Arc

Arc feels super good now, just check how many 95-100 play it :)

The range nerf is too much, it really adds tedium to a skill that already has the disadvantage of not just instantly blowing up every target on the screen.

Adding on top the damage reduction and the curse near-immunity of bosses and the skill feels absolutely gutted. I failed a T12 Elder 3 times that last league would have been a breeze with the range to easily hit the decay adds and actually take down his life bar at a reasonable speed.

Testing rig:
non-crit miner, 11 mines, 0.27 laying time, 960% damage, 30-670 flat added lightning damage, 9 chains, 68% penetration. PoB: 88k avg damage vs shaper.

After about 2 hours of gameplay I've noticed at least 5 cases when 8-11 mines had failed to kill a sparse monsters pack.

The build was 'fine' during Incursion league, now it's underwhelming at best.
This setup already has low flexibility, the only thing I can do in order to compensate chain radius nerf is (somehow) greatly increase the build mobility and mines laying time. (and this will lead to unsolvable mana cost issues)

Current chain radius just doesn't fit the game mechanics.

Arc feels like trash when self cast. Can't even chain once in small areas like the uber elder fight to clean up large adds. It is better now to use any other skill.

Arc should be changed so the initial chain length is long, and then reduces distance with each following chain.

Chain distance is obnoxiously short now. Not only does it fail to chain pack to pack (presumably the idea behind the nerf), but it often fails to chain WITHIN a pack.

How about text on arc that says:

100% more chain distance when hand-cast.

Right now I am playing crit arc totem hierophant, but the main thing that feels bad about arc right now was apparent from the start with self cast at level 12 and that is chain range.

For me arc was always a fun skill to play (even when it was considered bad - before damage buff and inc damage per remaining chain change) because of how relaxed clearing with it felt. There was no need for aggressive positioning or keeping an eye out for every single pack of enemies - if things were no further than 1/4 of screen apart the arc did damage to as many enemies as had chains.

Damage nerf was expected and I doubt many would disagree, but striking at what made it fun and relaxing to play is really bad, especially that we cannot remedy it with any itemization, skill nodes or support gems. What many of us liked in arc was broken and we cannot do anything about it.

The way I see reduction to chain distance is quick-and-dirty fix to prevent the skill from trivializing current league encounters, and while I hope I am wrong, I cannot see this as particularly good design choice.

I remember how back in beta you talked about balancing the game in a way that doesn't take the fun element out of outstanding skills, items or build but rather brings those that are lacking to match so I hope you will reconsider this change and tune arc in a way that doesn't make it not fun to play.

It's about time to add yet another absolutely non-mandatory jewel:

can arc gets a chaining radius from 25 to 30 back?

or on chain a small Explosion to make it more effective against thick Monster clusters(Monster Pack Size)?

kind regards
JeckNoTree

I've played Arc / Vaal arc now for two leagues, with three different characters. Each of those characters I've tried with different ascends, builds and equipment.

Arc seems like the obvious choice for long streams of mobs, and Vaal Arc for lots of groups of mobs, making it what should be an obvious choice for blight. Here we sit at 0.9%!

I play in groups and notice that a lot of other players are able to balance their skill sets quite nicely and a lot easier and effectively. Usually they have more variety of effective ways to use the skill and usually they have many ways to contribute extra damage to the main skill.

Arc almost feels like its designed to be a 3 / 4 link backup skill, maybe to apply curse's - more than it feels like its meant to be a main skill. I love the concept of arc, however I've tried my hardest to milk a similar level of DPS as my counterparts, and find myself having to create extremely expensive, mixed mechanic builds just to maintain a similar level of gaming with them, even then, they end up carrying me to the point that playing ARC feels like I'll always be a charity case.

I've tried tanky builds w/ guardian and inquis, but not had the damage, and tried high DPS builds w/ witch elem and occultist, and almost everything in between - but it results in very squishy characters and an unreliability in a skill which seems like it should be a stock standard 'snipe aoe'

I find that when im hitting packs, I'm left vulnerable to the lack of chains, and low DPS, compared to a majority of classes that can easily extended the reach of their projectile skills, travel speed, aoe range, and chains, as well as create better damage and area control, and usually because of this I need to combine with a completely separate skill set, just to be able to use arc effectively. (currently helm with innervate supporting orb of storms / curse on hit / with a curse such as mark / conduct / vun to elements )

I find when I'm hitting bosses, I need to go to a different skill or combine with multiple skills just to be able to fight effectively. Which until recently was stacking orb of storm casts with spire / arc. If the boss moves a lot, or i misplace, or has an aoe which is a trap killer, well im in for a long fight, and with high level fights and squishy characters, one hit unless you're also leaning on STR mechanics like IC.

It results in a lack of gem spaces, a lack of passive points and a lack of methods of balancing between the two to create something that is even moderately reliable, without having to throw down 20 or so ex to gather the right items. Even then, to get something that is actually powerful, you can really only go in the one direction with the design, and it just isn't anywhere near as flexible as you'd expect, especially in comparison to other spell skills.

I'm now trying a 3 chain element build, 2 x 20% lightning to cold + cold to fire. With buy-in gear i have 4.5 casts per second, average hit 100k.

With better gear I could easily achieve 6/7 casts per second and 900k dps, but to achieve this, I would need to lean hard on enduring mana pots.

I've tried about 8 variations of the class and the current build, to maintain 100k on hit, takes 3 quarters of my passive points. This leaves me in a mana / ehp deficit which makes me have to lean on orb/assassin mark for groups and frankly spamming enduring mana flasks constantly to be able to maintain clear speed.

It's not fun, but I'm a stupid creature of habit and I really just want it to be fun. *shrug*

thank you for listening to my 2 cents, I hope it helps.

I played Arc on a few builds with various different setups (self cast, traps, pre-3.8 mines, 3.8 mines, and two times with mjolner). Even long before the incursion patch, it was one of my favourite skills in PoE. That 3.3 buff however kind of spoiled the fun for me, because Arc clearly got OVER-buffed to some crazy levels, very reminiscent to what happened later in 3.7 with cyclone...

The current state of Arc is "rather ok" with traps and mines, because you're throwing many of them at once, and they land in some distance from each other. This means that different targets are chosen upon trap/mine detonations and your damage becomes nicely split. Otherwise - aka especially when self casting - the nerfed range feels so ridiculously bad, that it's like not playing Arc anymore.

This skill quite literally lost its identity of being a chain lightning style spell, which is present in almost every kind of fantasy RPG and always feels amazing to use. Arc is nowhere near being that anymore.


Suggestion: either simply up the range by ~7, or make it random from 20 to 45 which would fit the theme of lightning spells quite nicely.

"

Friagram wrote:

Arc should be changed so the initial chain length is long, and then reduces distance with each following chain.

I love that suggestion. It wouldn't straight up mean that Arc always gets the insane range that it had before, but at least it would provide some sort of "aoe" scaling. Suddenly stacking +chains would be a cool and very viable option (much like you can do with magma orb), but at the same time it wouldn't be 100% mandatory.