Path of Exile

Jabberwhacky

Lord Nagafen Raider
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Is Spellslinger gonna be SSF friendly at all? Being SSF 4 lyfe I've never got to dabble with Poet's Pen, so I'm wondering how far the gem could feasibly get me (roughly speaking).
 

Pyros

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Is Spellslinger gonna be SSF friendly at all? Being SSF 4 lyfe I've never got to dabble with Poet's Pen, so I'm wondering how far the gem could feasibly get me (roughly speaking).
Well it seems to hold on its own tbh, I don't know how easy/hard it is to craft wands nowadays but since this is kind of a mixed damage archetype(your attack damage is added to the spells supported by spellslinger and your caster mods on the wands obviously affect the spells that are triggered), it probably would work more than fine yeah. And since they had to nerf it before it even launched, it stands to reason it was pretty fucking strong in alpha already and so it should remain strong(they just made it a bit more annyoing to use instead of reducing power). Since it's going to be largely spell scaling too(can scale the attack but don't have to), it'll be strong early on since all you need are gem levels. And since it works off separate triggers it won't REQUIRE a 6L right away like a cast on crit setup would. Although you'll probably want to farm tabula and get that 6L spellslinger going asap.

So yeah should be fine.
 
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Caeden

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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I’m trying to not play, but I kinda want to try a kinetic bolt spellslinger assassin with arc and ball lightning. Seems easy enough to start and you can always fall back on storm brand. Some decent scaling you could do. Could also go low life I think or do CI and grab a ES on hit eye. Shavronnes would free up life for auras since mana reservation would come at a price.

Thought about heiro. But the crit on spells/attacks seems eh. Assassin seems very natural.

I also wonder how the new channels will work with totems.

Fuck this game and sucking me back in
 
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Pyros

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You can only support the base rune laying skill with totems, the 2nd active can't be tied to a totem you have to channel yourself. So it can't be done as a pure totem build.
 

Caeden

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Ideally that’s exactly what I hoped. I may try it.

Archmage support is confusing me some too.
 

Nirgon

YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE
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The new lightning channel on totem is probably good if ur detonating. Maybe something like inquis?

I'm thinking of trying that spell slinger assassin with descecrate/cremate.
 

Nirgon

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So maybe like unearth and sling the cremate on something else, i dunno

I'll fool with it and figure sumn out
 
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Xequecal

Trump's Staff
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New plan is definitely EK totems plus blade blast. I was expecting a damage bonus per blade, not a whole new spellcast. 4 EK totems is easily generating 20 blades per second, and I can set them all off with an x20 Archmage empowered blade blast for 20 copies? Yeah, that sounds fair.
 
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Caeden

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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I got an erection reading that.

Also, the 0.5s is why I could see spellslinger feeling very meh. Never enjoyed cwc builds due to that.
 

Caliane

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Ideally that’s exactly what I hoped. I may try it.

Archmage support is confusing me some too.
Archmage seems weak or SUPER niche.

Basic regular "Added lightning damage" is "supported skills have 21-402 added lightning damage". 211.5 average
So, it has to beat that..
What archmage does is,
  1. adds 7-134 lightning damage first.
  2. gives supported skills a mana cost of 6% of unreserved mana if 6% is more then its normal mana cost.
  3. adds lightning damage equal to 127% of the skills mana cost.
Example, pulling up my old stormburst build from 3.6.
1229 mana. 528 unreserved.
stormburst 5 mana cost base. with a bunch of mana multipliers from other supports.. 20 cost.
6% of 528 is 32. so 32 mana cost is the more expensive, and thus used.
I would then gain 32 x 1.27= 40 added lightning damage from the mana cost, plus the based added damage.
47-174=110.5 average

(if I had no reservation. 74 mana cost. 94added lightning. 101-228= 165 average.)

So, sure this build was not built for archmage at all... But you can see, a good amount of effort is needed to just be better then "added lightning damage".and even at that point, you still have not made up for all the lost reservation abilities. Heralds, hatred/anger, discipline, etc..
I did see a reddit post for a guy putting together a 14000 mana build. which basically took EVERY mana node/gear item he could find...
 

Caliane

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arcane cloak seems much better.
skill duration should give it a very healthy uptime.

spends 64% of current mana. (I wonder if this scales with mana multi?) 140% for increased duration? 90% of current mana?
75% of damage from hits taken from buff before life or ES.
Buff is equal to mana spent by skill.
Buff grants Added lightning damage equal to 14% of mana spent by skill.

So I took the above, and made a couple changes to get more mana passive (mom notably), and dropped a couple auras/heralds.
Like, I think you can run without discipline with arcane cloak.
1771 total mana, 1204 unreserved.

64% of 1204= 770 buff. 770 is of course not exactly amazing in terms of effective hp. but not awful. discipline itself was 900 ES.
but then, 14% of that 770 gained as added lightning damage.
770x.14=108 added lightning damage. That IS pretty solid for so little effort.

Cooldown does not activate while active. so you can not have 100% uptime.

I can see arcane cloak in alot of builds. replacing discipline. or, in any mom life build.
 
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Pyros

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You vastly underestimate how Archmage works.

First it checks the BASE cost of the spell. So in that case, it compares 6% of your unreserved mana to 5. Obviously 6% is going to be higher in most cases unless you reserve everything. Then once it picked 6%, that's the BASE cost of the spell, not the final cost. Now you apply all your supports to that 6%. Since your final mana cost example was 20, that means you have for example 1.3, 1.3, 1.4, 1.6, 1.1 and 1.2 as support(I just typed random numbers until I got 20 it's technically a 7L but fuck redoing the math). Now you apply that to 32, so your spell now costs 159mana. *1.27 is 203, so it adds 210-337 lightning damage or an average of 273 damage.

So it's not THAT good in that example, but 500 unreserved mana is absolutely not a good comparison case. If you were to build for archmage, you'd aim for a much bigger amount of unreserved mana, especially since you can use that mana with arcane cloak too so it's not "wasted". A better example would probably around 2000 unreserved mana, and now you're at 600mana cost, adding 870 lightning flat damage per spell. Which is a fucking substantial amount. There's obviously the logistics of generating the cost back to spam, but it's a lot of damage. It'll be best on spells that do damage for minimal cost like brands and orb of lightning(cast once then just wait).
 
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Derkon

Trakanon Raider
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Thinking league starting necro animate weapon. If it ends up feeling too clunky I can easily respec to spectres and try out anything new there.
 

Caliane

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oh, ok. then yeah. 6% is base mana cost. Def better then I was thinking.

And yeah, iirc when first discussing we did say brands. things you cast once, prior to combat, and thus don't have to worry about being OOM when a hit comes in. this even doubles up with how Arcane cloak works with alpha striking before combat.

stormbrand, Winter orb. orb of storms.. hrm. orb of storms doesn't follow you. so probably not the best choice.

I wonder about one of the travel skills. Lightning warp has 60% damage effectiveness. Frost blink 140%.. flame dash 100%
 
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Willy T

Trakanon Raider
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New plan is definitely EK totems plus blade blast. I was expecting a damage bonus per blade, not a whole new spellcast. 4 EK totems is easily generating 20 blades per second, and I can set them all off with an x20 Archmage empowered blade blast for 20 copies? Yeah, that sounds fair.

This sounds juicy. My brain is too smooth to make it work on my own. Got a PoB link?
 

Pyros

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Thinking league starting necro animate weapon. If it ends up feeling too clunky I can easily respec to spectres and try out anything new there.
Biggest concern so far I have with AW is the mana cost. It's high(not retarded like live, but still), and you kinda want to reserve a lot cause so many good auras. I think for mapping it won't be so bad since you can "ramp up" but for bosses it's gonna be quite messy to summon 15+weapons(assuming it keeps scaling but even if not 14) when you need 2secs of mana regen per summon. The mace is going to be a big must have for this shit, but it's going to be expensive as all fuck since it's super rare(tempest league item).

Could use Chains of Command but you're capped at lvl 20(when without you'll probably get like lvl 25+, maybe more depending on how you build and how the scaling goes) and it has its own quirks with writhing jars and all that shit. Spellslinger would require too much mana and between the support and the lack of auras I doubt it'll be that good, leaves hmm, maybe that bow that summons minions, although that requires a somewhat complex setup(probably need to run ele with ele focus to prevent dots, since phys would have vuln bleeds).

I'm not 100% convinced how I'm gonna fix the issue so far, just kinda seeing how it'll go. I guess EB could be an option, although it's kinda expensive to get. So far I've replaced Multistrike by Deathmark and have gotten some mana cost reduction stuff so it costs "only" 33mana, which is nice enough. Maybe a -15 body could help too, but that shit's gonna be costly.
 

Xequecal

Trump's Staff
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This sounds juicy. My brain is too smooth to make it work on my own. Got a PoB link?

I have one but I'm not sure you want it since I mostly play hardcore. So I'm overstacking defenses and then trying to find combos that mean my damage isn't complete shit afterwards.