Lightning Warp Traps & Totems (hardcore)

Here's the witch build I ran during the 1 month league:

Concepts:


Puncture, the reason why Stanching Flasks are important!


Passive Tree:


Gear and Links:


Videos!:



Extra Notes!


Questions and suggestions are more than welcome!~

Video is up!

^

The idea is interesting with instant warping traps and with some more development I think you can make an effective build, however, there are choices you make that are strange.

For instance, your LW totems are very much underwhelming since they do not have the instant warp your traps have. They die before they cast sometimes. Simply using Arc instead to prolif shocks seems to make more sense since the damage is instant. You are probably hesitant to use Arc since this is a LW build, I get that, but the totems are very awkward to use.

Your tree, you pass up 3x10% flask nodes in the witch area in favour of two +10 int nodes near the 2x16% increased spell damage. You could even opt for the ES nodes instead if you feel flasks are not going to benefit you much, which they will, but it is your choice.

Scaling damage is something that needs some work, you have some room to grow in the sense of linking lightning penetration and conc-effect but I'm concerned it won't be enough to actually deal reasonable damage. Something you could look into is going RF, grabbing aura nodes and +% resistance to scale your spell damage a lot higher given cast speed is useless and crit is not really an option here. You may sacrifice AoE nodes which are important but you must find some way of gaining enough damage to clear faster, the builds playstyle is relatively safe as it is. Defences might change as a result which would mean not using a CoD chest, but the last thing you want is having to go Lightning Coil and requiring 4b2g sockets - I rolled this for my Incinerator and it took 8k chromatics which is pretty lucky since the average for those specific colours is 1 in 10k. You could have an end-game goal of going low-life to gain some damage but it requires some more thinking.

Sorry if I rambled, those were my thoughts on seeing what you put together and hopefully you take something from these ideas and apply them to yours. good luck.

Made a quick example for you of what I mean by RF:
http://poeurl.com/yWWWotR

Level 23 PoF + RotP shield:
4% passives
9% aura
8% shield

96% fire resistance

3% life regen + vitality is enough so out regen 1.24 x 90% RF degen. You need ~4.5% regen to outsustain it.

That alone should really help the damage which looks like a limiting factor in the build. I would wait for FM/1.2.0 patch to hit before investing too much time into the build though.

Lightning warp traps are a lot of fun, and they work pretty well. They can be made to do a whole lot more damage, notably with conc effect (which is a lot better than added lightning imo). I guess working with a 4L limits things a good bit, but you could use deerstalkers for an easy cheap 5L.

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SlightRedeye wrote:

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Hi, thanks tons for the replies. You´re right about the totems sometimes dying and having underwhelming damage. I opted for Lightning Warp on because it isn't harmed by the lack of cast speed and benefits from the Area of Effect nodes.

I hadn't started mapping with this character yet to be honest, and as far as Lunaris and Docks farming goes, the totems were very useful. They rarely died, and did not require constant recasting. I guess what I liked best about them is how they would often chain between packs and "follow me" in a way. Another thing to take into account is that I sort of use them as bodyguards, making them take some of the heat instead of myself. I was hoping adding Reduced Duration on the totems would make them go fast enough to dodge damage (as was the case in docks/lunaris.) But I haven't quite tried that yet.

Righteous Fire is a good idea, as is with most if not all of casters. I didn't look into this because of the expenses primarily, but it's something I'll take into consideration. It'd be nice if I could keep the Warp Totems, but if not I was considering using stormcall ones since they benefit from the AoE as well. (Ball Lightning / Arc being the only other options)

Lastly, I didn't think the flask nodes were any good, and at the time being was unsure of how much ES I'd gather. I guess that bit is a little indifferent given that the tree is about to change, we'll have to see what route to take once the new tree is announced.

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PepprmintButler wrote:

Lightning warp traps are a lot of fun, and they work pretty well. They can be made to do a whole lot more damage, notably with conc effect (which is a lot better than added lightning imo). I guess working with a 4L limits things a good bit, but you could use deerstalkers for an easy cheap 5L.

Yeah, the traps are the focal point in this build, the totems just sort of piled on. I tossed 300+ jewelers on the damned cloak and it never got to 6 sockets, but I guess that's just RNG. Although it is limiting to use a 4L, I would probably use Lightning Penetration as a 5th. I have
off-colored deerstalkers in my stash, I just don't enjoy using those boots due to their lack of stats (and low level trap support)

I gave Conc. effect some thought as well, I haven't tried it, but my train of thought was that I didn't want to reduced the Area of the explosions, as I was attempting to cause the 6 detonations (the starting as well as ending AoE's from the three traps) to overlap.

More hits = more chance to shock = shock stacking.

I reckon Conc. effect would probably up the damage per explosion considerably, but I wonder how bad the area loss really is. That said, a friend of mind kept telling me I should recur to Three Dragons and freeze proliferation. Given that Shock Stacking is being removed, and you'll only be able to single shock, Conc. effect might be the better choice after 1.2.

Thanks for the replies! I'll put the ideas into testing through some dead Char I might have sitting around in standard and see what gives~