Elemental Hit

A templar would be better than a witch if you want to dual wand with avatar of fire. I hope you've got the templar elemental weapon damage passives, it can double your dps.


I think elemental hit is good as it is now, my templar using bow + elemental hit is running through merciless as if it was normal difficulty.
Build of the week #2 : http://tinyurl.com/ce75gf4
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Darkfyre wrote:
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Mark_GGG wrote:
I don't have time to play much so haven't gotten a character to a high enough level to say the build is good. I choose elemental hit because I like the elemental damage association wands already have on passives and the sex/int class has access to lots of critical strike stuff to work with that as well.


ahh the good old sex/int class...


LOL still no one else has caught the typo he made there..

freudian slip if you ask me :)
I've made a wand witch using this skill as her primary attack, with heavy focus on crits. Multiple projectiles, elemental weapon damage and increased crit multiplier as support gems. If I was to find the perfect armor, I would add faster attacks and pierce.

The build was very, very weak until about level 40. I got minion instability and spent the first 40 levels hiding behind my zombies. The power then increased exponentially as I finally got the +elemental damage and +crit passives necessary to make the build work. Now, at level 59, it's fairly effective at clearing Chaos. I still need to hide behind minions to stay alive, but the crits do heavy damage. It plays sort of like a bow ranger.

Wands have higher base crit % than spells but there are fewer passives and items that increase their crit chance, so I don't have as high crit % as I had expected (it's 23-33 depending which support gems I use).

One advantage of the build is that it is not very item dependant, all that matters is picking wands with high attack speed and preferably +% elemental damage. I still use these ridiculously crappy wands
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It's really annoying that the dps is not displayed on the char screen because it makes it difficult to compare wands.
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elemental hit on my ranger is still performing at a lackluster level compared with poison arrow

I still kill faster with poison arrow and am able to kill hordes of mobs for the same mana cost as elemental hit which only attacks 1 target at a time and the single target dps is still higher with poison arrow as well.
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Darkfyre wrote:
elemental hit on my ranger is still performing at a lackluster level compared with poison arrow

I still kill faster with poison arrow and am able to kill hordes of mobs for the same mana cost as elemental hit which only attacks 1 target at a time and the single target dps is still higher with poison arrow as well.
Sounds like you're talking about a low level and/or improper supports/passives.

Poison arrow hardly benefits from any passives or supports, and I don't think benefits at all from anything to increase it's DPS aside from it's level.

Elemental hit can be buffed with increased elemental damage, faster attack speed, or critical chance/multiplier supports. Such supports are all rather useless for poison arrow.
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Um, how are faster attack speed and crit chance/multiplier useless for Poison Arrow?

It won't affect the cloud, yes, but those will affect the +30% Chaos Damage.
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Xapti wrote:
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Darkfyre wrote:
elemental hit on my ranger is still performing at a lackluster level compared with poison arrow

I still kill faster with poison arrow and am able to kill hordes of mobs for the same mana cost as elemental hit which only attacks 1 target at a time and the single target dps is still higher with poison arrow as well.
Sounds like you're talking about a low level and/or improper supports/passives.

Poison arrow hardly benefits from any passives or supports, and I don't think benefits at all from anything to increase it's DPS aside from it's level.

Elemental hit can be buffed with increased elemental damage, faster attack speed, or critical chance/multiplier supports. Such supports are all rather useless for poison arrow.


Please explain how faster attack doesn't work well with poison arrow? It's just as good with poison as elemental hit, and the crit chance/multiplier supports are just fine too (the chaos damage is a % of the initial hit). The only real "drawback" is no critical effect to chaos dmg.
Right i forgot about the +30% chaos damage to attacks, I haven't used it since that change.

That said, It's still not that effective with additional attack speed. The main draw to the skill is still the poison cloud. Increased attack speed does not increase the DPS of the poison cloud.
Critical support doesn't work at all with the poison cloud (and chaos damage doesn't give critical effect).

The supports work, yes, but they are not particularly effective. The supports worked even before the +30% chaos damage,the only difference is that now it deals +30% chaos damage)

I'd say Elemental hit gives a lot more direct damage/weapon damage than poison arrow does, and hence it (or split arrow) is the most efficient skill to be using for any of the mentioned supports
a 150% damage shriek bow deals an average of 280 damage, while a lvl 17 (not even max) elemental hit deals about 500. With elemental hit support that's buffed up to 890 dmg, which is + 318% damage, more than 10 times the added damage poison arrow does.
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Last edited by Xapti on Dec 26, 2011, 4:41:03 AM
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Xapti wrote:
The main draw to the skill is still the poison cloud.


Just to compare elemental hit with PA, I'm using both as main bow skills with a lvl 39 ranger (along with rain of arrows since I've yet to get a split arrow gem --- maybe it's just me, but skill gems seem a lot harder to get hold of in 9.5...).

Without min/maxing, and just based on using what I happed to have found, I'd say that the problem with elemental hit vs. PA is exactly that PA does (in my experience) at least as much single target damage that elemental hit does. Even if it's fun to watch monsters keel over after a while with the enhanced cloud damage, the main draw of PA is single target da, which seems to push out elemental hit (if you assume EH is suppoed to be a high single target da and PA the dot attack, but maybe that's not what's intended).

Add to that, PA still works vs. elemental reflecting bosses, so it does leave me wondering a bit where EH is meant to fit in. If anything, the main advantage of EH as a single target attack is that it is targeted on monsters, whereas you can easily miss mobs with PA and hit the ground, just getting the cloud da only.

I use EA though, and it seems that as you lvl up it does relatively more da --- not sure how EH works now in 9.5 at high lvls.

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