Cast on Elemental Ailment is not viable (?)

Mirror of my #build-help post from Discord so that I'm not screaming into the void:

I'm a level 64 Stormweaver, just made it to maps and I failed to kill the first rare I met (it had a life regen mod).

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I'm starting to have impression that it is physically impossible to generate enough energy to achieve anything near a decent proc rate.

Ignite: 1 energy x enemy rarity x ignite damage / enemy ailment threshold
Shock: 1 energy x enemy rarity
Freeze: 10 energy x enemy rarity

The energy cost of triggering a spell is based on the base cast time of the spell, which means the only spell worth considering are Comet (1s) and Snap (0.5s). Yes a spell with a 4 second cooldown is a contender for a trigger spell, the proc rate is that garbage.
All other spell have way worse damage per cast time ratio than Comet.
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Now, back to my build, I went the freeze way because it's a cool defensive layer, and I assumed it would made up for the somewhat slow trigger rate early on (how optimistic!), but the thing is, there's only so many freezes that can be done, and my current trigger rate feels like once every 15-30s when the screen is filled with monsters, 1-2min when attacking one pack at a time. The main goal of my build might as well not exist and the difference wouldn't be visible.

I do freeze all the enemies, and they're quick to get frozen again once they escape. I also have Shaper of Storm ascendancy node (all damage can Shock) to squeeze out a little more energy, but my damage / shock chance is yet too low to shock consistently.







Regarding Elemental Invocation:
It was just as dead, same awful energy generation, having to manually trigger it is an insult, I fail to imagine the use case of the new Ritual Cadence notable as it disable energy generation (I did try it), and there nothing even worth triggering when you unlock it as Comet is lvl42

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End of copy paste. Now I did look around, to see if anyone had made it work, and I only found two fellow players with bricked builds on the verge of quitting the 'league'. One was an Infernalist (and quit yesterday) the other was Blood Mage cast on crit (thanks to the 15% base spell crit chance ascendancy node) and had the exact same issue of being unable to kill the first rare monster encountered in map. So I'm quite sure Cast on X is in a terrible state, as it has been since it was killed in ~0.1.1

I'm not a build maker, but I have 3k hours in PoE 1/2, and I can confidently say the archetype is (still) in a terrible, terrible state. I hope I somehow missed something that could make it work, but so far the archetype seems like a meme end-of-league project to burn your currency and check if you can even achieve anything with it.

My 0.2.0 chronomancer migrated to 0.3.0 is consistently triggering cast on ailment. Basically if you want this you need to be able to hit at least two of the ailments consistently.

If you factor in the extra spirit cost, I'd say the fantasy of having a single-element caster is completely dead.

I understand wanting to allow multi-element casters. But these changes also come with the added consequence of making single-element neigh impossible. Specially the removal of Cast on Freeze/Ignite/Shock.

Actually, I would go as far as saying that it was okay to keep Cast on Freeze/Ignite/Shock. We already had a good trigger for multi-element builds, it was called cast on crit.

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vexorian#9572 wrote:

you need to be able to hit at least two of the ailments consistently.

Thanks, I guess I over-invested in freeze build-up, I'll try to mix in a lot of shock tomorrow. Maybe even more extra damage as fire to see if I can proc some ignite, as all damage can already shock.
EDIT: It's better but still a terrible build at my character level / gear. I'll check back in 0.4 or 0.5 and go with a meta build.


About CoC I heard it needs Choir of the Storm to get off the ground, but again, I have the wrong class to try it.

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ExiledOnCore#3435 wrote:

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vexorian#9572 wrote:

you need to be able to hit at least two of the ailments consistently.

Thanks, I guess I over-invested in freeze build-up, I'll try to mix in a lot of shock tomorrow. Maybe even more extra damage as fire to see if I can proc some ignite, as all damage can already shock.
EDIT: It's better but still a terrible build at my character level / gear. I'll check back in 0.4 or 0.5 and go with a meta build.


About CoC I heard it needs Choir of the Storm to get off the ground, but again, I have the wrong class to try it.

See Hotfix 13.

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0.3.0 Hotfix 13

Fixed a bug where Cast on Elemental Ailments was generating 10x less energy than intended from freezing enemies.

Nice, I was able to clear my first map of 0.3, thanks for telling me!