Dominion's Hardcore Dual-Spark CI Witch - UPDATED for 1.0.1

@rsalty The crit/spell damage does apply to all your spells. 11.4% crit sounds right if that's the only crit you have. Spark has a base crit of 6% x 1.90 (90% crit) = 11.4.

I wouldn't worry about crit unless you're level 88+ and are already starting to transition into crit passives. Focus on spell/lightning damage for now. I would definitely recommend getting a new shield as 84 ES is super low on a spirit shield. The majority of your ES comes from your helm, chest and shield. You should focus getting high ES on those pieces, even if it means sacrificing a bit of damage on the shield.

For example; This is my current shield, it lacks in crit/spell damage but it has pretty nice ES. While I lost a little bit of spell damage from my last shield, the survivability boost was well worth it.

@Spinley -

Thanks. I actually have low ES on boots, gloves and my shield, however at 78 I'm running 6300 ES. My helm could use more ES as well, but it's okay at 273 (65% +47 max) and my chest is okay at 467 (49% +121 max).

The strange thing is that not one single piece of my gear has any armour on it so I have 0 armour.

I've just been running my 66-67 maps even though they are well below my level just for more map drops so i can start doing my 68s and hopefully keep getting a bit higher ones. I don't have a ton of currency, so haven't been able to trade for much, but I'll start looking for a higher ES shield.

Thanks again. I didn't know I was going to have to do math to play this! ;)

Sorry for the delay everyone. I'll start by mentioning the recent addition I made.



I am currently using the templar and shadow power charges, yielding 5 total power charges. With the 4 link above, I have had very little maintaining the charges. Given that this requires sacrificing the links otherwise used for summons, I would suggest either holding off until you can afford to discard summons or using it in a 3 link and putting temp chains+enfeeble in the weapon switch (it's possible to make them appear over your primary curse hotkeys allowing them to be used on switch). If you do this, you can use a 3 link at the cost of faster casting or GMP.

I'll answer the first few pages of questions, I'll get more of them throughout the day hopefully.

"

Aereic wrote:

I just had a question about fork.

At level 17, it gives:
32% increased projectile damage
and
30% less projectile damage

So it should increase my tooltip damage, right?

However, when I unlink it from spark, my tooltip damage goes up. Could you explain this to me?

"Increased" is additive, "less" is multiplicative. Increased stacks with other mods, while less reduces everything.

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dro_13 wrote:

Why don't you take Doomcast in the 70-88 builds it doesnt worht it?

Crit isn't effective until lots of it is used. I choose to wait until many points can be allocated for crit since single crit nodes do very little.

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SuperGreatness wrote:

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glh5 wrote:

@supergreatness you're not rolling your maps correctly.

But, I allways aim for maps to have 30+ quant, witch is fairly easy.
How can bigger size maps be better then smaller with higher quant items dropping?
I understand that bigger maps have more mobs = more drops

But, shouldent it be the same in the end??

Or is the area increase so much better then more quant?


And the rolling 70+ with alchs chaos is just 100% impossible for me.
The amount of currency I currently have to spend on just buying maps is higher then my income. So spending that amount of currency on just rolling maps would be impossible.

Hold off of doing the 70+ maps until you can afford to roll them. As far as rolling lower maps is concerned, read the FAQ in my first post, it explains my method of rolling low maps.

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Kamro wrote:

I quote the patch notes

"

Critical strikes have been standardised in how they interact with repeating actions. The critical roll is made only once per action, regardless of how many repeats that action does. Exceptions are Tempest Shield (which rolls each time you block), Piety's Ball Lightning (which rolls per target) and Infernal Blow/Explosive Arrow (which roll separately for the explosion).

Any Idea if this will be bad or good for our little forking and roaming sparks, if i understand it right, it will be so that once it pops out of the totem and then its a crit or not but what about when it forks ? and The forks of the forks ?

Since many casts are occurring, even though there is only a single roll for all projectiles that result from a single cast, it should average out in such a way that it has little impact.

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deentemp wrote:

...the owner of this build or someone way experienced should post a way to lvl faster cause if you follow this build , YOU WILL BE LVL 60 IN AGES.

You're mostly right. I've used the leveling strategies in multiple 1-week races and they've worked decently - though I agree completely that they can be optimized. I haven't died on this build ever, so the only times I've needed to do progression were: 1 league character in closed beta, 2 1-week races in closed beta, my current character in the hardcore league, and the character I leveled for the first 1-week race in open beta.

As such, I have perhaps 50-100 hours worth of experience during progression (at least half of it with parties), and several thousand hours in endgame.

I'm absolutely convinced there are better methods for progression, though I haven't enough motivation to optimize a part of the build that constitutes perhaps a single day of gameplay. I agree that it should be optimized.

If anyone has input or suggestions regarding progression optimization, I'm quite interested in hearing it.

To everybody who wants to use the 4 Link he posted.

Dont level the Ice Spear, there is literally no difference between a level 1 and 20 Ice Spear regarding charge generation. The skill will simply cost you way more mana which can be a problem when you dont have manaregeneration stacked.

As for leveling, you can easily do it as Freeze Pulse and still reach level 60 in a day. Simply add LMP and Faster Projectile. Starting with level 19 you pretty much two shot any pack until merciless. If possible get a Crest (Unique Shield with 40% block chance), it will carry you through normal and is a really safe way to level up in combinantion with Pulse. You can tank a whole room of mobs and never drop below 80%.

For progression I think 1x fire trap is a no brainer. I still use it at level 82 in place of another bear trap.

Fire trap is great because it does pretty well vs lightning resistant golems, the whirling blade guys, skeletons, and the tail shooters. I would feel like I'm at a serious disadvantage without it when it comes to clearing packs of those mobs. It also comes in handy once in a while when you want to burst down 2 necros who are next to each other.

If you could go back in time would you have picked power charges from the bandits in merciless instead of a skill point, or is it the 5 charges enough with this build?

Btw at 82 my dps is 760 with maligaro's and a 35/55ish necklace. 83 + spark leveling should bump it to about 900 or maybe even closer to 1,000. I really think you can start switching to the crit build earlier than 88.

Mainly because you skip those 5x 8% grey nodes under inner force but you end up getting the green nodes near shadow which is 38% instead of 40%. You really don't come up with less ES than the damage / no crit route. The crit route leaves you in a much better position too to pickup crit nodes.

You do however lose quite a bit of mana (and in return some ES) from the lack of int nodes when you eventually switch to windscreams and spec out of the entire top area of the tree.

"

nynyny wrote:

To everybody who wants to use the 4 Link he posted.

Dont level the Ice Spear, there is literally no difference between a level 1 and 20 Ice Spear regarding charge generation. The skill will simply cost you way more mana which can be a problem when you dont have manaregeneration stacked.

I've been trying to find a quality ice spear with which to replace it. I can't stomach the idea of unleveling a level 20 gem. With my current setup, the mana isn't a significant issue, or I would use level 1 without quality.

You are quite right in identifying that the gem should not be leveled though.

What combination of 5-th link support gem + curse will be better concerning 1.1k Spark totem DPS, 33% crit chance and ~500 multiplier, Lighting Penetration + Critical Weakness, Lighting Penetration + Proj Weakness or Critical Damage + Elemental Weakness/Conductivity.

For me it seems like LP+CW is better, but need moar tests and it's really hard to use all the benefits of this combo in a party cause there's a lot of ppl with RT, so in that case i use LP+EW. Make sense?

Currently I'm level 81 and I'm stuck on which passives to get. Should I get Elemental Adaption first or complete the ES nodes?

I have max Resistance without Purity.

Thanks.

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relaxyo wrote:

Currently I'm level 81 and I'm stuck on which passives to get. Should I get Elemental Adaption first or complete the ES nodes?

I have max Resistance without Purity.

Thanks.

Just saw this, i think you should have already taken it lol. Its an amazing node. With my purity and that i have 83 all res. It reduces ele damage by so much.

An idea i had about shuffling of gems to fit the power charge on crit in:

OLD - 4L = Zombie + Spectre + Mlife + Mspeed
NEW - 4L = Ice Spear + Power Charge + GMP + Faster casting

OLD - 3L = Temp Chains + Enfeeble + Faster Casting
NEW - 3L = Temp Chains + Enfeeble + Zombies

Now i understand that i am losing both supports for zombie and spectre. But I find they still do the job of being a buffer for flicker and projectiles. And if you find that 3 isnt enough, you can take lord of the dead for +1 Zombie.

This way we dont need to lose summons completely and/or have to weapon switch.

My current gear - lovin the play. Sitting at 9.3k ES at level 71 with 500ish Spark damage. Hoping to upgrade my circlet and maybe ring next.