Mjolner questions
"I wouldn't bother with Ball Lightning. Four hits from each cast, which is the max you'll get on a still enemy as far as I know, is still a bit less damage than one of Arc. It only gets worse from there as you take into account enemy movement. Yes, it probably is slightly better against hordes of trash mobs, but they melt to double Arc, I can assure you. "My friend and I had this exact discussion a while back. I think we back-of-the-enveloped ~40% lightning res as the break point. However, that was with ~450 STR and using Rathpith. Anyway, I'm actually a fan of Lightning Pen mainly because it is mostly those lightning resistant mobs that slow you down. Again, white and blue packs die to whatever because you proc so much. It's when all the adds are dead and you're left plinking down the other half of a resistant rare's health bar for 20 seconds that you'll wish for more damage. I'm rather hesitant to weigh into the attack choice discussion at this point, but I will say that Cyclone would be clearly the best if not for the comical amounts of desync it causes, Lightning Strike sucks because of what I said above, and Spectral Throw works fine. Have not yet tried Molten Strike, mostly because my only build-appropriate 6L is pure eva and I'm leery of chroming that into correct Molten Strike colours. Have you done something awesome with [url=http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Sire_of_Shards]Sire of Shards[/url]? PM me and tell me all about it! Last edited by viperesque#7817 on Jul 10, 2014, 5:49:38 PM
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Much depends on life replenishment strategy. If you go Cyclone and link LGoH you get excellent life replenishment. It's harder to make life leech work. But if you're going low life then a ranged attack like ST will offer a lot of advantage.
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" So only one projectile from Molten Strike can ever hit any enemy? It's just like Lightning Strike yet LS cannot shotgun and MS can. Also you should note that the wiki isn't always fully up to date. If ST cannot shotgun, I'd love to see the patch notes that say so. Whenever I use it, ST sure as hell seems to shotgun. On a side note, why do people have this childish attitude that using caps lock somehow makes them correct? " So the wiki is up to date and ST can no longer shotgun? " That's exactly why I'm not even considering Discharge. I'm planning on using it on a low life aura build for easy damage but there are two problems. 1. Chancing Mjolnir 2. Leeching damage without getting corrupt mods, which are useless anyways. The only way is with a Life Leech gem, and that means one less Arc or no support. Seems the best way to use it is with maximum Endurance charges, max block, and then just dump everything into strength and intelligence. |
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If you go leech you have two avenues...
1- Support Arc with Life Leech in the gavel. As you say, this reduces your damage substantially. 2- do enough damage with your primary attack to put the leech there. If you're going to take lightning damage nodes on your skill tree, you can consider Lightning Attack as a skill that might leech enough. Especially if you plan a lot of mitigation. |
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ST definitely does not shotgun.
So, based on your last reply, it seems that you are theorycrafting here. I have a mjolner character and I can tell you that I strongly prefer LS to ST. My ST attacks per second was 3.0 with 19/20 blood rage supported by lvl 2 enhance. My LS attacks per second was 6.0 due to multistrike. Add in the "free" chain from mjolner and it's not even close in my view. Much more aps plus each projectile chaining makes it better. The colors also make it easy to remove LS and GMP and put in Cyclone and LGOH. That's my take. Also, for leech you can get an atziri belt. My important gear: And this is the chest I used to test ST: Last edited by enigma1406#0526 on Jul 10, 2014, 11:31:08 PM
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" The belt only gives 1% leech. It's also a very hard to obtain item. Leech has to be at least 8ish%, and that means a Life Leech gem. The only way to avoid the leech problem is to have 100% lightning resistance, which should be easy for my aura character. |
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" Other attacks can shotgun but as far as I can tell, Spectral Throw cannot. At least I can't seem to shotgun when I tried. What I do notice with Spectral throw though, is that if it is at the edge, on the beginning of its return path, it seems like you can hit the target multiple times. |
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"Technically, it can't. The projectiles can't collide with the same thing because the projectiles can't collide with anything. However, each projectile does a separate AoE that can hit the same things as the other AoEs from the other projectiles. They can also hit something that was also hit by the melee attack, which is different to LS as well. Molten Strike can't shotgun just like Lightning Arrow can't - the projectiles can't collide with the same thing - but the additional effect around where they end can hit the same thing, because it doesn't involve the projectiles "hitting" the thing directly. Molten Strike is effectively like shooting three lightning arrows at the ground around you If molten strike projectiles did collide with enemies, only one from each use would do so with any given enemy, because that's the behaviour it has from being an attack projectile. "While this is good general advice, and I wish more people were aware of it, in this case the wiki on spectral throw is correct. "There are none, because Spectral Throw has been unable to shotgun since before it's addition to the live realm - thus there has never been a patch that changed it to not shotgunning. It was able to shotgun to some extent in an early preview video shown before its addition to the game, due to a quirk of how the code at the time handled it doing it's multiple hits, but this was changed before release of the skill. | |
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The main problem of spectral throw : it can't be support by multistrike ( you loose 100% more attack speed ) so if one spectral throw hit at least two time.
Lighting strike procs hit one time per attack, but it's two time faster. PS : I'm using two abilities in one 6L for my mjolner : Molten Strike - Lightning Strike - Multistrike - Faster Attacks - GMP - Life gain on hit. Edit : Natharias : The belt only gives 1% leech. It's also a very hard to obtain item. Leech has to be at least 8ish%, and that means a Life Leech gem. The only way to avoid the leech problem is to have 100% lightning resistance, which should be easy for my aura character. => 1%leech of a lot of damage is a lot of leech. ( 100kdps => 1000life per second... ( with the leech cap at 20% of your max life/es, against pack your almost always at the maximum leech rate )). is so strong. => with flask, i'm at 99%lightning and 106%fire. it should be really easy for an aura characters. PS : the 10%additional shock chance during flask effect is increase by the increase effect of flask in the witch tree. Last edited by xMasaox#5129 on Jul 11, 2014, 7:53:11 AM
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Agreed with what xMasaox said on almost all accounts. You do NOT need anywhere near 8% leech. 1% is plenty because you are doing a ton of damage. Granted that I'm using discharge and you won't be, but still it will be very high. I'm also lowlife RF/PA so that helps my damage output considerably.
Leech is not a problem at high damage, but reflect is. As mentioned, running purity of lightning (I do in one gear setup for maps) and using a flask is enough to counteract reflect. Also, by using iron will instead of lightning penetration, reflect is less of an issue. |
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