evasion--but it's not worth going out of your way to pile it on. The main reason is because of the Acrobatics keystone passive skill, which cuts your ES by 30% (in exchange for dodge chance). More ES is better than less, but something that gives you +30 life is going to have a significantly bigger impact on your total life pool than something that gives you +30 ES because our passive tree gives us lots of % increased life, not ES. In effect, +30 flat life will end up multiplying out to +60-70 when you equip the item, while that +30 flat ES will be around +30 ES. (Keep in mind that this advice is meant for this specific build; the opposite is true of a high-ES build.)

I understand your sensibility wanting as "pure" of a witch as you can get. I am attracted to witch builds for the same reason, and this is a great one for a beginner. The game's mechanics are not designed to reward purity in many instances, though, so some aesthetic deviations may be necessary to further the pure stats that are your ultimate goal. For instance, Inpulsa's is not a pure intelligence-based robe, but it is certainly the chest armor that benefits self-cast Arc the most because of its powerful effects. You can wear some kind of robe if you want, but it's not going to make your lightning spells magically explode enemies or significantly increase the strength of your spell-based shocks the way Inpulsa's does.

There are green and red gems in this game that are really powerful for spellcasters; you aren't doing yourself any favors by dismissing them as being archetypically undesirable just because of their color. Look at Ice Golem, for instance; the gem is green, but you're basically summoning an elemental that slings frost and ice around like a mage! Other support gems are meant to benefit skills that are both spells and attacks, and these certainly can't all be blue. Adding one green and one red gem to your Lightning Warp setup is going to give you the best, fastest LW possible, and LW certainly seems to me to be the most classically mage-like teleport in the game. Watch the video of Enki slaughtering Uber Elder in the OP and tell me--disregarding the appearance of his witch, which is totally customizable--that's anything other than a pure mage.

All told, this iteration of this build is one of the closest to "pure" you will get in this game while still being capable of handling the highest-level content. Depending on what you fancy, next league is clearly going to be a strong one for the Necromancer ascendancy, which is certainly in the realm of pure magic-using, so you can always try that in 2 weeks when Blight is released.
Last edited by WorderMostFoul on Aug 23, 2019, 8:27:55 PM
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All told, this iteration of this build is one of the closest to "pure" you will get in this game while still being capable of handling the highest-level content. Depending on what you fancy, next league is clearly going to be a strong one for the Necromancer ascendancy, which is certainly in the realm of pure magic-using, so you can always try that in 2 weeks when Blight is released.
Thank you for all this. I will think on it all. I have corrected the passives error.
Last edited by Ratsneve on Aug 25, 2019, 1:00:31 PM
Finding higher map tiers and lvl90+ difficult. Sometimes I die quickly and don't know why. What should I spend my next 10ex on with focus on survivability?

Thanks
I have built and am using the +1 Arc wand. Marvel is defeated without needing the sapphire rings though I replayed that battle again for farming potential and thinking the rings might have some important effect on the battle--they didn't. Starting Act 2 today.

I'm standing on others shoulders, falling off one minute and climbing back on the next. Thank you for that.
Last edited by Ratsneve on Aug 25, 2019, 1:10:11 PM
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Ratsneve wrote:
I have built and am using the +1 Arc wand. Marvel is defeated without needing the sapphire rings though I replayed that battle again for farming potential and thinking the rings might have some important effect on the battle--they didn't. Starting Act 2 today.


The sapphire rings are for frost resistance. Resistances are not vital in act 1, but you need to start thinking about them. By the end of act 3 you want to be close to the cap, which is 75% resistance to all elements. From about mid act 4 onwards you always want to stay capped.

You get -30% to all resistances after act 5 and act 10, so 135% to all resistances is needed by the time you enter maps.
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ZROGST wrote:
Finding higher map tiers and lvl90+ difficult. Sometimes I die quickly and don't know why. What should I spend my next 10ex on with focus on survivability?

Thanks

Your chest got 3 gems with 0% quality, that's your main dps link so you should fix that- despite the fact that it doesn't add too much to your survivability.
Regarding your defense, it looks to me as if you got tons of life on your gear but very little mana. You should try to keep mana at ~43% of your life, otherwise you will end up without mana before life due to mind over matter.
The result of that happening is you being unable to use Lightning Warp in tough situations, which might cause deaths.

With that big a budget you can also think about getting one jewel with immunity to corrupted blood (implicit). We can cancel corrupted blood with our "of staunching" flask, but sometimes preserving our energy shield by not taking any damage from corrupted blood can be helpful.
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ScaryAtheist wrote:
The sapphire rings are for frost resistance. Resistances are not vital in act 1, but you need to start thinking about them. By the end of act 3 you want to be close to the cap, which is 75% resistance to all elements. From about mid act 4 onwards you always want to stay capped.

You get -30% to all resistances after act 5 and act 10, so 135% to all resistances is needed by the time you enter maps.
Oh boy...that is going to be fun. Resistances have always been ignored. Just looked for the first time this build at my resistances so far and they are 29, 11, 32, and (of course) 0. :) I suspect now that dealing with resistances is what will draw my witch away from staying pure? Will I need more STR and DEX equally? Even if Bluitch's attacks are Arc should I seriously look to scepters that address elemental damages and thus resistances better then a wand and likewise with shields and stop focussing on Energy Shield only? Bluitch is going to end up a hybrid witch! A new "Hybritch".

Seriously... while ssf'ing I was hoping to just pick up energy shield items with INT... Now that is fast becoming not a good idea. I kill everything that attacks Bluitch. I clear all fog. I break, open, pick up everything dropped. I move to a clear area nearby when I can't pick up another thing and look through it. The faster I can drop things I don't use or don't think I can use the better. Up to now if the gear says "armor" I drop it or if there is a red STR or DEX it is dropped or if it says Evasion I've dropped it. If it is anything but a wand or scepter or anything plate or chainmail I've dropped it. I keep everything that occupies 1 square though. So far in this Legion run there don't seem to be as many Wisdom scroll drops?

Thanks for your help always.
Last edited by Ratsneve on Aug 25, 2019, 3:23:10 PM
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Ratsneve wrote:
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ScaryAtheist wrote:
The sapphire rings are for frost resistance. Resistances are not vital in act 1, but you need to start thinking about them. By the end of act 3 you want to be close to the cap, which is 75% resistance to all elements. From about mid act 4 onwards you always want to stay capped.

You get -30% to all resistances after act 5 and act 10, so 135% to all resistances is needed by the time you enter maps.
Oh boy...that is going to be fun. Resistances have always been ignored. Just looked for the first time this build at my resistances so far and they are 29, 11, 32, and (of course) 0. :) I suspect now that dealing with resistances is what will draw my witch away from staying pure? Will I need more STR and DEX equally?


Those are fine for entering Act 2. Just prioritize gear with decent stats and at least one resistance. The last one - chaos resistance - is not that important, you can leave it at 0.

You will need a fair bit of DEX and some STR for the green and red gems in the build. There are +30 nodes available right next to the build path on the tree if you're not getting it on gear.

Again, this is not a "pure int" witch build, and I doubt such a build would ever be efficient in this game, it doesn't really follow the INT-DEX-STR "trope" of many other RPGs aside from having stat requirements for the skill gem levels. Your damage and defense does not rely much on INT beside that. You need to stack pure damage / defensive stats like life, mana, resistances, added spell damage, crit chance to spells, and so on.
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Ratsneve wrote:
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ScaryAtheist wrote:
The sapphire rings are for frost resistance. Resistances are not vital in act 1, but you need to start thinking about them. By the end of act 3 you want to be close to the cap, which is 75% resistance to all elements. From about mid act 4 onwards you always want to stay capped.

You get -30% to all resistances after act 5 and act 10, so 135% to all resistances is needed by the time you enter maps.
Oh boy...that is going to be fun. Resistances have always been ignored. Just looked for the first time this build at my resistances so far and they are 29, 11, 32, and (of course) 0. :) I suspect now that dealing with resistances is what will draw my witch away from staying pure? Will I need more STR and DEX equally? Even if Bluitch's attacks are Arc should I seriously look to scepters that address elemental damages and thus resistances better then a wand and likewise with shields and stop focussing on Energy Shield only? Bluitch is going to end up a hybrid witch! A new "Hybritch".

Seriously... while ssf'ing I was hoping to just pick up energy shield items with INT... Now that is fast becoming not a good idea. I kill everything that attacks Bluitch. I clear all fog. I break, open, pick up everything dropped. I move to a clear area nearby when I can't pick up another thing and look through it. The faster I can drop things I don't use or don't think I can use the better. Up to now if the gear says "armor" I drop it or if there is a red STR or DEX it is dropped or if it says Evasion I've dropped it. If it is anything but a wand or scepter or anything plate or chainmail I've dropped it. I keep everything that occupies 1 square though. So far in this Legion run there don't seem to be as many Wisdom scroll drops?

Thanks for your help always.


Listen to ScaryAthiest here.

To reiterate, resistances are NOT optional in later acts and certainly not in endgame! They are an essential defensive component of every single successful build in this game. Think about it this way: you are taking literally 4x as much damage from a fire/cold/lightning hit if you have no resists compared to if you had that resistance capped. That means you need 4x the amount of life to survive that hit, making it by far more efficient to go for resists. Look at any of the high-level characters in our profiles and you will see that there are multiple "+% to [elemental] resistance" affixes wherever we can fit them in, especially on gloves, helmet, belt, and rings.
Last edited by WorderMostFoul on Aug 26, 2019, 10:02:51 PM
dear experienced arc-players, how does it feel in delve? didn't see any delve related info in Guide..

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