[2.4] Mines over Matter - Lightning Warp Finally Viable!

Walk the Aether makes every active skill with the Movement tag completely free, regardless of how you link it up to other skills. Lightning warp is free, whether or not its equipped for mines, same for leap slam, flame dash, whirling blades, cyclone, the list just keeps going on. This also affects things like Zerphi's Last Breath, since Lightning Warp is free its ability will make Zerphi's "Gain 800% of the Mana Cost of used Skills as Life during Flask effect" completely useless, but in general free movement skills is a build-defining benefit.

/edit
Incidentally, since detonate mines doesn't have an MP cost, its worth noting that a Detonate Mines Totem is also free to place. If it wasn't for Orb of Storms, a Stone Golem, and Mind over Matter I could reserve 100% of mana and play just fine. If I ever get around to doing a crit CI version of this build, thats the direction I'll likely build towards, but right now that just seems like too much investment for too little benefit.

Ahh, now it all makes much more sense, with the mines being cost free as well.
*chuckles* I wonder if flame dash mines work as well. For levelling purpose I had in-between an arc gem instead of the LW, which also worked nice.

I must admit I had been eying the mine triggered give power charge node and contemplated doing the build via crits.

Funnest build i have ever played. Going to do this in the upcoming 2 week challenge league. Its surprisingly strong and more amazingly i survive alot better with this build more than any other build i have played. Got lucky and 6 linked my tremor rod in 47 fuses but even with just a 5 link tremor i was doing mid tier maps very easily. Trying to move past tier 10 maps but i cant get any higher maps to drop :(. Anyways thanks so much for the guide i am so happy i stumbled upon it.

The problem with flame dash mines is you wont bypass its cooldown, you can do a flamedash trap build (have trap cooldown) but other gems seem superior.

Playing this self-found. Lvl 77 and so far it seems great.

Have you tried Mindspiral, and do you think it would allow you to spend fewer points on mana?

What does the quality/cast-speed on LW do with a mine set up? I can't decide if it is worth adding the quality at 20 and re-leveling the gem.

Mindspiral is a great leveling piece, but for endgame I'd rather have a good tri-res rare, preferably with some combination of life, mana, evasion, or +2 summoning skills. The damage taken as mana property (and all that extra mana) is neat, and takes effect before Mind over Matter activates. So its useless when you are on full mana and take damage, but could be a lifesaver if you were on zero mana and then took damage. Mindspiral is best used when your life/mana ratio is skewed in favor of life, which is common while leveling.

I prefer to sit on the proper 100:43 life:mana ratio instead of cutting back on mana and using mindspiral, because it provides optimal protection against getting 1shotted, whereas Mindspiral is best when mana is not full. Also resists.

As for gem quality, its useless on Lightning Warp itself. Mines make cast speed completely irrelevant. For most players increasing cast speed effectively increases movement speed, but the only thing that matters for us is duration, which cast speed does not affect in any way.

There are other reasons for flipping a gem to 20 quality, such as higher resale value later on. Personally, I had two lightning warp gems, one I Vaal'd at 20 with no positive outcome, the other I flipped to 20 quality. I've been using the Vaal'd gem as my primary attack, and since I'm using a 4link stone golem in place of leap slam fortify, I need some kind of movement skill for convenience, especially for Labyrinth. I also have an extra gem slot because my Carcass jack is 5link still, so I tossed in my other Lightning Warp gem. So, long story short, I'm actively using both a corrupted l20 Lightning Warp and a 19/20 lightning warp.

As for quality on other gems, obviously flip them to 20 when you can.

/edit updated the original post helmet section.

Do you plan to update the guide for 2.3?

"

Oktolon wrote:

Do you plan to update the guide for 2.3?

Yes.
I have been holding off on doing a big update before 2.3 releases, because I won't know exactly what to update until the patch actually hits. Here are some tentative changes:

Unique Items:
No clue whats going to happen here. Chances are that new uniques, and fated changes to existing uniques will not change anything for the build, but who knows, I can dream of an item that automatically detonates mines under the proper conditions. A pair of gloves that caused mines to detonate upon reaching maximum mine count for instance, would drastically change the way the build plays.

Preliminary useful new uniques:


Known skill tree changes for 2.3:
Weave the Arcane buffed from a 5% chance to activate to a 20% chance to activate. Huge buff, it was effectively 0.5% of max mana recovered per cast before, when 2.3 hits it will go up to 2% of max mana recovered per cast. While dumping mines this means Weave the Arcane was effectively ~1.5% to 2% of max mana recovered per second, now it will be ~6% to ~ 8% of max mana recovered per second. Not game breaking or build defining, but convenient, especially for maps with zero mana regeneration.

No more dispute between Weave the Arcane and Shade Form, complete the endgame labyrinth and just take both.

Meaningful Bug Fixes

"

Fixed a bug where you could cast Lightning Warp through walls by using mines/traps or by targeting your own location.

This is the biggest one, I have a portion of the original guide covering this, with a bug report and youtube video. Hopefully 2.3 will properly fix this so its no longer blatantly exploitable.

"

Fixed an issue where having Detonate Mines bound with the Detonate Mines skill gem could result in skill slots being replaced/unset when moving to a new instance.

This was a rare issue that came up a couple times while I was leveling pre-maps, which was super-annoying in how it messed with using both a manual detonate and a detonate totem. Glad to see it go.

"

Fixed an issue where being frozen while Lightning Warp goes off could cause the delay on Lightning Warp to last forever.

I think this is for self-cast LW and not mines, but this did happen to me a few times since I did use self-cast LW for the Labyrinth.

"

Fixed a bug where Cluster Trap and Minefield were only reducing trap or mine damage respectively when they should have been reducing all damage.

I never used this combo because it slows activation down more than I like, but I know there were folks that swore by it.

I think there are other impending changes, and I just cant think of what they are at the moment. For the most part though, the build didn't break, and will work as-is for 2.3. Just waiting on those new items.

News!

Now that Perandus is dead and the Standard merge happened, after 2500 fusings or so I finally have this:

Dear god its good to have my Tremor Rod back again, and I think I may shelve my +3 skill staff for good.
I had forgotten just how blindingly fast 107% mine laying speed is. I will need to retrain myself in drop-and-pop minelaying, as the emplacement-style gameplay I've gotten used to with my +3 is a hindrance vs most non-boss targets now. I think I can say that while a +3 lightning skill staff offers the best damage on paper, Tremor Rod is flat better for clear speed, provided you adapt your playstyle around it. Orb of Storms and Detonate Mines totems are still good, and still used heavily, but now theres much more balance between using one or both of those, and just running as fast as you can while dropping and detonating manually.

One thing that seems different though, is that I think I'm getting much fewer shocks. It would make sense with the lower per-mine damage, and shocks are really only relevant on rares and bosses anyway. If shocks are no longer reliably sticking to bosses, removing a Trap and Mine Damage gem or a Lightning Penetration gem, and swapping Elemental Focus back in may be a good idea. I'll play around with it some more.

The dust is settling on the 2.3.0 launch, and the game is literally playable now. About the only Unique item worth adding to the build is Hinekora's Sight, for stacking dodge and spell dodge. I'm gonna need to collect these on Prophecy, try to corrupt one for +1 curse for when either they hit standard or I make a LW Miner on Prophecy.

Also in 2.3.0 is the Endgame Labyrinth.
I just got access, and did my first level 75 Lab run. I like the updates and additions they made to layout. Difficulty-wise, its not too bad, I can see myself doing a lot of Lab runs. In the one run I did, I got that "100% extra monster damage as fire" modifier off a darkshrine, and Izaro still was not one-shotting me. I won on my first try, and got a corrupted box at the end, filled with 8 sacrifice fragments and a bunch of corrupted rares. There was also a div card box, and a couple more crappy standard issue boxes, but I'm glad GGG was paying attention to how much people ran the Corrupting Tempest lab when it was a thing. Got my last two ascendency points, finally took shade form, and it seems decent even with my poor evasion gear.

I'm finally ready to do a thorough update on the guide, I just need to sit down and crank it out. Also, I'm hoping to get a video of the Colosseum boss fight, I have been putting that off for far too long. I expect it will go better than Abyss boss, due to the absence of spawned adds distracting my mines.

"

CoolColJ wrote:

As a secondary damage, you could use a Warp Totem, and put in Searing bond, that would really boost the damage :)

I don't think you have thought this suggestion through. This build already makes heavy use of a totem, and you seem to be suggesting adding two more totems.

Absolutely love this build! In fact, I believe this is my first post in years :D

Now, I'm not very good at maths/theorycrafting, or even PoE really, but can we talk about the Pros and Cons of Minefield? Curious to see your take on it.

With Minefield, I can have 8 mines out with 0.75% dmg each. That's 600% total.

Without Minefield, I can have 6 mines out with 100% dmg each. 600% total as well, but using up a link.

One downside is that, without Minefield, it takes twice as long to get all mines into play (6 casts instead of 3). However, with the 58% increased mine laying speed of the Tremor Rod, 6 casts only takes about a second or two.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it seem a good idea to swap Minefield out for one of the other support gems when you're fighting stuff that takes more than like 3-4 seconds to kill? You get the extra damage from another support gem and on top of that, each individual mine would do more dmg (no 25% reduction from Minefield), also causing longer shocks. Right?