Hellcat5's Guide to Scion - Pledge of Hands Lightning Balls!!

Hello!

A player I met recently asked me about the possibility of making a pledge of hands lightning ball build. He submitted an idea to me, found here:

[his tree]


[my revisions - UPDATED]


He said:

"Idea is that everybody runs ball lightning with 1handers only but I wanna use a pledge of hands cuz its sexy. They got 1handers for crit really so my build lacks the crit from weapons. I'm wondering if this would work or I fuck it up bad and be subpar.

6 link pledge of hands ball lightning, added lightning damage, lightning penetration,increased area of effect, slower projectiles, and (gmp or lmp)

Herald of thunder, curse on hit, assassin's mark, conductivity, (wrath just to have it later)

Only two things I got planned at the moment, lol. Pretty much use assassin's mark to generate power charges."

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I'd have a look at this - http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Ball_Lightning

from this, consider using spell echo due to the 200ms limitation because they're on seperate timers. Since one target can only be hit my ball lightning once every 200ms, except when considering spell echo, it might be more beneficial to throw on faster casting instead of lmp/gmp. I'm not sure exactly how bad it would downgrade the dps. lightning ball doesn't shotgun.

Now, lets consider your base crit. if it's 5 to start, then taking "True Strike" wheel only gives you 3.75% added chance (75% inc based on the base crit chance of 5% for lightning ball), and 8% multi. I think you might be better off taking "Blast Radius". lets do a bit of math -

Ball lightning at level 20 - 14–262 14+262 = 276/2=138 average

Now, to figure out how that 3.75% benefits vs. blast radius -

if you look at 10 hits, one might barely be effected by "True Strike" with 3.75%, we're looking at almost a 1/26.66 chance with an 8% modifier. so 138 average if you go from 150% crit base
crit damage with true strike = 150% +8% = 218(158) vs. 207 (150%)

However, if you take Blast Radius, you have this effect each hit =

138 * 0.12 = 154.56

So, lets look at the pattern of 1/26 -

138*25 = 3450 + 218 = 3668 = (the benefit of true stike)

154.56*26 = 4018.56 (the benefit of Blast Radius)

and, with a higher base, the multiplier from the other nodes you took mean a higher damage total. from the build you gave with my change, you have from a 5% base 24.25 total crit chance before power charges. add another 12.5% from 5 power charges = 36.25% true strike would take it to an even 40%
with 40% it averages to 8 out of 20 hits is crit. with 36.25% you're looking at around 7/20.

now, multipliers equal to 110% before considering true strike. true strike takes it to 118%
I'll show with and without:

with Blast radius (154.56 base) - 401.86
with true strike (8% more crit, one more extra hit in 20) - 369.84

so, lets take 20 hits with 7 crits at 401.86 and a base damage of 154.56 =
13 base hits @ 154.56 = 2009.28
7 crits @ 401.86 = 2813.02
(Blast Radius) = 4822.3

and now, I'll do without blast radius -
12 base hits at 138 = 1656
8 crit @ 369.84 = 2958.72
(True Strike) = 4614.72

Mow, we also know that Shock applies %100 of the time when a crit happens, and that gives 50% more damage from all sources. AND we also know that Shock lasts longer if you do more damage. Here's the calculation for that -

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shock

Sorry, I'm getting lazy here about calculating the duration. But, you can see clearly that 50% more damage from a bigger base is ... MORE damage. The gap grows more between the two choices in this 107 point build.

Now, another potential issue is that I'm seeing only a 94% increase for life. If you have 8 pieces of gear with 80 life per piece, that gives you 640. then, the tree as you have it adds 50 str, which is 25 life. bringing the total to 665. Now multiply that by 94% and get 1290. That's not enough when considering the % your taking with energy shield -

1500 es from gear +76% = 2640
total damage pool = 2640 + 1290 = 3930

since pledge of hands has a HUGE base spell damage modifier, I'd suggest removing some of the damage nodes and applying them to more es.

I changed the lightning damage nodes to "Lightning Walker" from the "Annihilation" circle, removing 3 putting them into "Unnatural Calm" instead, which gives 30% more es.

Whild dropping your damage down, it gives you:
1500 es from gear +106% = 3090
total dmage pool = 3090+1290 = 4380 = 450 damage pool increase

I consider 4k the bare minimum damage pool for endgame stuff. I'd suggest going higher, around 6k if you can bare the dps drop to manage it, or get some uber es gear to handle the 106%. and of course, you can find necky and rings that have es and es %.

I found an issue with your tree in the shadow area. you took a str node that's not necessary as far as I can tell. This enabled me to rearrange and add back in "Lightning Walker" to hit the 107 points mark.

Here's the tree with my revisions -


So, to talk about other mechanisms now. We've got a main attack 6L, and we've got a curse on hit 4L. That leaves three other gem links to fill. you'll need auras. i'd say probably clarity and discipline, and if you can fit a res in there, great. I strongly suggest running with tri'res pots with this build so you can close the gap on the damage received :

reduce mana + clarity + discipline + whatever auras you want to run. or need to run for the situation. I've seen people take in two hats with different aura configurations.

now, lets talk about escape.

Lightning warp + faster casting + decreased duration + chance to flee - yes, make them run when you're running away. they can't hit if you they're running.

And the final, perhaps a 5L or 6L chest - spell totem + balls + added cold damage + echo + faster + gmp because we want shock going on things as much as possible. (shocked and frozen is quite nice, just a thought)

Gameplay:
walk in the an area, drop totem, and pledge away. gg.

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Blunt Trauma (critical strike chance and knockback on critical strikes with a staff) and Staff Damage and Accuracy would seem to be wasted points. By their wording, none of their benefits should apply to spellcasting, only to physically hitting enemies with the staff.

Do they really apply to spellcasting and not just striking?


As for auras, if there's room I'd consider slotting in Herald of Ice if the situation arises where there's not quite enough room for another aura after taking the obvious ones. You've got lots of elemental damage and crit, and there's nothing wrong in both electrocuting and freezing mobs. ;-)


If the build turns out not to be quite tanky enough due to low life, an obvious change would be to not Curse on Hit and give up Conductivity in favour of a setup with a low level CwDT with Assassin's Mark, Warlord's Mark, and Increased AOE. They wouldn't be applied while fighting enemies that didn't manage to damage you (but then, you wouldn't strictly speaking need them in that situation), and you wouldn't be able to run them at as high a level as in a CoH, but you would be guaranteed that they were applied whenever you were fighting anything dangerous that hurt you, including bosses.

It would also save you the three points you spend on getting Hex Master, which would be completely superflous with that application methods. (Mind you, I'm not sure you need it in the first place with your CoH setup either.)

Regardless of whether you do this or not, something that is in my experience very much worth doing if it can be squeezed in is to have a lowlevel CwDT with Ice Spear and Power Charge on Crit (and either Improved Critical Strikes, Ball Lightning, or another AOE spell if in a 4L), to help maintain power charges in general when getting a bad streak of Assassin's Mark luck and to ensure power charges when fighting bosses without handy trash mobs around.

I do both of these things in my own Pledge of Hands/Firestorm Build, and it does wonders for survivability in general at the cost of slightly less speed when killing trash. I don't know whether your build needs any such defensive tricks to survive, as the build seems to be going all out on offenses, but it is something to consider.

You're correct about Blunt Trauma. I confirmed it with GGG, they said:

"In this instance, Blunt Trauma will only affect Attack Skills and Melee Swings used while wielding a Staff."

I've corrected my updated tree here, adding back the two points on the right side for power charges and duration. I prefer to use [chance to flee] with my curse on hit because that causes a nice drop in DPS received for ranged characters.