Scaling Obliteration explosion.

I've been having fun with obliteration wand the last 3 days and I feel like I found my new starter for the next league.

Having said that I feel like I am shoehorned into rolling a berserker if I want to go this route, the reason being there are many increased damage jewels and nodes on the passive tree for scaling the obliteration wand explosion damage but there's only one 'more' multiplier that can scale it--aspect of carnage (yes scion has a 10% more multiplier but that's a scion).

After playing a berserker almost the entire league, I feel like I want to try a different ascendancy this time around but build around the obliteration wand explosion. Occultist seems to be the next best choice but it's very expensive to reach the 100% damage with the explosion damage.

Honestly this is the case with most other item and enchant triggered spells. Unless they take on the socketed support gem, the only way to scale their damage is with Berserker and I feel like that's a lost opportunity.

Are there other ways to scale the obliteration explosion(or other item triggered abilities) than going berserker?

I used Occultist when I made one. Dual wielding those wands and Profane Bloom gives you 60% chance for the explosion. Void Beacon gives you a big damage boost with the -20% chaos resist aura. Malediction gives you another curse and some bonus damage. And Wicked Ward gives nice ES benefits (got this one last I think). That's how I made mine anyway. With Whispers of Doom you can get 3 curses - I had Enfeeble, Temp Chains, and Vulnerability on blasphemy.

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mark1030 wrote:

I used Occultist when I made one. Dual wielding those wands and Profane Bloom gives you 60% chance for the explosion. Void Beacon gives you a big damage boost with the -20% chaos resist aura. Malediction gives you another curse and some bonus damage. And Wicked Ward gives nice ES benefits (got this one last I think). That's how I made mine anyway. With Whispers of Doom you can get 3 curses - I had Enfeeble, Temp Chains, and Vulnerability on blasphemy.

Yeah I think occultist is the second best option in my opinion. But as I said in my post it gets quite expensive to scale the explosion without the more multiplier for the damage part of the explosion.

Ideally you'd want 100% of the target's life dealt in an explosion so the equation you want to solve is

25*1.4(aspect of carnage)*(1+x)=100. x being 1.9. 190% increased damage is manageable with good gear and good passive tree planning.

Without aspect of carnage the equation is now

25*(1+x)=100. x being 3. 300% increased damage is not impossible but seeing as only things that scale it are chaos damage and area damage, it's gonna cost a lot in expensive items and passive points.

Also I think relying on curses is not viable since curse immunity is so common these days. Of course there's cospri's but I don't think anyone's going life based build with an occultist.

Berserker might be better damage-wise, but it's not that much better. Don't underestimate the -20% chaos resistance. At zero resistance, sure, it's a 1.4 multiplier instead of a 1.2. But add in some resistance and the Void Beacon catches up some more. At 40% resistance, your damage with Berserker is multiplied by 1.4 * .6 = .84 compared to 1.0 * .8 = .8.

Well, if any of the mobs that I kill does not have chaos resist it wouldn't matter.
So I guess the only way of actually scaling the explosion damage is berserker or frenzy charges.
Time to roll raider.