Pierce

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Rory wrote:

Post your 0.9.3 feedback for this support here.

Make sure you concisely state your character build, level, and other complimenting abilities you have when you talk about a support.

Copy/pasta fail. :)

Title: 0.9.4
Post: 0.9.3

This is true for every support thread (the normal skills one i checked was right).

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Rory wrote:

Bah! Too much effort to fix!

Anyway, how about that there Pierce support gem?

Imo it's not very useful because you can easily get around 50% piercing from passives.

0.9.5 feedback below this post

So Where are the gems themselves on first post for each support gem threads in this section ?

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BrecMadak wrote:

So Where are the gems themselves on first post for each support gem threads in this section ?

There's one! It's got some mileage on it though, and it seems to be stuck in a mostly worthless magic piece of trash I picked up somewhere.

Anyway, I find this support gem essential to an excellent Spark build, along with the Projectile Weakness curse. In other words, far from useless, from my experience.

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Rory wrote:

The pierce support gem used to be free - It could be we need to increase the gem further, but you're already giving up damage of other supports to get the pierce chance. I guess it depends how useful it is, whether it's too good for it's cost. Discussing it in the Support Gems thread would be good!

Maybe it's just because not all the supports are in yet, but I don't actually have any other damage supports to sacrifice.

My planned gem combination is:

Ice Spear
Increased Critical Damage
Multiple Projectiles
Added Chaos Damage
Faster Casting
Pierce

I could go with Added Lightning Damage, but its damage is poor, its mana cost high, and I already have Lightning Damage per Power Charge, so I'm already getting the shocked debuff. I could go with Added Cold Damage but it's already a low damage boost with a high mana cost increase, I already have plenty of freeze, and I don't even have enough dex to max it. I could go with Increased Critical Strike, but it's my understanding that I'm already at around 80% crit with phase 2 ice spear, so stacking it further is relatively weak in terms of damage, and I can reach the crit cap with gear bonuses anyway.

All else I can think of is Cold to Fire, but for that to be useful would imply that I have lots of both cold damage and fire damage, which are pretty rare stats on gear and don't come in very large amounts. Furthermore I'm already saturated with increased spell damage bonuses from equipment and passives diluting the relative impact that increased fire damage could potentially have on my damage. I suppose the burning could be nice, but I already one-shot most everything on a crit anyway, and freezing enemies is safer.

So that leaves Pierce, which provides a substantial improvement against the huge crowds that make up most of the content in the Maelstrom of Chaos, while costing only 5% more mana. Granted it's still last on my list of support gems since being able to immediately kill the most dangerous enemies is most important, but I just thought I'd point out that there's not much else anyway.

Linking pierce with raise spectre does not seem to have an effect despite the skill description stating "minions have x% increased chance of projectiles piercing".