I worked out how to make Arc viable

You use Remote mine

...

No I am not joking.

Basically, you stack as much shock chance as possible, lay 5 remote mines and deal insane burst damage.

Because of the way mines work in this game, there's a slight delay between each hit being calculated, which means if you shock a mob on the first hit, the remaining 4 hits will get the 40% bonus to damage.

Because each Arc hits 3 times, if you support Arc with Elemental Proliferation, it's possibly to roll shocks so that the first mine detonation will shock all 3 targets hit, proliferating on to every nearby enemy, leaving the 4 remaining arc mines to deal 120% more damage. Sure that's assuming some good rolls, but even if you only manage 1 shock from your first mine or two, that's still a notable boost to your damage.

As additional icing on this cake, because of the huge increase to your final mine(s) damage, shocks caused are entirely capable of having significant enough duration to carry across to your next batch of 5 mines.

Arc is great for shocking enemies because it has a base 10% chance to shock on hit, which goes up to 20% with quality. Combine this with 20% shock chance from Static Blows, 5% from the Notable in the Shadow area and 4% base crit chance and you're up to 49% chance to shock. Add in Conductivity's 10-14% additional chance to shock, a little increased crit chance from the passive tree and dual-curse Crit weakness for +5-10% crit chance and you could get this chance up to 75%+ by late-game.

Because of the incredibly low delay between Arc mines hitting an enemy, even if you roll the minimum shock duration (300ms) you still benefit from the increased damage.

You can also get some insane damage from this, as mine laying speed isn't affected by casting speed at all, which lets you run
with hardly any downsides.

Also, there are two +15% mine laying speed nodes on the passive tree, which are an insane boost to your damage. Support gems are pretty nice too, the downsides to both Iron Will and Culling Strike don't actually impact your damage, so you can use those low-cost supports easily

This is so cool. Not even because of Arc, it's all about Remote Mine being deployed to good effect. Nice job!

Well I tried and it dosn't work very well, the time between your bursts is very long and sometimes your arc focuses the same mobs even if they would have normaly die to the first arcs.

Arc can't hit enough target to afford the time needed to lay all mines.

But the huge lazor is brilliant.

Problem is that you'd have to dedicate several skill slots on several instances of Arc Mine, since the most major drawback to mine and trap spells is the cooldown.

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0nin wrote:

Problem is that you'd have to dedicate several skill slots on several instances of Arc Mine, since the most major drawback to mine and trap spells is the cooldown.

Mines have no cooldown. Only traps do.

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Papyrazzi wrote:

Well I tried and it dosn't work very well, the time between your bursts is very long and sometimes your arc focuses the same mobs even if they would have normaly die to the first arcs.

Arc can't hit enough target to afford the time needed to lay all mines.

But the huge lazor is brilliant.

Usually no more than 5 seconds tops. And I've found that spreading mines out a tiny bit (literally like half a character length) influences them into targeting more enemies. Also, kiting a large group of enemies and laying mines in a circle is a good way to decimate an entire group.

I remember doing exactly this a long time ago, but my mines kept being destroyed before I could deploy more than 1. Whenever it did work though, it was lots of fun and good damage. But since then I think they've reduced the mine detonate times etc., so I'm gonna be trying this again... might even go double totems, since mines still do damage with Ancestral bond active if I'm not mistaken :) And the totems might draw aggro to stop them from puncing on my mines again.

I don't even care if this is good, I'm doing it anyway. Cool idea OP.

(as a Shadow in Onslaught league - will report back after a while)

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Dechef wrote:

I remember doing exactly this a long time ago, but my mines kept being destroyed before I could deploy more than 1. Whenever it did work though, it was lots of fun and good damage. But since then I think they've reduced the mine detonate times etc., so I'm gonna be trying this again... might even go double totems, since mines still do damage with Ancestral bond active if I'm not mistaken :) And the totems might draw aggro to stop them from puncing on my mines again.

Double decoy totem. Oh yeahhh.

"

slemenik wrote:

"

Dechef wrote:

I remember doing exactly this a long time ago, but my mines kept being destroyed before I could deploy more than 1. Whenever it did work though, it was lots of fun and good damage. But since then I think they've reduced the mine detonate times etc., so I'm gonna be trying this again... might even go double totems, since mines still do damage with Ancestral bond active if I'm not mistaken :) And the totems might draw aggro to stop them from puncing on my mines again.

Double decoy totem. Oh yeahhh.

OMG DOUBLE LIGHTNING WARP TOTEM + THIS

IT WILL BE ABSOLUTE INSANITY

On the topic of Arc being viable, it's great to see more people trying out this skill, it's absolutely great. I might try out the remote mine thing on my next char.

Arc, in my eyes, is definitely viable, I'm currently rank105 (level 81) in Anarchy with my Dual-Arc-Totem Templar (Arc-Prolif-Totem-FastCast) and I'm both shocking everything on screen as well as doing respectable dps (with 5k es).