Elemental ailment nerfed below the ground ??

Tought it would be cool to try burning arrow since it got super high base damage, but the ignites does nothing other than adding a nice visual effect!!
Do you have to choose between pure hit damage or pure burn damage ??

Im a player that plays abit and then takes a years break, so i dont follow meta etc to carefully.

GGG added a new keystone passive called Perfect Agony.

I'd say it's kind of symbolic of where ailments are currently balance-wise. If you build around them you can probably get more mileage out of them than you could previously, but if you don't invest in them at all they're going to feel fairly anemic most of the time.

What used to happen is ailments would do a percentage of the damage done by the hit which applied them. To take your example of Burning Arrow, if you used Projectile Damage nodes on the skill tree to boost the initial hit's damage, the Ignite damage would be higher than it was without them (same % of initial hit damage, higher initial hit = higher ailment damage).

This was both unintuitive, and a form of double-dipping which was overpowered. In most builds, ailments represented "free" extra damage with minimal to no investment. GGG thinks the game is more interesting, and ailments serve a better role in the game, if when planning builds people have the option of focusing on hits, focusing on ailments, or trying a jack of all trades.

It's worth noting that Ignite is still potentially useful, even if you're not using it as a primary source of damage. Celestial Punishment on the passive skill tree improves your damage against Ignited enemies, and as Ignite is Burning, the Chieftain's ascendancy node Ngamahu, Flame's Advance also works. Not sure how likely either of these specific examples are to be relevant to a Burning Arrow build, but I figured I'd mention the mechanics just so you're aware of them. :)

Thank you!

So burning arrow makes no sense really after the change, its either a flying heavystrike "base damage ich" or flying ignite dot.

Got kaoms heart so tought it would make a cool build with burning arrow.

Burning Arrow makes as much sense as any other Ignite skill - you build up your Ignite damage with it, then Prolif that ignite and go from there. is it the best Ignite skill in the game? Dunno. Probably not. I don't know if Flameblast is still King of Ignites or not, but I know Burning Arrow gets a bunch of interesting threshold stuff, including a threshold jewel that lets you Ignite critters twice and thus double your Ignite DPS.

You just have to build it differently is all.

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Sarno wrote:

It's worth noting that Ignite is still potentially useful, even if you're not using it as a primary source of damage. Celestial Punishment on the passive skill tree improves your damage against Ignited enemies, and as Ignite is Burning, the Chieftain's ascendancy node Ngamahu, Flame's Advance also works. Not sure how likely either of these specific examples are to be relevant to a Burning Arrow build, but I figured I'd mention the mechanics just so you're aware of them. :)

I'd say Immolate Support deserves a spot on this list as well - it grants a pretty ridiculous degree of flat Fire Damage against any Burning enemies, which is useful regardless of whether you build for hit damage, Ignite damage, or both.

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adghar wrote:

I'd say Immolate Support deserves a spot on this list as well

It wasn't really intended as an exhaustive list or recommendations - it was just "here's a couple of mechanics and an example of each." Mechanically it's pretty similar to Ngamahu imo.

I'd argue that immolate is actually a much weaker gem than any more multiplier gems as long as you're stacking them. and who doesn't.

probably needs a separate thread but immolate is a great example of a somewhat unique support gem that gets obliterated and overshadowed by more multipliers. on direct damage builds its overshadowed by more supports, and in indirect damage builds it gets overshadowed by EE (really a more multiplier)

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grepman wrote:

probably needs a separate thread but immolate is a great example of a somewhat unique support gem that gets obliterated and overshadowed by more multipliers. on direct damage builds its overshadowed by more supports, and in indirect damage builds it gets overshadowed by EE (really a more multiplier)

What do you mean by direct and indirect here?

"More" is simply a description of consistently multiplicative change. That means that if one is scaling base fire damage in any way, then the more-damage bonus from Immolate is dependent on the amount of base fire damage you already have:

Comparing against Lv.20 Elemental Damage with Attacks Support 54% more: 475 average base damage or less "needed"
Comparing against Lv.20 Elemental Focus 49% more: 523 average base damage or less "needed"
Comparing against Lv.20 Controlled Destruction 44% more: 583 average base damage or less "needed"
Comparing against Lv.20 Hypothermia 39% more: 658 average base damage or less "needed"
Comparing against Lv.20 Pierce 19% more: 1350 average base damage or less "needed"

(for example, if you have 475 average base fire damage and you are trying to decide between EDwAS/WED and Immolate, 475 * .54 = 256.5, and 256.5 is the average base fire damage granted by Immolate lv. 20)

spreadsheet so you can check my calcs if skeptical

To be fair I am no master of creating endgame-trivializing builds, so I don't know how much flat base damage a "pro player" gets, but considering the fact that a max roll Oro's Sacrifice has 537.5 average base fire damage, I wouldn't imagine the majority of builds going too above 658 average base fire damage, which puts Immolate solidly at the 35%+ More Damage level, which is not too dang shabby if you're already juicing the highest More multipliers you can.

On my SSF melee witch, my base damage is in the realm of 250 only per weapon right now, so Immolate Support is going to grant me approx. 100% more damage against Burning Enemies

OK sorry I have to double post because I feel like an idiot.

First after reflection I understand what you mean by indirect damage (minions, totems, traps, mines). In that case though it is the classic question "why not both?" You can still use Immolate Support on your proxy or minion just fine.

Secondly I lied. I forgot I am using Added Cold Damage Support so, marginal to my current setup Immolate would only provide about 50% more damage. However, if I switch Faster Attacks back in, it goes back to being ~100% more damage, but the exchange might be a little less because Faster Attacks might be less +dps for me than Added Cold Damage... so it will be somewhere around ~75% more damage overall, I'm guessing, once I get a 5th link in. And it would only be ~50% more damage if/when I get a 6Link.

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adghar wrote:

OK sorry I have to double post because I feel like an idiot.

First after reflection I understand what you mean by indirect damage (minions, totems, traps, mines). In that case though it is the classic question "why not both?" You can still use Immolate Support on your proxy or minion just fine.

Secondly I lied. I forgot I am using Added Cold Damage Support so, marginal to my current setup Immolate would only provide about 50% more damage. However, if I switch Faster Attacks back in, it goes back to being ~100% more damage, but the exchange might be a little less because Faster Attacks might be less +dps for me than Added Cold Damage... so it will be somewhere around ~75% more damage overall, I'm guessing, once I get a 5th link in. And it would only be ~50% more damage if/when I get a 6Link.

I kinda skimmed your post (sorry, at work right now so I will check it in depth later- again, apologize)

the indirect damage thing was if youre doing burn fire-based damage yourself you dont want immolate (RF is a good example of that, youre giving up EE for immolate)

the more multiplier point, was kind what youre saying, immolate has to add equivalent of whatever more multiplier gem adds to the base damage to be as effective. most of the time, it doesnt. sure there might be exceptions with skills that have high damage effectiveness and low base damage.
but for the most part when you get to the land of 'really high numbers' you generally are stacking more multipliers and flat damage starts to suffer unless its so high compared to base damage (at least 40% more or whatever most multipliers end up adding)

of course, theres also the conditional nature of immolate. you need an auxilary skill most of the time or chance to ignite or high crit etc. yea Im aware of oro's but oro's base damage is pretty high meaning, again, that once you dish out enough damage in the endgame its tough to beat more multipliers.