1.3 The Community's Molten Strike, Face Melting Build!! 1h+shield and 2h variants available

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Fearmonger wrote:

Why no Avatar of Fire? It's a free damage gain via Lava Lash & Weapon Elemental Damage applying to the entirety of your attack and this is even more true if you take Catalyze as well.

Obviously it makes you a bit weaker against fire resistant mobs, but Fire Penetration should already take care of that to some degree.

Edit: Didn't realize you were running Hatred. Should still be worth taking until you can drop Blood Magic though so it's probably worth mentioning.

Hi Fearmonger,

I did not choose AoF because I wanted to head through duelist first and grab IR and Point Blank as well as the life nodes in between. After all this most people will be have or will be very shortly getting rid of the BM passive. Also AoF is 5 points above RT.

I am not exactly sure how AoF interacts with skills like Molten Strike but wouldn't converting 50% phy to fire mean that Molten Strike would have less physical damage to scale from and thus lowering the damage of both the initial hit and projectiles?

When i finish getting these health nodes I am working on I will give it a try to see if it is viable pre-auras. If anyone else can confirm AoF as a buff that would be great as well :)

Does "Cold to Fire gem" work on Hatred? That would be like the only reason for me to grad AoF.

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If I recall correctly, if you convert damage, all other stuff is calculaed first.

Like with 1000 Damage, 30% added fire gem, 60% converted to fire, +100% melee damage, +30% fire damage:

Increased damage: 1000*2 -> 2000
30% added fire -> 600 fire, 2000 physical
60% physical converted to fire: 1800 fire, 800 physical
+30% fire damage -> 2340 fire, 800 physical

Is this correct?

Thanks for doing some more testing with GMP/LMP....I am at a low enough level that it mostly 1-shots mobs anyway so I couldn't really test its damage effectiveness when it comes to groups and could only assume it was significantly stronger in groups due to a much larger area of effect.

As for damage conversion it basically works like this:

Base physical damage is increased by everything that normally increases it, the all "Added" damage is calculated before any conversion takes place. Finally all "Converted" damage is scaled to 100% conversion then actually converted (you cannot convert more than 100% of your damage).

So yes, it works essentially like how Peter mentioned....meaning AoF will never reduce the damage output of Molten Strike (all it does is change it to 100% fire damage converted from physical, rather than 60%). It is definitely an increase considering Weapon Elemental Damage, Lava Lash and any WED passive nodes you take, but I do not know if that increase is essentially worth losing a gem slot (to socket Life Leech, since you will get none from gear if you do no physical damage).

Basically Avatar of Fire takes the effectiveness of all weapon elemental damage (from gems and passives) as well as fire damage from 60% effectiveness, to 100%.

EDIT: Assuming you have Catalyse and 5 of the the 8% WED passive nodes plus WED gem (lvl 20), your damage goes from: 38.4% increased WED damage and 35.4% MORE WED damage, to 64% increased WED damage and 59% MORE WED damage.

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Peterlerock wrote:

If I recall correctly, if you convert damage, all other stuff is calculaed first.

Like with 1000 Damage, 30% added fire gem, 60% converted to fire, +100% melee damage, +30% fire damage:

Increased damage: 1000*2 -> 2000
30% added fire -> 600 fire, 2000 physical
60% physical converted to fire: 1800 fire, 800 physical
+30% fire damage -> 2340 fire, 800 physical

Is this correct?

You're close but not exactly. Damage increases are always applied simultaneously and only once, whereas in your example you're applying them at two different points and therefore inaccurately increasing their effectiveness. Here's the correct calculation (I'm going to assume when you said "melee damage" you really meant "melee physical damage"):

Base physical damage: 1000 phys
Added fire adds 30% of physical as fire damage: 1000 phys, 300 fire
Molten Strike converts 60% of physical to fire: 400 phys, 900 fire
Damage increases are applied, the physical damage is increased only by the melee physical damage, whereas the fire damage was converted from physical so it benefits from both:
400 phys * (1 + 100/100) = 800 phys
900 fire * (1 + 100/100 + 30/100) = 2070 fire
Total damage: 2870

Note how this is about 9% lower than the way you did your calculation.

So for fun, here's the same calculation but adding in Weapon Elemental Damage support:

400 phys * (1 + 100/100) = 800 phys
900 fire * (1 + 100/100 + 30/100) * (1 + 59/100) = 3291.3 fire
Total damage: 4091.3

And adding in avatar of fire:

Base physical damage: 1000 phys
Added fire adds 30% of physical as fire damage: 1000 phys, 300 fire
Molten Strike + Avatar of Fire converts 100% of physical to fire: 1300 fire
Damage increases are applied, while the attack is pure fire it also benefits from physical damage increases since all of the damage originated from physical:
1300 fire * (1 + 100/100 + 30/100) * (1 + 59/100) = 4754.1 fire
Total damage: 4754.1

So with just 20/0 Weapon Ele Dmg support and Lava Lash you get an effective gain of 16.2% from taking Avatar of Fire. This is increased by the fact that your damage is no longer mitigated by armour, but decreased by the targets fire resistance (although this is a double-edged sword because you can also increase your damage substantially against 0 fire resist mobs via Flammability).

If you were to do the same calculations with the addition of Catalyze, as if I were to run a Molten Strike build I would definitely grab it, you would find that the damage is instead increased by 19.66%. And don't forget you can get inc wep ele on gear as well.

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Nagisan wrote:

but I do not know if that increase is essentially worth losing a gem slot (to socket Life Leech, since you will get none from gear if you do no physical damage).

This is definitely a good point that I hadn't considered. That said, I'm pretty sure socketing a Life Leech or LGoH gem would give you significantly larger life returns than just relying on physical leech from gear and passives, so it's not all bad.

so really thought about AoF this morning and I came up with this thought... I see it as a damage loss and here is why:

Since we already have 60% of the initial hit being converted and the projectiles are already 100% fire (unless GGG states otherwise) we would only be converting the remaining 40% phys damage of the initial hit. It will not boost our projectile damage by even 1 point. Sure the initial hit can get boosted by WED but the main damage comes from the projectiles. So we would end up boosting the main hit that we don't really need to worry about and dropping the damage of our main damage source since we need to drop a damage gem to make room for LL.

Please let me know if you guys agree or if I am missing something :)

The thing is, nowhere in the skill does it say that the projectiles are 100% fire. It does say "balls of molten magma" but I could see that feasibly dealing physical damage as well. The only thing 100% certain we have to go on mechanically is that the tooltip states 60% of physical is converted to fire, unless we have something to go on that states otherwise I think it makes sense to assume this is true for the entirety of the attack.

While I agree a developer confirmation would be nice I don't think it's really necessary. Looking at Lightning Strike's wiki page you can see that its tooltip is worded in a very similar way: it does not explicitly state that the projectiles are 100% conversion to lightning. If you look at the mechanics section you'll see this:

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Unmodified projectiles will do 70% of full weapon damage, of which 50% of physical damage is converted to lightning damage (the bolts benefit from added damage, e.g. as from aura's), against any target struck.

So the projectiles have the exact same conversion amount as the initial hit. We don't have any reason to believe the same is not the case for Molten Strike.

Edit: Added some more solid information.

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Fearmonger wrote:

You're close but not exactly. Damage increases are always applied simultaneously and only once, whereas in your example you're applying them at two different points and therefore inaccurately increasing their effectiveness. Here's the correct calculation (I'm going to assume when you said "melee damage" you really meant "melee physical damage"):

Base physical damage: 1000 phys
Added fire adds 30% of physical as fire damage: 1000 phys, 300 fire
Molten Strike converts 60% of physical to fire: 400 phys, 900 fire
Damage increases are applied, the physical damage is increased only by the melee physical damage, whereas the fire damage was converted from physical so it benefits from both:
400 phys * (1 + 100/100) = 800 phys
900 fire * (1 + 100/100 + 30/100) = 2070 fire
Total damage: 2870

Note how this is about 9% lower than the way you did your calculation.

So for fun, here's the same calculation but adding in Weapon Elemental Damage support:

400 phys * (1 + 100/100) = 800 phys
900 fire * (1 + 100/100 + 30/100) * (1 + 59/100) = 3291.3 fire
Total damage: 4091.3

And adding in avatar of fire:

Base physical damage: 1000 phys
Added fire adds 30% of physical as fire damage: 1000 phys, 300 fire
Molten Strike + Avatar of Fire converts 100% of physical to fire: 1300 fire
Damage increases are applied, while the attack is pure fire it also benefits from physical damage increases since all of the damage originated from physical:
1300 fire * (1 + 100/100 + 30/100) * (1 + 59/100) = 4754.1 fire
Total damage: 4754.1

So with just 20/0 Weapon Ele Dmg support and Lava Lash you get an effective gain of 16.2% from taking Avatar of Fire. This is increased by the fact that your damage is no longer mitigated by armour, but decreased by the targets fire resistance (although this is a double-edged sword because you can also increase your damage substantially against 0 fire resist mobs via Flammability).

If you were to do the same calculations with the addition of Catalyze, as if I were to run a Molten Strike build I would definitely grab it, you would find that the damage is instead increased by 19.66%. And don't forget you can get inc wep ele on gear as well.

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Nagisan wrote:

but I do not know if that increase is essentially worth losing a gem slot (to socket Life Leech, since you will get none from gear if you do no physical damage).

This is definitely a good point that I hadn't considered. That said, I'm pretty sure socketing a Life Leech or LGoH gem would give you significantly larger life returns than just relying on physical leech from gear and passives, so it's not all bad.

This is fantastic information. I didn't know that was how the conversion was done. This makes Avatar of Fire and Added Fire Damage (gem) much more effective than I originally thought. Going to have to think about my links again!

I see much testing in my future :), nice reply Fearmonger and the detailed information on conversion!

Some feedback on the guide for you Kry. First off I'll say you've done a pretty good job optimizing your tree, I ended up coming up with something very very similar once I found out that Iron Grip and Point Blank apply to the projectiles, so props for that.

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**There is the WED nodes right by point blank that are kind of nice, as well as

These nodes are pretty trash, I wouldn't take them under any circumstance. Even assuming you're running Avatar of Fire for them to be fully effective, you're only getting 8% increased damage per passive skill point and there's several other places on the tree where you can spend points more efficiently if you want to jack up your damage.

I see that you prefer going into the templar area for Catalyze and the life as well. I don't think there's any compelling reason that you wouldn't do this since they're some of the most effective nodes of their kind in the entire tree, and there's only one "wasted" node to travel through. You can also grab the Enforcer notable which is one of the most effective point expenditures you'll find on the whole tree; 22% increased physical for one point is just spectacular. And if the life is too much for some people there's better places on the tree to remove points (Duelist or Scion life). For these reasons I would advocate including it in the primary build.

The build is pretty severely lacking any significant amount of attack speed, and while your damage may be fine without it you should take this into account in choosing the few damage nodes you do take. The Wrecking Ball cluster by Point Blank is a very effective damage increase for this reason and I personally would take it as soon as I got Point Blank (even if I didn't need the damage I would respec out of other nodes into it, if possible).

Another way you can pick up attack speed would be to reroute your path through the Duelist area through Acceleration and Leather and Steel notables. It costs 3 extra points than just continuing on past Golem's Blood and you gain 12% attack speed (probably about a 8% DPS increase without Haste), 40% armor/evasion, and even some movement speed from the removal of armour penalties. It may be a good idea to take your route if you're rushing to Point Blank, but late game when you have some extra points to spare I think respeccing into this routing would be a no-brainer.

You're taking the "Armour and Life" nodes below the Marauder area (which personally I'm not sold on, but that's beside the point) but you're not taking the significantly more effective Armour and Life node in the Duelist area adjacent to Master of the Arena.

For reference of the changes I'm talking about, here's the build I would run.

I would also take Kraityn over Oak in Cruel, with the huge amount of increased damage and minimal amount of attack speed you've got it should be clearly better. For example, in the build I linked I've got 370% increased physical and fire damage with level 20 gems so if you run the numbers I would need 108% increased attack speed before Oak's bonus would surpass Kraityn's in value. That's obviously not going to happen.

Koam's really should have honorable mention in the suggest items section since this is a 2H build and you don't really need a second 6-link. Obviously it's unobtainable to most players, but if it is obtainable to you then it's almost a no-brainer.

Marohi Erqi Karui Maul

Any thoughts on this weapon? The Inc AOE Seams nice, esp if you run Conc Effect, but 10% AIS hit ouch?

Also, SO MUCH good information on this forum this far, my dude is only lvl 40 so everything just melts. At some point im going to make a big 6L Purchase ( I have like 20 ex to burn ) not sure if it will be a weapon or chest, but id like to know the final verdict on a 6L set up for maps. Sorry, Im in the Army and Deployed in real life so not as smart as some of you,nor do I have time to do the math ( Or know how lol )