Elemental Hit

I think this item could use same higher damage effectiveness. I use it on an elemental wand build but it still loses from Power Siphon on DPS and that surprised me. I think it has to do with damage effectiveness.

Another small thing I need to mention about Elemental Hit.
This skill lacks any specific animation, so it's boring.
Step aside the efficiency of this skill, maybe it can be used in combination with extremely fast weapon
and elemental equilibrium to get something decent, but.
It looks lame!
All active skills have a specific animation and/or effect, but this one - is simple "white" attack.
Maybe GGG forgot about this skill, and it's (skill) crying somewhere in the corner?

This skill does not scale well with a weapon's base damage, and therefore can only really scale with +Weapon Elemental Damage and +Attack Speed, which mean weapons with high attack speeds or high +Elemental Damage can really make use of Elemental Hit, which kinda leaves things like Quill Rain, a Piscator's Vigil, Dual Wielding Doryani's Catalyst, or if you're lucky, a wand with high attack speed and +elemental damage (or dual wielding such).

All weapon damage nodes only increase Physical Weapon Damage EXCEPT for a few Wand Nodes that generically state "Wand Damage" rather than "Wand Physical Damage" giving wands a slight edge to using Elemental Hit compared to other weapons.

Dual Wielding Piscator's Vigil would be perfect if the +Elemental Damage on them actually worked that way. To my understanding, with the way its worded, "Damage with this weapon" will only apply when you attack with that weapon and not in general and since you alternate weapons with using Elemental Hit, it'd be kinda pointless to dual wield Piscator's Vigils. You also miss out on the +Attack Speed for Dual Wielding passive nodes in the Witch Tree.

This skill also almost works with Elemental Equalibrium, if it could alternate elements in order rather than randomly.

So for the weapons that actually can use Elemental Hit, do they have better alternatives? Wands have Power Siphon which has a 125% damage effectiveness and culling which not only gets through enemies easily but also feeds Power Charges without using up a socket. Not only that, all the Wand +Added Elemental Damage nodes scale to Physical Damage and overall granted more damage thanks to Power Siphon's effectiveness, as well as with all the wand damage nodes.

It seems better off in most cases to use Power Siphon over Elemental Hit. As for Bow Users, Quill Rain is probably your best bet for Elemental Hit, but your only way of scaling it with Bows is through +Elemental Damage and +Attack Speed as well as a heavy Mana Regeneration to make it work. There is no effective way to Leech Life or Mana since you do not deal Physical Damage in this way and socketing Leech Gems is always a hassle.

This is kinda the reason why I find it hard to use Rebuke of the Vaal. It has high DPS, but doesn't scale very well with +Sword Physical Damage passives, a bit better with +Elemental Weapon passives, but those are far away from any sword or dual wield passives so would end up doing poorly to a high Physical Damage sword and thanks to how most Leeching works via Physiacl Damage will overall do better and easier with Leech and these types of items with Mixed Damage.

Elemental Hit has many issues on its own and because it does not work with a lot of nodes on the tree to make it incredibly effective. Most nodes can work together to make overall damage (Fireball with +Fire Damage, +Projectile Damage, +Elemental Damage, and +Spell Damage for example) but Elemental Hit can only use +Elemental Damage modifiers effectively.

i think GGG should rework this skill to be based on atributes:

add fire damage equal to str * "x"
add cold damage equal to int * "x"
add lighting damage equal to dex * "x"

For a attack that's suppose to scale with attack speed, elemental hit has an obscenely high mana cost. Isn't 'Attacks' suppose to have lower mana cost, a lvl 20 gem has 32mana cost...im imagining a 6L elemental hit would cost 100ish mana... and that's not factoring the 'attack speed' multiplier

Because of the high mana cost, it would actually be fair if this gem had 5-10% chance to burn freeze and ignite on hit.

I see no reason to use this gem if you are a melee and ranged have much better elemental gems.

Wow sucha long time and this gem is still not viable at all?

Could please decrease the mana costs???!?

It doesnt make any sense that this gem has TRIPLE the mana costs of other good gems, like lightning strike, dual strike etc.

First of all the gem alone sucks. You need many ele nodes and auras and good gear - all that stuff, then it can become really good I suppose. But the mana costs already kills the idea, it's not worth to test it.
See this old vid for example where the guy explains the high mana costs at the beginning. And he just uses a 5-link....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtjoVvGCSWE

You need to go blood magic via the passive tree, anything else is not viable (6-link with mana? Dream on).

Sad story, gem is dead and will be, until there is a change.

I am trying to theory craft a melee ele hit build, but running it from mana is crazy.
5L lvl 20 Ele hit costs over 150 mana per initial hit. BM passive with life leech gem would be 180 mana.
6L is over 200 mana.

Running it from mana is crazy unless you have at least 2x -8 mana jewelry or EB, maybe Thief's Torment ring.

Cost is way to high compared to other skills.

Currently playing with EH with my new build.
Working fine with a 6L + Blood magic keystone. I plan to remove BM keystone to BM gem later.

Lvl 61, i will give a final result when reaching lvl 80.

Definitely against making the skill physical damage based. Too many of those skills already, making the weapon search focus solely on high pdps items.

The skill already goes another route, allowing different character builds and gearing than physical builds. More precisely, the synergy would be +x% elemental damage and +x% attack speed nodes.

The rework of the skill should go to optimize it, via modified added base damage (taking into consideration the added elemental nodes in the 1.3 skill tree) so it could be endgame viable dps-wise, and also early game and endgame viable mana cost-wise by decreasing the enormous mana cost.

Currently, I haven't been able to use the skill without Blood magic (node or gem).