Ball Lightning

Ball lightning, to me, is in kind of a strange place right now.

It's just on the cusp of being perfectly balanced, but isn't quite there yet. Here's the problem as I see it: the damage is too low for it to really be viable non-crit, but if you just raised the damage, it would be too good as crit. I'm playing a BL Witch, currently lvl 61, running BL on a tabula with slower projectiles, echo, lightning pen, PCoC, and life leech. Using a high spell damage wand and spirit shield, and a lot of damage nodes (really, probably more than I should in 2.0). As-is, my non-crits tickle mobs, my crits melt packs.

As I said above, if you just increase the damage, then crit BL would be too strong. Same problem with increasing the damage effectiveness, those new added damage to spell mods would be too strong on crit BL. I think the best solution is simply to accept that BL is a crit skill and increase the base crit chance slightly. It's not a perfect solution, but I don't think there's any other way to make it do more consistent damage. As-is, as crit BL, it's a coin toss, basically half the time a I cast it, it does basically nothing.

This gem is quite useless in pvp or pve because of projectile speed. U're a caster & u use Ball Lightning as ur main dps so do u wanna come close the monster in high end lvl map ? The answer is absolutely NO
BL got nerf 24% less dmg now but got 16 radius ( 12 previous ). Most ppl played Knock-BL type for more hit time in pve but using BL is quite slow for clearing map.
My suggestion is increase Ball Lightning Radius = more chance to hit then increase base projectile speed = less chance to hit but BL will work well in pvp and faster in pve like Frozen orb D2

What increase dmg of BL?

1.spell dmg
2.projectile dmg

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pro_zealot wrote:

What increase dmg of BL?

1.spell dmg
2.projectile dmg

and AoE damage
and [just] increased/more damage

edit: i'm falling behind D:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Ball Lightning does not deal area damage, so modifiers to area damage will not apply

Not to forget that AoE range increases will also effectively increase the damage output since the bolts can hit further and therefore more often per cast. ;)

On another note: i believe that the changes to BL in 2.0 were good but that low damage effectiveness really hurts the skill.
20% @ 5 hits per second compared to 30-120% damage effectiveness for incinerate (depending on the stage) which also hits 5x/sec. Of course, BL also ramps up its damage proportional to cast speed and AoE but the bias towards Incinerate is still way too strong in my opinion.

this is the clear speed (with non-lvl20 supports, re-leveling some) BL + KB can achieve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPc4dU128kI

i wouldnt call it 'low' as it is mostly limited by run speed (lightning warp gives me real headache so i cannot use it constantly) (inb4 'its a colonnade' - clear speed is pretty much the same up to lvl 10 when it drops due to some mobs not being that easily shocked without crit, safety remains the same)

the only slow part is boss but.. a) it can be easily solved by replacing BL with Storm Call just before the boss b) boss fight itself has a minor impact on general map clear time.

what makes BL + KB so strong is the safety it provides. there are like 5 enemies in entire game that cannot be knocked back, everything else gets stuck into nearby wall and waits for the inevitable

scaling BL with faster casting/echo is a mistake - it just produces more duds that do nothing and there are several better supports there to be used

BL damage is good. I cast it once (2 balls with echo) and entire pack dies. 4 link in t10 map doing fine. Non crit.

It got good damage form lvl 1 to lvl 20.

The problem is: BL lag game like creazy while killing pack with rare "nearby enemies cannot die" mod.