Scorching Ray Skill Gem Mechanics

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Vipermagi wrote:

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1453R wrote:

[..]and how Melee Splash doesn't qualify a skill for Area modifiers.

yeah it does
Worth noting there: the tooltip displays the initial Hit, not the Area Damage. The initial Hit does not scale with Area damage, the splash does. As such, Area Damage modifiers are 'invisible', similar to how it's invisible for Fireball/Arctic Breath.
Radius bonuses apply as expected, and I'm certain that MSplash allows linking Radius/Conc Supports.

e;f,b

Mainly what I meant was that Melee Splash lets you apply area bonuses to the splash portion, but unlike, say, Cleave, you can't do something like use the Slayer's innate splash node to enable Conc. Effect for your Flicker Strike build. The Conc. Effect does bunk-all nada for the initial strike; it supports the splash effect, yeah, sure, but it gives you nothing insofar as making use of the 'Area' tag the skill now nominally possesses to improve boss-killaging on certain builds.

Or at least such is what I've been led to believe by other resources. And yet Scorching Ray, a skill with no discrete duration where it counts, gets to benefit from Rapid Decay and Less Duration anyways.

Poo :P

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1453R wrote:

Mainly what I meant was that Melee Splash lets you apply area bonuses to the splash portion, but unlike, say, Cleave, you can't do something like use the Slayer's innate splash node to enable Conc. Effect for your Flicker Strike build. The Conc. Effect does bunk-all nada for the initial strike; it supports the splash effect, yeah, sure, but it gives you nothing insofar as making use of the 'Area' tag the skill now nominally possesses to improve boss-killaging on certain builds.

Or at least such is what I've been led to believe by other resources. And yet Scorching Ray, a skill with no discrete duration where it counts, gets to benefit from Rapid Decay and Less Duration anyways.

Well, you got a valid complaint there, if you got the splash node you should be able to use AoE supports on all your single target skills. Though such things might be tricky to implement, we've been waiting for a whole league to get projectile supports to work with animated ranged weapons and skeleton mages, and they're enabled by default, not when you socket the gem so that might not even be possible to do. Having aoe gems enabled on all single target skills just because of slayer seems like a no go to me.

I don't agree with the thing about splash, I like that it behaves like that, it's an important difference from regular AoE skills and with no damage penalty on primary hit it's already configured as a bosskiller even without conc.

If Scorching Ray applies a duration effect on a target that isn't an elemental status, then it by all means qualifies as a duration gem, no less than Viper Strike.

Want to add some more things to it:

-Cant Stun (cause cant hit)

-Cant Knockback, or flee, blind, get charges

-Cant Culling Strike

-Cant be used with any projectiles or AoE supports (obvius)

-Cant have damage converted


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Good support gems you can use with it too:

-Iron Will

-Spell Totem

-Maybe Enhance, Inc Duration

-Some new support gem for Channeling skills that is for sure going to be announced

Honestly, I'm not sure that Rapid Decay or Less Duration would be good at all for this Skill, since you'll be reducing both the burning DoTs duration AND the debuffs duration, GREATLY reducing your maximum DPS potential [at critical mass;] it'd increase clear speed, but screw your single-target.

You guys completely forgot one of the best gem links.

Spell Totem :)

1. It isn't clear if duration does anything at all except prolonging burning AFTER SR have been moved away from mob. So in this case penalty from Less Duration might be insignificant.
2. The worst thing with totems would be targeting. Try to imagine totem aiming for the closest mob, then turning to the next closest at 180 degree, then again for 110 degree and so on. And this turn speed is dependent upon cast speed which is decreased by totem itself. It might be OK overall since we don't know default turn rate but GGG let us know this mechanic prereleased specifically so I wouldn't be much optimistic.

There's a total of 10 support gems that work with Scorching Ray -

Controlled Destruction, Elemental Focus, Faster Casting, Iron Will, Rapid Decay, Less Duration, Increased Burning Damage, Spell Totem, Empower, Enhance (no idea what the quality bonus is).

Likely the best setup will be -

Scorching Ray + Controlled Destruction + Elemental Focus + Faster Casting + Rapid Decay + Empower (if you've got the money)/Increased Burning Damage (cheaper option)/Spell Totem (if you want to go totems). Enhance and Less Duration would likely lose out to any of those three.

Club it with Doon Cuebiyari sceptre and Repentance gloves to get a free uber-Iron Will (Repentance adds free Iron Will + Doon gives its own Iron Will-like effect which can stack on top of that). Note that you'll need a lot of intelligence to wear both of those.

Play a Chieftain (Ngamahu + Ramako + Tawhoa + whatever) Righteous Fire character to add even more damage. Why Chieftain? Cos a bit of extra fire damage plus a ton of extra regen plus endurance charge generation, which is what keeps you alive (and supports Righteous Fire) since this can't leech. Also, extra strength to make your in-built Iron Will even better.

Add in Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Overload via Orb of Storms or some other skill for even more damage. That leaves the only thing missing being Pain Attunement, which is also technically possible if you've got the money to make a low-life RF character but likely not worth the trouble at this point (you'd have got way more than enough damage already by now).

One additional thing to note is that not only is this skill immune to reflect (so was old Incinerate since the reflected damage was laughable), it's also immune to lightning thorns (which often insta-killed old Incinerate builds) since channeled skills count as just one cast.