Viper Strike

Works well, I like it. Sorry I don't have more useful feedback. I did try added damage supports in the hope they would add damage over time but I guess you can't have everything.

You can use increase duration gem to improve the dot.

I was thinking more along the lines of applying shock damage per second or something like that. It doesn't make any sense and I'm not sure it's a good idea, it's just something that occurred to me in a moment of boredom so I thought I'd try it for a laugh.

The skill works fine as it is but after a while it becomes less interesting because it lacks creative support options. I've no complaints about it mind you, I use it quite a lot but I just got a bit bored with it at one point.

One thing I'd love to be able to do is add a life leech or life on hit support and have it trigger per second using the skill's chaos damage.

I guess I figure the point of this skill is applying charges to an enemy that each deal damage per second, so I figure supports should apply to those charges rather than to the strike that applies them.

The build I'm using is Tempest Shield abuse/tanking, and while I wait for enemies to kill themselves, might as well spread some poison around with Viper Strike.

The damage on this skill jumps very erratically (at least at my level). Getting a +1 melee skill is extremely powerful, nigh required if you're using the skill as a main skill. Shown below is my current weapon, showing 106 chaos per second on the viper strike. The next level (not shown) is 145 chaos per second.


It'll be interesting to see where this ends up compared to Poison Arrow. I'm assuming it does more damage since it's not massively aoe, but I'll find out when I get there.

At the risk of digression, the optimal weapon for a purely chaos damage based weapon is going to be something like a Divine Sword (base 1.65 aspd) with the best aspd mods and +1 melee skill level (not needed if the skill is maxed) with the implicit accuracy, and currently the best weapons have all had their aspds normalized (and I have no idea why that design was chosen). In any event, trying to get an itemlevel 60 exile rapier/divine blade is pretty counterintuitive and a pain in the butt (reminiscent of 0.9.5 base 60 items).

I'm sure this skill will shine a lot more when melee support passives are introduced that change the quintessential shape of melee skills (not just more damage or accuracy or attack speed, but something like "repeats damage 1s from now" or "minor cleave-style aoe"). Right now it's "alright" and has a niche in killing phys/elem reflects and trivializing storyline bosses.

All right skill for bosses, seems a bit difficult to apply right now. While you're applying it you could get yourself killed. At least, that's my experience. Misses a few times, too.

"

SinisterDexter wrote:

I do wish it had some AoE component. It'd be awesome to see charges hop to new targets if their primary targets die before the duration is up.

This. I'd love to see this.

If this game would permit for support gems that give skills extra random effects like that, that would be cool.

After playing a dual-wield rapier/dagger ranger, and now a bow ranger a glaring difference emerged- AoE.

Both characters had a poison-based chaos DoT that scaled well independent of gear. Yet, my melee ranger rarely used Viper Strike since flicker provided so much increased survivability and click-and-forget gameplay (chainsawing mobs). On the other hand, my bow ranger uses Poison Arrow every fight for single target and AoE damage that is fire-and-forget. The bow ranger feels like godmode compared to dual-wield.

What would close the power gap? Adding some form of AoE to Viper Strike.

My suggestion would be that once you reach four stacks on the monster you are attacking that additional applications are placed on all the nearby monsters.

Ex -> Temporal chains, flicker strike into position, viper strike applied to target, stack count reaches four, keep viper striking that target, surrounding mob stack count reaches four, win.

Now dual-wield rangers are closer to the enjoyable power level as their bow-using counterparts and not pigeon-holed into using nothing but flickerstrike for 60 levels.

I'm currently trying it on a melee witch (with Ice Nova), and the skill feels good early game. The only problem I have is to hit accurately due to my low dex (which I'll try to boost as I level up).

This skill should be really powerful on the last dex/int class.

I want to know while it caused a critical strike only calculate the "hit" damage or both of chaos damage per second?
and could the chaos damage over time calculate its critical strike rate every per second ?

I could be wrong, but with other similar skills such as poison arrow and explosive arrow, crits just apply critical weapon damage and the normal effect. I doubt there is any kind of bonus DoT damage for a critical with Viper Strike.