New Lightning Skills

So anybody got any really hot takes on these? I'm looking at them but kinda struggling to come up with a specific purpose - they feel like bonus clear skills but I can't help feeling that you'd just clear with the main skill anyway.

BigBubble is orb of storms that attaches to a target, but the damage isn't really there to make it a significant single target aid. I almost think the skill would be better if you could just attach it to a rare specifically as aside from that it seems kinda dubious?

Lightning Rod has better damage but fundamentally is stormcall that you can't spam, the damage isn't there to make it a viable 1-2 skill its nothing like the league of bladefall/bladeblast when that was dominant.

I stared at the gems and could only conclude that we have an arcanist brand situation on our hands, GGG were too worried they would be good so they premetively gutted the way you'd actually build these. Lightning rod have specific trigger rules and not working for ailments smacks of overdesign ;/

Curious what anybody else thinks? I feel like the real new gem is the shock as if doing X more damage because we can use it to ramp on builds that shouldn't but that is pretty stale as a concept.

edit: These would make sense if we had like a supreme single target lightning skill then we could prolif and clear but I really can't think of one, lightning skills tend to be pretty great at clearing already if you want to go in that direction.

Its like ED / DD playstyle and you scale the damage on them by scaling shock. Can be fun.

I kinda want to try a hybrid Inquisitor with Battlemage, Fanaticism, and stuff.
Shock with Attacks, nuke with Lightning Conduit.

But that type of build tends to spread itself too thin between attacks, spells, and defense/survivability.

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Sarganis87 wrote:

I kinda want to try a hybrid Inquisitor with Battlemage, Fanaticism, and stuff.
Shock with Attacks, nuke with Lightning Conduit.

But that type of build tends to spread itself too thin between attacks, spells, and defense/survivability.

this was the direction I wanted to head in too but I can't see how you'd scale the spell high enough to be viable, the lightning rod in particular has pretty crazy opportunity cost issues before you even get to spell itself.

My biggest gripe with Lightning Conduit is that for all the effort to make it work, it does not offer anything mechanically. In fact, it disables things by consuming Shock.
If you invest into a one-two combo, it should do something significant - like ED/Contagion's spread.

And yeah, as you mentioned, Galvanic Field is a clunky Orb of Storms.

Lol yeah that was my takeaway too, I'm hoping i've missed something really obvious but it aint looking good

The main issue I see with new lightning skills is that they're not really spammable.
Galvanic field has a cooldown of 0.7 seconds on hitting same enemy so RIP for bossing, it is usable as a support skill in mapping if your main damaging skill lacks in map clear DPS or AOE but from the numbers on gem I didn't see anything great.
Lightning conuit on the other hand is a 1-shot skill, you cast it and it removes shock. To me it looks like Hexblast mechanic which removes Doom from monster on hit. So either all your castspeed is worthless or you need to somehow constantly apply strong shock. Because you can't cast shock-applying skill and Lightning consuit fast enough manually.
One possibility is to use skitterbots - they apply constant shock but it's only 15%, is it possible to scale it's effectiveness so that they apply 50% shock all the time?
The other thing(and Chris said about it in announcement) is to use new support gem just for shock purposes with main damaging skill and stack maximum shock. Use skill like Shock nova with it for +10% max shock, then add Lightning mastery for another 15, add some effectiveness and you get 75% more damage all the time because everything is max-shocked.

You can spellsling it for example. Arc + conduit, or high shock brand to repeatedly shock, or use necro with shock corpses. There are a lot of ways for it. It all depends on numbers honestly.

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kuciol wrote:

You can spellsling it for example. Arc + conduit, or high shock brand to repeatedly shock, or use necro with shock corpses. There are a lot of ways for it. It all depends on numbers honestly.

But it still won't be spammable - it says "Cast time is added as cooldown if triggered" so you still can't have 3-4-5 casts per second with it. And unless its damage is 3-4-5 times more than Arc or any current lightning skill that actually scales with cast speed, what's the point of using it?

Tbh I'm waiting for someone to figure out how to get a big shock on a boss and then post it somewhere :D

Otherwise, not sure what the use case is - the lightning skills I have experience with have no problems with clear, but struggle with boss killing, so getting a supporting skill that improves clear but doesn't help with bosses feels like a miss.