Is ball lightning the fastest way to apply poison?

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xMustard wrote:

ancestral call for single target is not that awesome.

Maybe you are unaware of the attack ground to get 2x the ball procs technique? It will work differently in 3.4 than it works now though so I cant predict how good it will be in 3.4. But in 3.x given player skill this works for many bosses far better than LMP. (At least it worked like that in Abyss, far as I know it wasnt changed.)

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xMustard wrote:

however, for molten strike, gmp and lmp isn't that awesome either.
the more balls you have the more they spread out. so for instance tacking lmp on along with gmp the boss model may not be hit with any additional balls at all because all it'll do is spread them out more and more

Do you have a source for that "spread out more"? (This claim is not consistent with how I think Molten Strike works.)
Here is a post about expected number of ball hits: Molten Strike DPS Calculator

Barrage is the fastest way to apply poison. The Max_Stax poison barrage scion can apply more that 45 stacks a second. 3.8 second duration so with the other poison sources its getting up to about 180 poison stacks total. Not huge stacks, its totally a quantity not quality build.

I'm working with Firestorm + Spell Echo + Spell Cascade + duration increases for a build I'm planning, and it should have around 630 overall hits per second. I don't know of a calculator to see how many of those hits would hit a single target, but it should comfortably get the required poison stacks for packs.

The main bonus I see (apart from not being tied to ranged weapons) is that a single action will cause 300 hits over 5 seconds, leaving a lot of time to move around rather than having to spam it.

Colour wise, replacing Spell Cascade and increased duration with faster casting and slower projectiles should work for lightning ball for single target. The only issue would be needless duration nodes on the tree.

I'm currently using Ball Lightning + GMP + spell echo + poison + jewel: it's great, you get the 40 stacks directly in maps/depths. The ""issue"" is only on bosses where I mostly get 36-37 stacks… but it's still very good.

However, as someone said, don't play agony with necro, it's not optimal. Try a tanky caracters like guardian (what I did), juggernaut, gladiator, champion and Pathfinder (flask), and ocultist (if you want a better clearspead). You don't need any minion nodes except maybe redemption and spiritual aid.

My current build uses the minion accuracy nodes as well as the speed ones (while the crawler should have 160% increased AS already at 40 stacks, adding speed on top of 260% base speed is better than damage on top of 900% base damage).

How necessary is the accuracy really?

Also, while I think I didn't see it in here, someone somewhere suggested Scorching Ray CwC Ball Lightning, and I can only say that Lightning Tendrils or Storm Burst works better (if you need to reduce fire resistance just pick up EE; also works well for Hatred).

I've taken a quick look at the numbers and an Increased AoE support will increase the hit count against still targets on the projectile path by slightly over 2 (if no previous increase to aoe is present). It's worth noting that this also increases the AoEs of Lightning Tendrils and Storm Burst.

Small updates on my previous post:
I was wrong about the matching socket colours because Slower Projectiles is green (mixed it up with Less Duration).

Also, according to the calculator linked on the wiki site for Firestorm, mine should hit a big target about 20 times on average, not accounting for the repeat (since it's only doubled anyway) or the Spell Cascade (don't know how to calculate those).

I could consider optionally swapping in Concentrated Effect for Faster Casting for single target purposes, but faster casting gives me more hits on average not including Spell Cascade.

Without accounting for additional hits from Spell Cascade that leaves me at around 80 hits per second from spamming btw. Keep in mind that the build is still in an idealised stage and I will reduce it to a more reasonable one when I'm satisfied with the result. Aside from casting speed, this shouldn't have much of an impact on the number of firestorm hits though.