ball lightning question.

I made a 6 link ball lightning ..
BL - spell echo - life leech - lightning pen - slower projectiles.

im wondering what i need to get for the last gem among these.
faster cast, increased area, knock back, greater multi project, or concentrated

which one shold i pick ?

help me.

concentraded i believe doesnt effect ball lightning. From the listed gems i would go for faster casting, but personaly i would recomend socket in elemental focus (controlled destruction is also an option) and also would drop life leech and replace it with added lightning damage or if u have more wealth +4 lvl empower (or controled dest), since you can get life leech from so many sources, like: berek's ring, watchers eye vitality mod, warldords mark, boot enchant, atziris promise, if you convert damage to fire you can get leech from eye of innocent and anger + watcher's eye as well (but in this case you should change gems).

If you don't rely on shock (which you shouldn't, because Ball Lightning isn't good for shocking) or other elemental ailments, use Elemental Focus.

If you don't rely on crit., use Controlled Destruction.

If you need both ailments and crit., use Added Lightning Damage.

Let me explain this sh*t really quick to you. So you can easily understand the mechanic of the spell's itself.

There are 2 different "time-based" damage type in this game. One is "on-hit" and other one is "over-time". %99 of players are not understanding that the ball lightning spell is not an "on-hit" spell actually. The tooltip it is showing is for only one hit. But it is dealing this damage "over-time" with many hits and that means it's damage accumulating in this limited time. So, you have to "hit" much more over and over again in 1 or 2 seconds until the ball disappears.

So, to do that, you have to link a gmp to it. With gmp you're "hitting" much more in "over-time". The most important 2 gems for ball lightning are gmp and slower projectiles with some additional duration.

2 balls produced from GMP will both be under the same 250ms hit limit, though, so if you are already using slower projectiles, you won't gain a lot on single targets. For packs it's great, though.

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zagibu wrote:

2 balls produced from GMP will both be under the same 250ms hit limit, though, so if you are already using slower projectiles, you won't gain a lot on single targets. For packs it's great, though.

yea on bosses you can swap it to something like added cold damage or maybe culling.

nvm.

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Abdiel_Kavash wrote:

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Jideament wrote:

Let me explain this sh*t really quick to you. So you can easily understand the mechanic of the spell's itself.

There are 2 different "time-based" damage type in this game. One is "on-hit" and other one is "over-time". %99 of players are not understanding that the ball lightning spell is not an "on-hit" spell actually. The tooltip it is showing is for only one hit. But it is dealing this damage "over-time" with many hits and that means it's damage accumulating in this limited time. So, you have to "hit" much more over and over again in 1 or 2 seconds until the ball disappears.

With all due respect, I am not sure you understand the mechanics yourself. Ball Lightning definitely does Hit, and definitely does not deal any Damage over Time (unless you force it to via chaos conversion and poison for example). You can easily see this by the fact that it is able to apply a Curse on Hit.

Modifiers to Damage over Time will not affect the lightning damage of Ball Lightning; conversely any Hit-only modifiers (such as flat added damage) will. Again you can easily test this either in Path of Building or directly in game.

Thanks for trying to clarify mechanics but i didn't say "damage over time" once. I said "hitting over time". Read it again.

It is a hit spell but with 1 cast you're hitting more than one. Thats the point of "over time".