Elemental Equilibrium & two spells CoC shotgun

Spectral Throw - GMP - Cast on Crit - Fireball - Arctic Breath.

Assume we have EE keystone, ST crits and both Fireball and Arctic Breath trigger and shotgun a monster at close range.

I know that if a single spell shotgun, "first" projectile triggers EE and other four suffer.

But what about two "simultaneous" shotguns? I can think of two possibilities:

1. 5 fireballs hit, 4 of them against increased resistance, then 5 arctics hit, 4 of them against increased resistance.
2. 1 fireball hit, then 1 arctic hit, then 1 fireball hit etc, all of them against reduced resistance.

Which one if right? May be none :)

(1) is the correct one, spells are triggered in sequence.

It might be theoretically possible for a faster spell to 'catch up' with the slower one and hit sooner if the target was a bit further away but the timeframe of shotgunned hits is so tight nothing can come in between. You can think of it as 'simultaneous, but not quite'.

'simultaneous, but not quite' - now I'm curious how long is that 'not quite'. :)

Can it be so short that small distance difference coming from a different angle of 5 projectiles makes them alternate with 'next' 5 projectiles? Like, both central projectiles hit first.

I assume fireball and arctic have the same or very similar projectile speed.

There might not even be any time gap between shotgunned hits so they technically would be simultaneous, I say 'not quite' because the game registers them as separate hits in any case.

So I don't really think shotgunned spells can be shuffled like a deck of cards, and even if they could it would be such a rare occurrence there would be no hope of replicating it with any reliability.

You already answered the question, but I'd like to clarify my previous post anyway, because it was wrong.



Projectile 3 travels the shortest distance, while 1 and 5 travel the longest distance, even if 'monster' is square, not oval :)

As a result, there should be a small delay between hits.

Another delay is between fireball and arctic casts triggered by the same crit. My question was, can this second delay be shorter.

what it comes down to is, "Can i trust that i'll always get the EE bonus when 2 different element spells are casted with CoC?"

the answer is no, you can pretty much assume the order in which they hit is random due to how much chaos is going on during the time frame of multiple spells casting and hitting multiple moving mobs. especially since its not 100% guaranteed that one or both spells will be cast each time you crit. You could theoretically get 3 fireballs casted before an arctic breath gets cast.

That being said, hitting randomly is not so bad, you will get some casts that don't get the bonus but it should be a net increase in damage.

You're actually right, since ancient Greece it was common knowledge that monsters are round.

The thing about travel speed is debatable because we don't really know how much is shape of hitboxes actually respected.

If we assume it is, and take average monster radius to be 2 units (same as player) I'd estimate maximum difference in travel distance to be around 1,5 units and roughly consistent from point blank to medium range due to spread angle change. If we assume average projectile speed to be 50 units per second we would arrive at a difference of 30ms which is a fairly decent amount of time in computer calculation terms.

So, if we assume the delay between spells is less than 30ms and projectile speeds are the same I guess it would be theoretically possible that two of the widest going projectiles hit the target after the central projectile of next spell hits.

Of course, we made a load of assumptions here and some of them are pretty wild so I just can't recommend you to build around it. I guess it could be tested to some degree of reliability using CwDT as CoC is too random, I'll check and see if I got a char with a full respec lying around, don't think it will work but you know what they say - knowledge is power.

...
Yeah, since outer projectiles will hit roughly at the same time we will still ideally have one hit at -50%, then one hit at -50% again, then -50% and +25%, and again -50% and +25%, which is -25% per hit on average so I guess it might be hard to notice (in case of LMP, of course, GMP often fails to fully shotgun even at point blank).

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raics wrote:

I just can't recommend you to build around it. I guess it could be tested to some degree of reliability using CwDT as CoC is too random, I'll check and see if I got a char with a full respec lying around, don't think it will work but you know what they say - knowledge is power.

I've already built around it. ST is phys + lightning.
My playstyle was pretty cautious, so I didn't shotgun 5 projectiles often, attacking from distance, and EE was very good.
Now that others follow my build and shotgun with it, more questions arise :)

Using CwDT for testing is an interesting idea.

Tested CoC on Dominus 2nd form. He is big, he is meaty and he stands still while I shotgun him.
Made about 10 runs with and 10 without EE, recording video and then counting how fast Dominus dies.

With EE most of kills took 9-12 seconds.
Without EE most of kills took 8-10 seconds.

This supports version (1) from the OP. Round monsters or not, EE loses at shotgunning. The difference is very close to theoretical if we assume 36% resists.

Can it be that fireball is a sphere, which explodes immediately on cast because it's diameter > distance between exile and Dominus?