Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page & POE 2 Arc Summary

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Ratsneve wrote:

I'm giving up on those pure intelligence wand only desires and Bluitch will be wearing and using whatever.

You can use wands... I am using Profane Wand, as you can see in my profile, for the build and having tested it out against the end-game encounters I can say it is viable. And again majority of the pieces can end up being int-heavy. The only one that likely will not be "caster" themed would be your boots and unique chest Inpulsa.

@Ratsneve: SSF has no increased droprate or other benefits, it's just for the added challenging aspect. You have to approach the game in a completely different way than you'd do in a trade league, which includes starting with a relatively gear-independent build and planning its passive tree to be flexible enough to make up for potential gear deficiencies. And that's an aspect i've always tried to design this build around, sometimes more, sometimes less successfully. The current version is pretty good in that regard, but still requires you to plan ahead about things you just can't know yet as an absolute new player. That's why i'd recommend trade leagues to start out, even withe the horrible market situation on consoles you'd have an easier time with your first endgame experience.

To clarify my note about 3.8: Elementalist is one of the worst Ascendancies currently. It's not bad in itself, but bad compared to all other Ascendancies and its only identity right now is for golem builds, which is honestly kind of meh for what is supposed to be the master of the elements. And to make it worse, GGG even nerfed Elementalist in 3.7 by lowering Beacon of Ruins base shock value from 20% to 15% and removing the proliferation (status ailment spreading), without giving anything in return.

Arc has also been butchered in 3.6, the chain length (= distance it can choose targets within to chain to) got halved which pretty much completely killed this skills identity. And that came only a few months after Arc has been buffed to finally be an all around good skill, after years of being too weak on its own for the majority of endgame content.

To keep the tradition going, I wouldn't be surprised if dodge gets nerfed this patch and with that killing off the last reliable defense for builds that get no defense from their Ascendancy, such as Elementalist. And if that should happen without any reliable alternative turning up, then this build is done for good.

New notable passive next league that allows an additional golem...depending on placement, perhaps could be utilized in this build to run all 3 (elemental) golems for additional damage from buffs? We'll have to see.

I accidentally took 3 spell damage nodes instead of 3 cast speed nodes. Why not keep them and take the 3 energy shields too. If I need them later on take 3+ respecs then?

I'm using the Orb of Storms but don't understand the "attack without moving"? This may not be a problem for the PS4?

I read a Reddit about disabling auto-level for Arcane Surge. I think the gem is Level 4 now but never level 1 unless the gem level is described somewhere else? There isn't anything critical about Level 1?

To gain arcane surge, in level 1 you only need to use 15mana vs in lvl4 19mana.
You basically only need to think how many cast you need to gain arcane surge. You should be fine until lvl6. Anything above that, you need to be sure to have enough mana cost to proc arcane surge.

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Ratsneve wrote:

I accidentally took 3 spell damage nodes instead of 3 cast speed nodes. Why not keep them and take the 3 energy shields too. If I need them later on take 3+ respecs then?

Cast speed is more important than the flat spell damage. Energy shield is useless for this build, you want flat life & mana.

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ScaryAtheist wrote:

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Ratsneve wrote:

I accidentally took 3 spell damage nodes instead of 3 cast speed nodes. Why not keep them and take the 3 energy shields too. If I need them later on take 3+ respecs then?

Cast speed is more important than the flat spell damage. Energy shield is useless for this build, you want flat life & mana.

Principally a Witch is going to have more INT then anything else or it is not a witch? I want my Bluitch in slippers and robes. No doubt I can learn a lot from Enki and other builds but it is complicated.
If I backoff on an Energy Shield should I just ignore a shield all together and use a second wand or sceptre?
Should I be building STR and DEX up equally with INT still higher?
It was suggested I could stick with wands only but doesn't that preclude elemental damage? And then I am deviating off Enki's build for sure?

There is too much basics I don't understand. And the PS4 problem of trading I have heard about but don't understand which I don't even want to do from my liking SSF and avoiding crafting. Lots of lessons to try learning and maybe some great discoveries?

I'm going to keep an eye out for this build but feel a great need to build a blue witch as far as I can and then respec if I can or start over and hope to have learned why? There will always be a build to copy--won't there. I probably should stick with the PS4 forum though and not here? My goal is to end up with one character I can explore and build on through all the endgame maps/Atlas and/or understand why that isn't possible. At some point I get my fill of PoE and can let it go. PoE is in front of many other genres I've played in the past and I cannot play different ones at the same time.

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ScaryAtheist wrote:

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Ratsneve wrote:

I accidentally took 3 spell damage nodes instead of 3 cast speed nodes. Why not keep them and take the 3 energy shields too. If I need them later on take 3+ respecs then?

Cast speed is more important than the flat spell damage. Energy shield is useless for this build, you want flat life & mana.

Why? And thank you much for explaining.

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Ratsneve wrote:

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ScaryAtheist wrote:

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Ratsneve wrote:

I accidentally took 3 spell damage nodes instead of 3 cast speed nodes. Why not keep them and take the 3 energy shields too. If I need them later on take 3+ respecs then?

Cast speed is more important than the flat spell damage. Energy shield is useless for this build, you want flat life & mana.

Why? And thank you much for explaining.

Cast speed is essentially a damage multiplier because it increases the number of times you can hit an enemy before you need to move. It's also incredibly important from a defensive standpoint because it allows you to cast and get out of the way that much faster. It also helps your movement speed if you're using Lightning Warp. I'm not saying 4% increased cast speed is more valuable than, say, 80% increased spell damage, but ScaryAtheist is certainly right here that 12% increased cast speed is more valuable than 30% increased spell damage. The cast speed is multiplicative and the increased damage is additive (with other types of applicable increased damage, of which there are plenty available). You should refund 3 passives elsewhere on your tree, allocate the points to the cast speed nodes, refund the 3 spell damage nodes, and allocate them back to the first 3 you refunded.

Energy shield isn't useless for this build, per se--it's more useful than armour or evasion--but it's not worth going out of your way to pile it on. The main reason is because of the Acrobatics keystone passive skill, which cuts your ES by 30% (in exchange for dodge chance). More ES is better than less, but something that gives you +30 life is going to have a significantly bigger impact on your total life pool than something that gives you +30 ES because our passive tree gives us lots of % increased life, not ES. In effect, +30 flat life will end up multiplying out to +60-70 when you equip the item, while that +30 flat ES will be around +30 ES. (Keep in mind that this advice is meant for this specific build; the opposite is true of a high-ES build.)

I understand your sensibility wanting as "pure" of a witch as you can get. I am attracted to witch builds for the same reason, and this is a great one for a beginner. The game's mechanics are not designed to reward purity in many instances, though, so some aesthetic deviations may be necessary to further the pure stats that are your ultimate goal. For instance, Inpulsa's is not a pure intelligence-based robe, but it is certainly the chest armor that benefits self-cast Arc the most because of its powerful effects. You can wear some kind of robe if you want, but it's not going to make your lightning spells magically explode enemies or significantly increase the strength of your spell-based shocks the way Inpulsa's does.

There are green and red gems in this game that are really powerful for spellcasters; you aren't doing yourself any favors by dismissing them as being archetypically undesirable just because of their color. Look at Ice Golem, for instance; the gem is green, but you're basically summoning an elemental that slings frost and ice around like a mage! Other support gems are meant to benefit skills that are both spells and attacks, and these certainly can't all be blue. Adding one green and one red gem to your Lightning Warp setup is going to give you the best, fastest LW possible, and LW certainly seems to me to be the most classically mage-like teleport in the game. Watch the video of Enki slaughtering Uber Elder in the OP and tell me--disregarding the appearance of his witch, which is totally customizable--that's anything other than a pure mage.

All told, this iteration of this build is one of the closest to "pure" you will get in this game while still being capable of handling the highest-level content. Depending on what you fancy, next league is clearly going to be a strong one for the Necromancer ascendancy, which is certainly in the realm of pure magic-using, so you can always try that in 2 weeks when Blight is released.

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WorderMostFoul wrote:

All told, this iteration of this build is one of the closest to "pure" you will get in this game while still being capable of handling the highest-level content. Depending on what you fancy, next league is clearly going to be a strong one for the Necromancer ascendancy, which is certainly in the realm of pure magic-using, so you can always try that in 2 weeks when Blight is released.

Thank you for all this. I will think on it all. I have corrected the passives error.