[1.3] Daze (Arc-Stun)

Hopefully this will allow me to asses how to approach the ballance:
[Arc DMG] versus [%Reduced stun treshold]
This will in turn determine gear & skill tree options.


Test 1,2,3
conclusions so far:
- Low dmg but decent stun treshold will enable you to stun all non-bosses. Exceptions are high lightning resisting monsters and ofcourse plain stun immune monsters.
- Without facebreakers I was not able to shock/stun Piety and Dominus.
- With Facebreakers I was able to shock Piety.
- With Facebreakers my critical damage went up from 240% to 330%. The freeze/chill effect on trash mobs really started to play up. I definitly like this level of damage (9-10k tooltip). Elemental reflect was no problem; i.e. you can no longer spam a button while on the phone, you do need to use pots.
- I can stun bosses on academy, shipyard and courtyard, but cannot stun lock them 100%.

work to be done:
Will boost the multiplier up in further testing to 380% critical strike multiplier.
Will increase the damage and stun treshold until i see some more results on Piety & Dominus. After that determine if it was worth the tradeoff versus survivability.

Test 4 conclusions so far:
Progress made!
Finally shocked and stunned Piety on shrine, not completely locked, but the AI went bonkers: Piety was running around like a headless chicken. Mission accomplished here.

Shocked dominus with a rare few stuns. Work needs to be done before i reliably can shock/stun dominus. For a stun I need to shock, and for a shock i need to crit with a decent dmg roll. Easiest way to fix might be to increase the shock duration.

Negative side effects:
-from getting tripple curse was my mana. I had very little spare mana, so I couldn't run too far before my pool was empty disabling my arctic armour.
-Once you stun lock a monster it is usually no longer able to trigger your CWDT. And thus the lockdown ends when the curses expire.

Can't do much more dmg on trash because of reflect.
Possible solutions are:
- Could have 2 setups: lower damage for trash monsters and high pewpew for boss kills.
- Do have to look into vaalpact / added chaos gem (6L?). Vaal pact is right on my current skill tree route. GG, first time for everything.


Test 5 conclusions so far:
Finally shocked and stunned Dominus. Far from lockdown, or disrupting AI.
For this to happen:
-I respecced +60% increased shock duration.
-Zana nerfed Palace to a 76 map.

My new curse setup was:
CWDT- Temporal Chains (I did not want to risk spending 500 chromatic orbs to get elemental weakness / warlord's mark in here)
Curse on Hit- Warlords Mark--Elemental weakness.

The dilemma:
- Curse on Hit Arc doesn't have the cast speed for good first strike capability; i.e. hit the trash mobs and stun em before they stun you. So you only have this for bosses.
- I rather have tempchains & warlord's Mark on the curse on hit for bosses.
- The CWDT-warlords mark setup lost, while it was so nice versus elemental reflect. Stunned reflecting mobs would still trigger it.
- Losing enduring cry in the Immortal call setup was a pain.

So in short: You can stun Dominus, but you need more dmg. I don't wanna go to the route of glass cannon, so the limit of the build is reached. Not that it's not ever gonna lock down dominus.... you will just need another source, like Elemental equilibrium from a party member, or very high dmg gear you swap into just before boss fight (it'll be a new league start, so that's not gonna happen).

This means we loose stuns on dominus but gain in other fields. For all round purpose I'm gonna aim for these numbers:

- Drop the stun treshold down to 90%, roughly 85% effective stun treshold. I will use that as a future benchmark for all build variations.
- 60% increased Shock duration is there to stay.
- 150+% increased stun duration (that's without modifying with temporal chains or warlord's mark)

If I can reach these numbers in the monthly but the stuns are not satisfying, I will just fight in lower level area's instead of trying to increase dmg at the cost of survivability.

Dominus (Palace) proved to be the toughest cookie. After that came Piety (Shrine).

Dominus seems to have a truckload of life. The minimum duration a shock can have is 300ms. This means you have to do about 1.09% of the targets max life in damage without any duration modifiers to cause a shock. In this case that seems to be a good roll of roughly 3.000-3.500, critting, for somewhere around 12,000-13,500 lightning damage. with then 60+% shock duration. Pretty crude calculations done, and I'm still missing some factors like elemental weakness on a boss (diminished effect of curses) and inner force hidden bonus to the heralds... so we can safely round it up to 15,000 dmg with 60+% shock duration. Heck it might be somewhere around 25,000-30,000 flat non shock duration damage.

The other bosses are a whole different story, they can get shocked and stunned much easier. Shipyard boss can be locked without curses.... but he hasn't hurt anyone since he got hit by the nerf stick a long time ago.

Good thing is this build can tank the vanilla dmg (no extra dangerous map mods) of Dominus. Both lightning and physical ("Touch of God!" etc excluded ofcourse). Some armor is needed though, else the bleed will hurt too much.

There are so many options. Double or Tripple curse. Curse on hit or Cast when damage taken. This character cannot apply curses manually, since you want to lockdown the enemy on first sight. Good options are: [Temporal Chains] [Conductivity] [Elemental Weakness] [Warlords Mark] [Assasin's Mark]
This will determine the number of sockets available for aura's.


To be able to curse on hit, we only have a 4Link available. That means 2 curses, and no extra cast speed gem. Handy for Piety and really good for Dominus, not needed for all else.

I like the "first strike" capability on this build. You hit so fast, and so hard, you stun, and the fight is over, the monsters are unable to retaliate.

Most fitting will be to use CWDT.
First choice will be Warlord's Mark.
-It will help counter the elemental reflect.
-gain endurance charges
-the increased stun chance will make you reach possible stun and 100% chance to stun much easier.
-for the future: mana leech synerchy with mind over matter.

Second choice will be Temporal chains.
- Negative is the elemental weakness will be more of team player.But in a party the CWDT won't trigger that much anyway. And the curses aren't needed to lock down trash mobs, you just want to hit em first.

So we kinda don't need a third curse. then we happily skip that and pickup some more survival gear.

Everything is possible though, don't let this stop you from equipping a 5Linked Hrimnor's Hymn (80%-90% increased Stun Duration on enemies & 15% reduced Enemy Stun Threshold) or some rare two handed mace with stun dura, treshold, and crit multiplier and what not. Or you can link your stun arc in a 4L dropping lightning penetration orso, leaving the chest links for your curse on hit. I would personally only use curse on hit what i can link it to fastercasting or with much more fastcast on gear/skills.

After testing (6) going to tweak the build to

- Cloak of defiance (skill node would take 7 skill points to reach, so 6 points if i respec a 30 dex node, atm i don't want to do that, because it would cost me the templar side of the tree)
- Using facebreakers.
- Replacing windscream for raindbow stride (could also take mana regen goldwyrm boots)
- 700/800 unreserved mana. (that's about the mana dmg I take from big hits in testing)Running abit less (668) will see how it goes.
- Double curse by CWDT-Warlordsmark-TemporalChains

I now have one free green socket, will test a manual cast temporal chains or vaal haste.
If I get a 6link, that would be the spot where arctic armour would go, else i'd need to use an unset ring.

my reduced enemy stun treshold= 47 gem + 15 sceptre +10 face + 14 belt + 15 skillpoints=101%
So i'm 11% above the sweet spot benchmark of 90%. The 101% will give 88% effective enemy stun treshold.


I could later decide to replace the facebreakers for more life & mana. Can always swap it out for elemental weakness maps. Might be the perfect piece of gear to swap in for bosses, and out for trash monsters with possbile elemental reflect while still keeping above the sweet spot in reduced enemy stun treshold.

Done test run 7.
-The mom build ran very smooth. Stun on bosses was acceptable. Trash got stunned good; stunlocked a Rare earth elemental with extra resis & extra resist aura & EE & Endurance charges. Unwavering monsters activate Tempchains & Warlords mark, and will be a small threat. Nemesis for this build will be unwavering & curse immune & elemental reflect. So that will only be 1 monster a rare, or a pack of champion on an unlucky mapmods on an UNID or Zana map. (you'll reroll otherwise)

-AA did not go out by lack of mana.

-Since i've dropped Purity of Ice for the unreserved mana, cold reflect is an issue. The big AoE cold explosion is a ripper. Tried with facebreaker and the only thing saving me where the Map mods EE and Endurance charges (causing my damage to be lower). I tried swapping out the facebreakers for rare gloves, but still the reflect maps hurt with cold. Lightning reflect is mannageble. So for reflect maps gotta turn off herald of ice to be safe. So if you're running around on non reflect maps, a pack of reflect monsters activating big ice explosions can rip you. Either run purity of ice instead of purity of fire, or run around without the facebreakers, and wear it for bosses. Will run around with Sapphire flasks some more. Vaal pact will only be a solution, if you link herald of ice with lifeleech, cause you cannot trust warlord's mark to be up when applied to targets with the CWDT gem. This will increase the mana reservation.

-My mana didn't drop alot on any reflect damage taken. Weird, i thought i'd see alot more MoM in action there.

-Dominus with EE and Endurance charges took too long to kill without facebreakers.

Further testing:

- Try out elemental reflect with Purity of Ice.
- Try out elemental reflect without Herald of Ice.
- Kill map trash without facebreakers and see how many times "the stars align" for dangerous situations.


test run 8 done, without facebreakers.
- Tried out reflect & Purity of Ice. I choose a 66 map to get good chance of exploding frozen monsters. Purity of Ice helped alot, but I kinda hate to loose purity of fire. Fire is a dangerous element, and sucha nice combo with arctic armour. Purity of Ice still not bullit proof, and you gotta press 2 flasks then, a Topaz & Sapphire before the dmg comes.

- Tried out reflect & No herald of Ice. Just bursting away without hitting a topaz doesn't kill you, unless you fall asleep behind the steering wheel.

Conclusion:
- If you gonna run elemental reflect map turn off your herald of ice. Turn it on for boss fights without minions.
- If you suddenly encounter an elemental reflect rare, press your sapphire flask first.

A new question has arrived.... do I really want to run herald of ice? Why you want to freeze/chill monsters when they are stun locked..... The unwavering monsters aren't that scary unless they are curse immune and somehow reflecting. The arctic armour will chill them too. Perhaps we're better off without the herald of Ice completely. The extra damage is nice, but no longer really needed.


Further testing:

- Using a lower level of Herald of Ice might be a wise choice too. Gonna check if a lvl 10-15 orso still causes some chills freezes.
- Kill map trash without facebreakers and see how many times "the stars align" for dangerous situations.

Test 9-10 done.
A low level herald isn't really gonna help on the chill freeze department. Although all dmg boosts too arc are nice.

A loose manual curse is handy. Templchains tried.

Test 11
Have taken Vaal pact.
Tried on reflect maps, and the mana pool is taking a beating. Lovely to see the synerchy with MoM & Warlord's Mark mana leech.

Defenitely safe for reflect this way. Lost purity of fire in the process, because i linked Herald of Ice to Lifeleech.

Added Herald of Lightning as well, might be nice to replace life regen with abit of leech from beams on shocked kill effect.

Conclusion:
Levelup with low level herald of Ice as optional. If you do run high lvl: Face the consequences; walk around with mitigation factors:
-Sapphire flask
-Purity of Ice
-low crit multiplier.

Did see alot of Mana pool action, i gotta rewatch the dried lake testing and wonder why i didn't see the big hits taken by mana there.
Ok I've watched it back, and the mana was taking big big hits, It was just less visible because of 700 unreserved mana versus a total pool of 4k mana.

Will make first Daze build version with MoM & Vaal Pact.
Made second Daze build version without MoM


worked on survivability and play style.
-With Vaal pact it's hard to see how much damage you take.
-Will run some unwavering maps to see how to play casual when you suddenly run into cannot be stunned monsters.

conclusions: I Just picked up bad habbits on softcore, yolo warp into packs blasting around. While good fun, i gotta concentrate more to keep it hardcore style. Unwavering not a problem as long as you spot them in time. Phyl lync bloodlines mod will be like unwavering since they don't take any dmg to get stunned.

worked on Corrupted gloves with Temporal chains on hit.(test 15/16)
-The dream would be: tempchains on hit & CWDT-warlords & assasin's mark.
I like to get some more critical strike chance.

Unfortunately i dont have the sockets. bought a corrupted for 2ex 20c on torm, OP, end league, but in comparison that would be like 8ex start HC league... so this is out of budget.

conclusion:
Definitely worth every orb. This so fits the "first strike capability" i talked earlier about. This is mega stuff.


Spend some more orbs and vaaled one with the right colors! oooo yeah!

Added cold chilled very good. herald of ice doesn not produce anough cold damage for arc to chill effectively. I worked with a 5L so I dropped the faster casting gem. This could be a viable option for a 6th link if you have anough fastcast from other sources. Be carefull not to overreach. It's nice for trash to see more ice shatter, but remains to be seen if really needed.

Skill tree options: Mind Over matter (COD?), Vaal pact, Power charges, Fending (knockback)

At this time I'm running Shadow. My only character on torment. Might not prove to be ideal, but good anough for testing.