Crackling Lance
" +1 Completely agree. I also got the impression that people playing as an Inquisitor have much easier time because ascendancy alone solves most of their problems. But for other classes there are just too many requirements to make the skill perform alright. |
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" So I'm an inquisitor but I'm not using EB simply because I'm ssf and haven't gotten myself a DD yet. Mana is 75% reserved and I have zero mana issues with a single flask. I actually really like the skill. It has a good deal more single target then arc (I suspect people are forgetting intensify support) and the clear isn't bad since it's an instant screen length cone. I feel like the issue about not dealing damage if the mob is moving or in an animation is either real or it's confirmation bias on my end. I also noticed some strange damage interactions at near max distance. For example had a betrayal door eat so much casting for barely any damage, then I moved closer and it blew up with two casts. Oh and increased / decreased aoe doesn't seem to do anything? Or maybe it's a visual bug. |
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" The AoE functions like divine ire beam, it's AoE damage scaled but not modified by +/- area scaling. This means things like intensify and conc effect are "free" huge multipliers without their downside. I guess that's fine for uniqueness, but the built in stage changes/intensify are more than enough uniqueness for this skill I think. I actually came to the thread to talk about the AoE specifically. Basically... it just feels clunky and like you need assistance from other skills or on-death explosions to clear as well as other skills. I'm not gonna talk about damage numbers or damage mechanics, those are much simpler to change I think, but I will get into the nitty gritty on area feedback. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unf0M8F-5Xk Here we can see crackling lance missing enemies directly in front, inside the cone. This should never happen, period. It just FEELS terrible, especially considering you lose AoE as you keep casting. The first hit or two, for how weak it is, should cover a LOT more consistently. Maybe the lower stages should do slightly more damage too, I dunno. Either way the forks of the lightning, if they're going to have a fixed area, should have a big enough hitbox to never miss like this. Increasing the covered area would also help some with the glaringly awful pre-forking blind spot close to the character where almost nothing gets hit. In fact I would have the skill fork as soon as it leaves the character's hands and create a bigger total area.  That combined with consistent hitbox inside the cone would be huge to make the clear not feel clunky. The mechanics of the skill need to work well in both forms if it's going to make special demands of the player. boost form 1-2 damage slightly might help with that too. Dunno. As for the final form laser, I feel like making it a tiny bit wider might not hurt, like +3 width per stage, or adding a small energy burst in a circle around the caster to hit enemies hugging you. I really love this skill! It just needs to reward the player for meeting the demands it's making, with rewarding AoE, and a rewarding single target that appreciates that you're comitting to standing there and building up. Right now the worst part is definitely the clear/AoE though. Edit: Not balance related but I wish the sound effect were slightly more punchy/crunchy/zappy or something. Also I realize I didn't include character info, I've tried several 70+ characters but the AoE being poor/non-scaling doesn't really matter for that... Last edited by Fourson#2423 on Sep 28, 2020, 12:04:24 PM
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" What I meant is that the Inquisitor gives you cast speed, reliable life/mana/ES sustain, crit chance/multi and elemental damage resistance ignorance which is huge not only for damage but also for survivability when combined with the Call Of The Brotherhood ring. Unlike you I was foolish enough to go with Occultist to try Crackling Lance with chaos damage conversion and I struggled a lot mostly with the survivability and mana cost. In the end I solved the mana cost with the Clarity aura, Inspiration support gem and increased mana regeneration. EB kind of worked as well but it took away quite a bit of ES from my EHP and disabled ability to use mana based skills. And I hate to rely on flask. My survivability skyrocket when I obtained Expedition's End unique chest which allows me to freeze stuff. I still need to improve my survivability because I cannot rely on freeze alone with so many freeze unfriendly map modifiers and freeze immune bosses but I finally get to the point where I can proudly say that my character performs well. Currently level 87 doing mid tier maps. I like the skill but I still believe there should be some improvements. First of all Crackling Lance unlike Arc or Divine Ire relies on Orb Of Storms to be able to efficiently clear content which is imo fine. But there should be some benefit in exchange. You can say it's the single target damage which on paper might be right but in reality it gives you just another huge disadvantages: 1. In order to archive high single target damage you have to stand still and that puts you in great danger which forces you to rely on other skills like Frost Shield again. Compare to chanelling skills you are locked in the cast animation and takes longer to react. 2. To be able to pull of that high damage you have to heavily invest into cast speed and also to mana sustain. 3. To get that high single target damage it's expected to use Intensify support which creates huge damage gap between the first and the last cast. In the end is the single target damage so much better than lets say Archmage Unleashed Arc Build that could also happily kite stuff around? Or at least better than regular Divine Ire crit build? I'm not sure which way GGG want to go with Crackling Lance but the requirements for using this skill imo should be lowered somewhere. Here is my list of suggestions for improvements: 1. Increase base damage and lower damage increase per intensity to lower damage gap when occasional kiting is needed. 2. Fix blind spot in front of the character. 3. Increase anomalous gem quality bonus to up to 40% damage converted to chaos (same as Spark) 4. Increase base cast speed and reduce mana cost to compensate. 5. Increase beam width per intensity to create thicker beam area for better aoe scalling. Perhaps in form of helmet enchantment? Branching angle does kind of nothing. Overall I'm having fun with Crackling Lance now when I got over the initial frustration. I appreciate that the Crackling Lance unlike the Arc requires good positioning and aiming and has awesome visual effect. Skill is definitelly viable when you make some investment but still feels to be quite a bit bellow its competitors especially when you take into account survivability issues. Thanks for reading I hope it makes sense considering my poor english. :) Last edited by Langhun#7314 on Oct 15, 2020, 1:04:41 PM
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Level 90 Low Life Elementalist, no golems just critical lightning CL.
The clearspeed showed in the teaser video missled a lot, using Impulsa gave the impression the skill has a high clearspeed, wich is just partial. For it to work you need to constantly move and shoot so the bigger aoe on intensity one hits many targets. But the worst part of this is that the skill can miss targets inside the cone. It must hit all targets inside the intensity one and two cone, always. The feeling of a hadouken on intensity 3-4 is great, damage is ok, but you need to stay in place, wich in PoE is a death sentence. Even with more than one layer of defense it's difficult to tank enough to stand in place and use concentrated beam often. In general the hype was more than what skill actually is. I see no reason to use it instead of arc. To improve I say make it two skills in one gem: cone aoe for clearing with no intensify gain and reduced ailments chance and hadouken beam for bossing, with intensity gain and increased ailments. "There's no thing like random one-shots in this game. You only die because you take 353,456,237 hits in 0.2 seconds."
"The best items in the game should not be crafted, they should be TRADED." - Cent, GGG |
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Level 89 inquisitor Crit crackling lance
PoB: https://pastebin.com/sJREuZUk I have an effective crit chance of 92% when taking inevitable judgement, which causes your critical strike to hit targets as if they have no resists, I have noticed the i can do the Enslaver with little issues. If I do a conqueror i have large amounts of problems such as my beam(intensify 4/4) misses the conqueror causing death. The problem that I'm mostly is that the conqueror is taking no damage(A4) this does not bode well for the future fights. |
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Hi there,
My starter this league was Crackling Lance Inquisitor Fanaticism, following mostly Zizaran's build. I thought the damage was ok, PoB showing enough DPS, was able to do red maps. I was pleasantly surprised how Fanaticism works, it helps with stacking Intensity. But I had a few problems with Crackling Lance: - when fully stacked, sometimes the beam wouldn't hit. The visual doesn't seem to reflect the hitbox (is it because of Conc Effect + Intensity?) - the damage is pretty low when not fully stacked. So the gameplay would revolve around trying to get max stacks and try to hit enemies when fully stacked. But against single boss, it's quite annoying when the beam doesn't hit, and the damage seemed low. I then switched to Ball Lightning... yeah, different story. It deals more damage even if not fully stacked. You can throw a few balls and move around, it will still continue to deal damage. It deals better AoE damage, and no problem against single target as well. The helmet enchant is currently cheap, so you can take the +1 intensity, but even without it, not fully stacked, it deals better damage than Crackling Lance. The premise of the skill looks interesting, but it needs to deal more damage when stacked, and have clear visual if the beam will hit or not. If Less AoE is a problem, the visual should reflect that. PoE forums ignore list script:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/162657 0.4: added "ignore" button. ignore list is now saved locally. | |
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My feedback is that intensify seems to actually lower the area, reading what other people may have said, I might be totally wrong and intensify truly is a multiplier. Anyway, the main thing I would say is this skill needs to get some more clear. This is basically ethereal knives that only shoot one projectile. When I imagined this hitting, I was expecting to be a bit wider than a pencil and this leaves you totally vulnerable to enemies in pretty much any direction, not even factoring in that most boss fights now regularly include adds.
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" Get Storm's Gift + Inpulsa's and watch the screen blow up VAC RGL RGI SOE DCC
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" Yeah, other people mentioned this: but that's my point. Even without using inpulsa's or Storm's gift, it should be at least somewhat usable on its own. |
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