Is herald of thunder worth the mana reservation?

I was kind of thinking about this. I was looking at the tooltip description about how much a level 17 HoT skill gems adds to my spells. It's 15-61. Doing the math I figured that it added a maximum of about 200 some damage points to every blast from my Storm Call skill when all bonuses are tabulated. However, my character also relies on Mind of Matter for a significant portion of damage reduction, and I'm starting to think that the mana that it reserves really isn't worth that extra bit of damage. On the other hand, I have a pretty loose grasp on the concept of damage numbers, only that more = better. So... is the damage worth the reservation? I realize there are other elements at play, like the lightning storm that it causes, and the potential for curse on hit, etc.

HoT isnt so much about the damage added to your abilities - though when you first get to act 2 it can be nice, it is about calling down vast sheets of lightning upon thine enemies, smiting and burning them again and again, for daring to oppose you.

HoT is also a very useful vehicle for Curse on Hit, and any number of other nasty little combinations of gems that can be cooked up and fed to the corrupt and ignorant monsters of Wraeclast.

Ultimately it depends on your build...

You can try the same zone a few times with and again without and see hwo it goes.

Agree HoT is more about its proc effect. In my lightning build it does pretty good damage. With Hierophant's Illuminated Devotion it leech life and mana and also blinds and kockback enemies with no extra mana reservation. ;P
For CoH setup is better to use Orb of Storms these days. It's more reliable during boss fights and doesn't reserve any mana.

While the added damage is on a little low end of things (could really use some boost... pls?), one could argue that it should be used with fast-casting, low base damage spells/weapons.

But then again, it depends on your build. I, personally, find Herald(s) pretty useless at the end game, where Herald of Ash is kind okish and Herald of Ice is damn useless (aside from some gimicki builds) :V

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Perq wrote:

While theshould be used with fast-casting, low base damage spells/weapons.

You would think that, but GGG added Damage Effectiveness to normalize the curve for Spells quite a bit :| you could of course make a case for Weapons that have almost 2 APS or more than 2 APs.

Thanks for the help, folks. I did some experimenting last night and my overall damage seems to be largely unchanged without it. I think having the extra mana is better.