[2.6] The Curse Whisperer - Tri-Curse CI Whispering Ice Elementalist - Viable for Everything

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cheekym8 wrote:

Hi. I want to ask: is this corrupted staff mod better than standard?

Also, how do you find this chest? Grabbed it for 40c, wondering if it was worth it.

I don't know if the staff's damage is considered as cold or fire for the purposes of the leech.

The chest is a good one, though you might have overpaid a bit. It's good because the crafted affix is resistance, meaning you can scrub it off and pick another resistance should you need it. Otherwise, you really want a chest with 2 good resistances on it already, which generally costs more.

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dectroye wrote:

https://youtu.be/sqndOfGBrvk
Cast while channeling =) Atziri at lvl 84.

Cool! Gives us something to do after we've cleared the maps with the current build.

The downside does appear to be reduced mobility, though. You have to stand and channel, as opposed to the stutter-walk you get now. Do you find that a problem in practice?

There is one overlooked benefit of CwC gem - it isn't affected by temporal chains/Chilled ground map mod. Minor thing, but kinda nice. :)

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Khornaar wrote:

There is one overlooked benefit of CwC gem - it isn't affected by temporal chains/Chilled ground map mod. Minor thing, but kinda nice. :)

there is also a huuuuuge downside: you need to link the staff. so essentially, playing with cwc in endgame raises the build's cost by about 4-5 ex.

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Garnier wrote:

I see you're playing Marauder on this build this league. Which do you prefer comparing the two at the current stage. I don't expect you to compare a three month old characters gear with the gear of a week old league. ;)

I am also playing this build again as I did last league. I enjoyed it too much

Too early to compare yet. I don't have a huge play time at the moment and I'm not rushing into endgame before I'm ready for it. But I've already done a few reflect maps on the Marauder and they are no problem at all. That nerf + Marauder leech takes care of it. Reflect is no longer quite so scary for non-Witch versions.

As for the endgame and breach, I'll get there in a few days and then we'll see how it goes.

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cheekym8 wrote:

Hi. I want to ask: is this corrupted staff mod better than standard?

We aren't doing any cold damage, so no. Even the 0.2 fire leech is not better than the default 12% block though. 12% block is very useful.

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Black_Gun wrote:

there is also a huuuuuge downside: you need to link the staff. so essentially, playing with cwc in endgame raises the build's cost by about 4-5 ex.

You only need 5L. Fire Pen does nothing for Scorching Ray, so leave it out. 5L is cheap.

Overall, I see a few very nice things about this already. If nothing major comes up I'm going to be using this too.

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Kelvynn wrote:

Fire Pen does nothing for Scorching Ray, so leave it out. 5L is cheap.

So does life leech, so only need 4L.

Yet I am not convinced that damage with SR is any better. Spell echo alone effectively has a 1.8 damage multiplier, also presumably it doubles the stun chance as the skill hits twice making stunlock more persistent. I don't see how SR is going to make up for it. And on top of that we are losing either rarity or conc effect.

Update: ok, after reading up, the spell echo is not 1.8 damage multiplier but rather 1.5. The point still stands though.

So a couple of small details about flask choice: Silence is deadly. It's rare, but it'll kill you in an otherwise easy map. I like to have a Warding flask on hand for this. Also, I like having Silver Flask in conjunction with the Adrenaline Flasks. Onslaught stacks additively to all the other movement speed buffs, and the extra attack speed to Leap Slam is a nice emergency button.

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Black_Gun wrote:

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Khornaar wrote:

There is one overlooked benefit of CwC gem - it isn't affected by temporal chains/Chilled ground map mod. Minor thing, but kinda nice. :)

there is also a huuuuuge downside: you need to link the staff. so essentially, playing with cwc in endgame raises the build's cost by about 4-5 ex.

Life leech and Firepen doesn't work on Scorching ray, so we dont really need any nore than 4link.
There is issue with coloring sockets (blue 4link and red elswhere, easiest if 2R are top two or bottom two), so i'll give you that. I spent about 10-15c in chroms/fuses, results may vary, but nowhere near 4 ex.

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DirtyDot wrote:

Yet I am not convinced that damage with SR is any better. Spell echo alone effectively has a 1.8 damage multiplier, also presumably it doubles the stun chance as the skill hits twice making stunlock more persistent. I don't see how SR is going to make up for it. And on top of that we are losing either rarity or conc effect.

Update: ok, after reading up, the spell echo is not 1.8 damage multiplier but rather 1.5. The point still stands though.

For example (4 other gems are the same) in H/O:
Spell echo + Conc effect : 3830 avg. dmg. * 0.4 cast speed
Scorching ray + CwC: 2950 avg. dmg. * 0.36 cast speed (debuff stacks ~6 times, so -18% fire res.)
Echo+Conc deals more damage (around 26% more if Wiki Firestorm/Icestorm dps calc to be believed), Scorching ray itself deals some damage, but nowhere near enough to close that gap. However, i can reserve almost all my mana (ArcticArmor ftw), so i feel safer with CwC.

ok, I thought we would need a fully 6linked staff to make cwc work, but you're right, its not needed.


nonetheless, lets have a look at the math: with the standard setup and good gear, we reach around a cast time of 0.35 seconds with the selfcast setup. this is already including spell echo! so the cast time is the same with selfcast and cwc and can therefore (approximately) be left out of the equation. remove spell echo, replace it with cwc. this corresponds to a damage multiplier of 1.09/0.9 = 1.2111 = 21% more. however, we have to replace one other gem to make room for scorching ray or blight or flameblast.



so in the end, we lose one support gem with a more multiplier of around 45% and replace it with a setup that yields approximately the same cast time and a more multiplier of 21%. in the end, this nets to very roughly 17% less damage with the cwc setup compared to endgame selfcast. I'm not really convinced that SR/blight/Flameblast can make up for this. moreover, the cwc setup loses the multiplicative cast speed modifier of spell echo, so that external cast speed buffs (teammates, inquisitor ascendancy, silver flasks) scale worse than in a selfcast setup.



overall, I think cwc will not be much worse, but I also dont really see a way for it to beat selfcast.

CwC is, imo, "midgame" option, while our enlighten is leveling and our INT isn't high enough for 26% dmg gap between Echo+Conc and SR+CwC be that noticeable.
Taking on t15/Guardians/Shaper will be better with Echo, from a simple math perspective.