when is a jewel socket worth the passive points?

3 passive for 1 jewel is always worth it.

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_kinimi_ wrote:

Thanks a bunch for the tips.

The resistance nodes are there because I was planning on using magic gear, and was going to go for life and + armour on most of the gear pieces. I know I could also get resistance in addition to those, but I think those pieces would be exceedingly hard to craft, and also hard to buy. Anyway what do you think of Kripp's use of the jewel in his latest PoE video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ZJtDxUe8w That is what inspired me to use it, as he says that magic items can be almost as good as great rares, or something like that. He talks about it at 3:45, but apparently the damage from the jewel double dips for him too, so, I dunno. And thinking about it now it is a lot of nodes wasted for that jewel.

I was going to stack armour because I like a flat phys reduction in theory better than evasion or ES, but indeed I forgot about the links. Also, Elementalists don't have any defensive stats besides +resists it looks like, so I am not seeing the difference if I went for ES or something. Like, how does the typical Elementalist stack defense then, I'm wondering?

Say I got Shaper of Desolation. Does Scorching Ray benefit from it very much? Not sure how that would work. And does beacon of ruin spread all Scorching Ray's damage then?

I tried Enduring Cry once. It was kind of painful to keep track of my charges, having to look at the top left of the screen all the time. I wish you could display them in the middle, by your character. Anyways, I'm going to need some QoL changes before I touch that skill again.

On the subject of links again, maybe I'll get a 5 or 6-linked staff, and just use Kaom's. I think that would be okay.

Essence Crafting mods like 20-25% Increased Fire damage will give just as much power on your jewelry vs Hidden Potential, as well as much more defensive mods to boot. It'll save you a lot of points on your tree and improve your defenses.

Armour is weird in this game. Having a huge amount of armour will help...somewhat. Rule of thumb is kinda: armour saves you from small hits, but gigantic hits will still chunk you. If you go pure armour gear, then get a decent amount from the tree, with a granite flask up, you might be sitting anywhere from 15-50k armour based on investment. Seems like a healthy dose, but big hits will still probably chunk you for 4k+ per hit. Most big smash attacks will still kill you outright, especially with damage mods on the map. The majority of deaths in this game comes from elemental damage.

I used to hate Enduring Cry too, but it has it's uses. It's a generic Endurance Charge generator. Your other options are to use Blasphemy Warlord's Mark, or skip Endurance Charges all together. They are great for survivability though. Your choice here.

A +X Fire Staff is fine, but going 1 hander + shield also has it's benefits, mainly defensive. Do mind you that a 6L is going to be significantly more expensive to obtain.

Shaper of Desolation doesn't directly work with Scorching Ray, but your Orb of Storms can proc it instead, and you'll gain the benefits. Shock is 50% MORE Damage. Don't see why you'd want to skip this.

Beacon of Ruin doesn't work with Scorching Ray. It's not an Ignite. It's just Burning Damage.

Typical Elementalists' defense is - Kill them before they kill you. The majority of them is ES based, so they run around with a gigantic ES pool.

Thanks huge man.

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_kinimi_ wrote:

The resistance nodes are there because I was planning on using magic gear, and was going to go for life and + armour on most of the gear pieces. I know I could also get resistance in addition to those, but I think those pieces would be exceedingly hard to craft, and also hard to buy.

You can't get life and armour on the same piece of magic gear since they're both prefixes. Resistances on the other hand are suffixes and probably the most useful ones. So you'd likely want a resistance on most of your gear even if you go with magic items.

Oh damn. Thanks for the info.

Armor is best when stacked with other forms of flat physical mitigation, such as Fortify or Endurance charges. Armor by itself is a shaky defense and far less reliable than it might seem. Do not believe the "Average reduction" stat in your character sheet, it's a poor and often quite misleading approximation. As stated, large single hits get a larger overall percentage of their damage through armor, and of course elemental and chaos damage ignores armor completely.

On the subject of jewel sockets - compare your intended jewels to Notable passives your build is obtaining. If your jewel generates similar or greater numbers, the jewel is generally worthwhile. Any two-node jewel socket you can get is a plus, and three-node sockets along the outside edge of the tree can also be a boon if you have better jewels or don't have a plethora of other jewel options. Jewel sockets are things you generally take later in your build unless you have critical jewels you need to make your build work (or a steady supply of awesome jewels in the first place), but most two and three-node sockets are worth the points if your build can spare them.

Hidden Potential is tricky. Any given rare item you trade in for a blue one is potentially a huge power loss for many builds, and also a defense loss since you can't score nearly as many resistances. You can't afford to load down on blues to increase the bonuses from a Hidden Potential, and since Hidden Potential is limited to 1, you can't stack them up to magnify their effects. Assuming typical budget 2-affix jewels in the ~15% range alt/aug'd and then Regal'd, you'd need at least two pieces of blue gear for Hidden Potential to overtake a typical rare jewel.

The best way to do that is with Elreon jewelry, since that also goes a long way towards helping your mana sustain, but rings and amulets are one of the biggest sources of non-weapon damage a build can find. You could potentially get away with one Elreon trinket and blue gloves instead, as the glove slot offers less to spellcasters, but ironically this would make your endgame build more expensive, not less. Your other rare items would have to compensate for the loss of power from the blue items on your build, which drives up their price. As others have said, it also cuts into your build's total power, if you sacrifice a lot of gear that might have offensive stats as impressive as the Hidden Potential.

If you're not planning on using any defensive reservations in your skill set-up (easy to do with Orb of Storms to apply Curse on Hit defenses for you, rather than Blasphemy), you might want to look into Clear Mind, instead. That's a relatively easily obtained jewel, offers a hefty boost to damage that can be quite handy early on, and doesn't cut into your gear selections. I'm quite fond of it for a number of spelly builds.

Hey thanks for the advice. With Clear Mind looks like I can also get Blood Magic, which might be good.

So what about stacking evasion then? Referring to Kripp's build again, he has 42% with almost all magic items and not a ton of evasion nodes. Is this an okay strategy for phys mitigation?

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_kinimi_ wrote:

Hey thanks for the advice. With Clear Mind looks like I can also get Blood Magic, which might be good.

So what about stacking evasion then? Referring to Kripp's build again, he has 42% with almost all magic items and not a ton of evasion nodes. Is this an okay strategy for phys mitigation?

In short, nope, it won't be enough to fix your defense against physical damage.
In this spoiler is my attempt to explain it more.

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_kinimi_ wrote:

Is this an okay strategy for phys mitigation?

attack mitigation, or if you really want to be a nitpicker, attack avoidance. Evasion helps against Attack DPS whether it is Physical, Elemental, or Chaos. However, it does nothing against one-shots in the long run.

Checking the Kripp video, it looks like he's using Hidden Potential for a specific build with specific blues and specific intent, utilizing it as a double-dip damage source for Chaos/Poison. That works, but it's not something that works for every build you'd like to do. Scorching Ray doesn't benefit from double-dipping in this particular case, so Hidden Potential would be weaker.

Also note that Kripp crafted exactly the mods he needed on his blues, and that he's factoring in HP's double-dip 25% bonus per blue item. That's valid, but the build has to warrant it. These Berserkers of his are something of a perfect storm of double-dippy insanity (frankly I actually super want to try the Abyssal variant now, so thanks for pointing it out!), but trying to apply some of the mechanics of his build to other stuff without all of the other pieces will likely result in severely decreased performance. You can by all means try, but as Kripp himself said, 'scaling knowledge of the game' is the best way to beat PoE.

Which means go ahead and experiment! Maybe you'll come across something that works out really well, and if nothing else a blue-centric build with Purity of Elements would be somewhat incredibly cheap! Though I'd perhaps think about Necromancer over Elementalist, actually. Commander of Darkness gives you a fat resistance buff if you have an aura up, and getting your resists properly capped will be the biggest challenge of working with multiple blues. Mistress of Sacrifice is also a ton of duration, helpful for Scorching Ray, and Offerings are fat-assed buffs with MoS up. Set up the build right and Necromancer can compensate for a Hidden Potential build's weakened defenses and support your offense just as well as an Elementalist could, since most of Elementalist's stuff doesn't actually work on DoT effects like Scorching Ray.

Get some aura reservation reduction nodes and as much aura effect as you reasonably can, run a smackton of auras to buff your everything, and have at it. Could actually be a pretty damn solid league starter, given how disastrously cheap it'd be to assemble. Almost entirely gem levels and maybe one or two lower-costed enabler uniques like Alpha's Howl, then a bunch of alt/aug'd blues and Hidden Potential. Wouldn't be as nutso as Kripp's double-dipping Chaos builds, but it'd do the job, mefigures.