Ondar's Guile keystone: need some help with math

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vargorn wrote:

The AoE is still an attack and not a spell so evasion still applies but it technically isn't a projectile either although it is created by one and might therefore have inherited the Projectile tag.
To be honest, i don't know if it will still get the double evasion bonus from Ondar's but you could simply test it on a non-hardcore char.

Oh, you don't know? Cool! I found a question which such an experienced player doesn't know the answer for. And i sure respect the honesty!

See, this is not a trivial issue though. Ice Shot explodes (creates its AoE) on _every_ hit, and its AoE cones can overlap. Lesser multiple projectiles (not greater one, as it has higher penalty of "less" damage; lesser one is nearly negated by ice shot's native 120% damage scale, i guess) plus pierce (passives plus pierce support gem initially for 80%+ pierce) will produce tons of cold damage vs tight/big packs - easily over 20 hits total of its AoE effect per such a shot. In a blink of an eye, that is. If Ondar's Guile doesn't work, then that's a huge reflected cold damage spike coming back, something which even maxed cold resist and flask possibly wouldn't be able to reduce enough... %)

Thing is, i am only starting with PoE, and so, i so far have no character with Ondar's yet; though i'll have it on one soon. But running maps is still weeks ahead at best, i recon - means i'll have to find some area with ele reflect during levelling and test it there. Alright, i'll do that. o7

You can usually spot monsters with ele/phys reflect rather easily due to the visual effect they have and should be able to handle it with some care and preparation.
The Survivalist notable close to Ondar's provides 1% maximum cold resistance among high boni to evasion and all resistances and you will probably be using the Purity of Ice aura to further boost your maximum cold resistance if you are dealing mostly cold damage.
You can be at 80% cold res with a leveled gem or even 81% if you get a total of over 25% buff/aura effect from passives. Adding a Sapphire Flask will then temporarily increase your cold res to 90% or even more if you take some flask effect nodes. This means that unless you have huge damage per hit or hit a ton of mobs at once, you shouldn't be able to one-shot yourself and can then use a secondary skill with mostly physical damage to dispatch the source of the reflect aura.

Below is an example on how i deal with reflect on one of my latest chars:


My point is: don't overthink these things too much and discard a viable build just because of that, especially when playing softcore!
Pretty much every build will eventually face situations that are very dangerous for that specific build, so be prepared, have maxed cold resistances when you get to a higher level (at least 75/76%), have a Sapphire Flask ready and prepare a secondary skill that is based on another damage type or use a trap (trap damage isn't reflected) so you can snipe out the most dangerous targets.
About every build has a few mods that they will refuse to or simply cannot do so you will often discuss what mods should be evaded when doing maps in a group.

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vargorn wrote:

You can usually spot monsters with ele/phys reflect rather easily due to the visual effect they have and should be able to handle it with some care and preparation.
The Survivalist notable close to Ondar's provides 1% maximum cold resistance among high boni to evasion and all resistances and you will probably be using the Purity of Ice aura to further boost your maximum cold resistance if you are dealing mostly cold damage.
You can be at 80% cold res with a leveled gem or even 81% if you get a total of over 25% buff/aura effect from passives. Adding a Sapphire Flask will then temporarily increase your cold res to 90% or even more if you take some flask effect nodes. This means that unless you have huge damage per hit or hit a ton of mobs at once, you shouldn't be able to one-shot yourself and can then use a secondary skill with mostly physical damage to dispatch the source of the reflect aura.

Below is an example on how i deal with reflect on one of my latest chars:

Spoiler

My current main project is a fire Witch with rather insane damage per hit. She can deal over 70k damage per hit on a lucky crit - per mob. Spell damage cannot be evaded and she also has neither spell block nor -dodge and even with only 15% reflect, that amounts to a lot of damage reflected compared to her measily 3.4k life.
She therefore has to use several mechanics that temporarily push her fire resistance to 96% (97% when my Purity of Fire finally reaches lvl 20 or even 100% if i ever play her to lvl 91 to get the 30% flask effect nodes near the Witch area) and use a semi high level Arctic Armor and life leech (only 1% leech but at that much DpS, i reach the leech speed cap when in "Berserk Mode") to mitigate reflect.
This means that up to 300 damage per mob hit in the AoE will pass through all that mitigation (Artic Armor is applied after resistances) and usually a lot less, so unless i get too careless, miss the visual effect of the elemental reflect and hit too many mobs at once without the Ruby Flask on with a top end crit, i am usually fine.
Since all these things went into place, she has died to reflect once or twice as far as i can remember (lvl 85 now btw.).

My point is: don't overthink these things too much and discard a viable build just because of that, especially when playing softcore!
Pretty much every build will eventually face situations that are very dangerous for that specific build, so be prepared, have maxed cold resistances when you get to a higher level (at least 75/76%), have a Sapphire Flask ready and prepare a secondary skill that is based on another damage type or use a trap (trap damage isn't reflected) so you can snipe out the most dangerous targets.
About every build has a few mods that they will refuse to or simply cannot do so you will often discuss what mods should be evaded when doing maps in a group.

Ain't overthinking, really. It's quite that simple in this case: if Ondar's Guile doesn't work vs Ice Shot's AoE part, which means effective evade chance vs this specific reflected damage would be _zero_ percent - then this makes high-DPS multi-protectile Ice Shot builds unusable end-game. This is due to faster projectiles/arrows - it's rather typical to see many rangers having +50% of that from passives alone. With arrows travelling fast to begin with, and with likely more "faster projectiles" from gear, this means that Ice Shots will be flying waaaay further than "one screen". 2+ screens, i suspect. And with obvious high-% pierce mod (without, it's not _high_-DPS ice shot build anymore, imho) - this means that lots of times, i probably often won't even see that visual effect you talk about all the way till sudden death happen. Because one stray Ice Shot hitting that reflect pack way out of visible range will drop me dead before i knew reflect pack is there, before i could get any idea that it's time to use a flask.

Ain't no witch, those looong-range piercing arrows are indeed the point in themselves - these features are among things which make it extremely deadly, but in the same time, side-effect is that you can't rely on visual control of reflect mod graphic, and this means you can't rely on flask too - not every time, and by far so. That's why i think that for Ice Shot, you gotta have somethings "always active", which taken together save your hide (almost) every time.

But no worries. In any case i definitely have a plan B, in terms of this topic, and it's quite very well known - poison arrow. Chaos damage doesn't get reflected at all. It just would be worse (for my taste and goals), but it'd work well enough. :)