shock nova has the highest damage of all lightning spells, but it does the lowest damage of them all

so im trying to do a CRIT shock nova build and now it deals 20K at Lv 79 with no penetration

It SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

it feels really bad (man)

because all the goddamn monsters in the game resist elemental damage and because necromancers spawn fucking everyware in and map and they already implicitly resist lightning + a rare one resist extra ele dmg AND sometimes this fucking necromancers spawn with ele res WITH lightning res WITH their fucking implicit res to light dmg

when i lvl up shock nova it only goes up +700 dps........WHAT??? 700????? FROM LV16 TO 17?????

that needs a buff

also thats my setup,better gear just never comes by (SSF)

Pretty sure that crit damage is not a very good support.

Besides that, no idea what tree you are using.

And SSF pretty much always sucks, specifically for crit builds, no?

Sorry man, but well... your on a 4L... even SSF you should be able to get a 5L one way or the other at lvl 88. Secondly you have almost no crit on your gear. Then you don't use a single more multiplier gem in your setup...

In my humble opinion you would do better to ditch the crit until you get some decent gear, to specc out of critnodes and to use lightningpen and controlled destruction (swap with conc for bosses) instead of ICSC and ICSM. And to use conductivity instead of Assasin's mark.

Crit is king when you have the gear, but without gear it sucks ass.

And then i have a really hard time to understand why your going occultist. I don't see a second curse in your setup, nor do you use Eldritch battery as it seems. If you are occultist just for the powercharge, that's simply not worth it.

He is lvl 79 and is likely not an occultist.

Also spell echo is a 'more multiplier' and one of the strongest for non projectiles.

Are you inquisitor? If not probably should use lightning pen gem.

Iv swap fron non crit to crit because the damage with shock nova was already bad
So i think that the problem is not with me going crit with my currect gear.
i grabbed every single crit multi and chance nodes + 4 power charges + assasins mark that together it gives me 80% chance to crit and 350% crit multy. 350% not enought? Again, this gear is the ABSOLUTE BEST i could have find! the BEST!! i alc'ed like about 100 daggers and these two are the best iv got until now.
I wont go assasin because i need the mana nodes from trickster , witch is another HUGE problem with lightning skills , the mana costs are insane!

Its kind of insulting to hear "upgrade you gear" when you think that there is nowear to progress anymore. That really sucks.

Shock nova is not the highest lightning damage spell per cast. Even if you're adding in the extra 50% damage from the ring, it still does less damage than a single use of Lightning Tendrils. Plus there's Discharge, but that's a different story.

Figuring out which lightning spell actually does the worst damage... Well, it's probably Tempest Shield, but if you've got the right setup basically any spell will work to kill stuff so it's a moot point.

Key words being "right setup." You do not have that. Anyway, as others have mentioned you're only running a 4 link and your supports need work. Increased crit damage is generally not considered a worthwhile gem, and even if it was you don't seem to have enough gear to make crit actually worthwhile. By the way, solo self found does not support crit very well because getting enough crit gear to make it feel good is quite the test of patience, and you don't seem to have much of that virtue.

Let's do some simple math on resistances: If a monster has 75% resistance, that means you do 25% against it. However, if you have 25% resistance (which is a level 8 Lightning Penetration support) then that 75% goes down to 50% and thus you deal 50% damage. Compared to 25%, that's double. All the time. The lightning pen support will be significantly stronger for you than the crit damage gem even if it doesn't change your tooltip.

A tip for future reference though: The game is not balanced around solo self found. Thus, complaining about lack of damage in a solo self found setup is basically meaningless.

Shock nova isn't in one handed + tv watch meta category. It is possible to get to 100k+ tooltip dps (well, including that 50% extra hit) since there are arc builds where arc has lower base stats and still able to get to 100k+. Althou with storm call, ball lightning, lightning tendrils im pretty it is possible to get quite a bit higher.

I'm sorry. Your Profile shows an occultist, lvl 88, thus i assumed it was this char. My apologies. 80% crit should be fine. But still, as others have said, critmulti isn't the best support. It might well be the case that you need some ridiculous gear for shocknova - voidbattery and the likes.

(@biyte: yes, echo is a multiplier, but its a castspeed/castamount multiplier, not a multiplier that multiplies the base damage of a single cast. But its obviously a must use support for most spells.)

Shock nova is the worst lightning spell because... there are lots of monsters with lightning resist.

Right... Think about that for a second.

No Elemental Weakness and no Lightning Penetration...... if you don't use the tools the game gives you to get around the barrier, how can you be qualified to talk about how hard that barrier is?