Spark damage scaling question.

Hello, I am theory crafting a spark build for myself and I just have a question regarding the damage scaling of the skill. I am going to be converting lightning to chaos using voltaxic because I do not want to deal with rips to reflect damage.

So what is the primary damage scaling factor in your experience, cast speed, lightning damage, or chaos damage scaling?

I am trying to figure out my priorities in the skill tree.

Considering you won't have any cast speed on your weapon and that faster casting is a highly inefficient support for selfcasting, investing in cast speed passives would be very effective.

As for chaos, lightning elemental or projectile damage, all of those bonuses will work the same so take whichever is most cost effective.

Alright, thank you very much for the info.

Scale Chaos and Projectile... Lightning and Cast Speed would be horrible

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raics wrote:

Considering you won't have any cast speed on your weapon and that faster casting is a highly inefficient support for selfcasting, investing in cast speed passives would be very effective.

As for chaos, lightning elemental or projectile damage, all of those bonuses will work the same so take whichever is most cost effective.

Do not listen to raics. This time he's wrong. Some cast speed never hurts but in this case "Spell Echo" is more than enough. You need Projectile Damage and Chaos to be effective and that with just one spark all die instantly. And if something has too much life to die immediately, it will do a couple of seconds later by the effect of Poison.

Look at the settings on my armor:



Pierce is there because I use Drillneck...

Either use Poison support gem or maybe Snakebite unique gloves

Heavily invest in modifiers to:
Damage (untyped)
Chaos Damage
Projectile Damage
Skill Effect Duration

Avoid investing in modifiers to:
Spell Damage
Lightning Damage
Elemental Damage
Damage over Time
... Unless they're "more" modifiers, those are always welcome.

Moderate your investment in:
Cast Speed
Projectile Speed

There are a couple of ways to approach your build, with differing strengths and weaknesses.

The main issue as I see it is that converted chaos Poison builds are really strong right now because of a certain "double-dipping" mechanic, but the lead game developer has pointed out that he recognizes it is a balance problem. So it is likely to be addressed, probably removed in some way. So if you build for Poison double dip right now, your character could be weaker later on.

First let's look at what raics said. Faster casting support gem tends to give less damage boost than other possible support gems, this is true, and increases your mana consumption to boot. Spell Echo is actually a strong option like Actkqk mentioned as it gives 53% more DPS at gem level 20 for a relatively cheap change in mana expenditure (effectively 119% after adjusting for cast speed and forced repeat), the main weakness being that it roots you in place for a bit longer than usual (about 17.6% longer).

The second part of raics post is the most interesting. What he said is not currently true for Poison builds, but would be more or less true if double dipping were somehow removed, and is currently and likely forever true if you do not use Poison.

But let's assume GGG do not patch out Poison double dips (some people see it as completely certain that they will. But let's plan for now, not for later.) In that case, you can basically follow ScrotieMcB's guidelines. When he says "avoid," he doesn't mean they don't help you - they just don't help you as much as the other modifiers he mentioned.

Additionally, beware of "unfavorable double dip" with Poison. Whenever you see a penalty to one of the stats in ScrotieMcB's "heavily invest" column, it will double penalize your poison damage. In theory this means do NOT use Lesser or Greater Multiple Projectiles, Fork, or Chain. For coverage you would likely want things like Pierce or Increased Duration instead. In practice I gave never played poison spark so I wouldn't know if LMP and GMP still benefit after the double penalty.

Spell Echo also double dips the penalty, but it's not too bad. Effectively 19% less poison damage. That works out to give the gem 37.7% more poison DPS instead of the 53% more dps I mentioned above. Since cast speed doesn't double dip, that means that depending on how much of your damage output is from poison and how much is from initial hits, Spell Echo would grant something between those two numbers in overall dps.