Path of Exile

Apparently Ele hit is going to be pretty strong(maybe broken?) based on how the mechanics work from what they said on reddit.

Basically, you can convert all the damage from the other element types into one, then use jewels to restrict that element only, and they all add up.

That's because the restriction happens after the conversion instead of before. That means for example just having Avatar of Fire, you'll get the base 419 - 779 fire damage as well as half of cold and lightning so 171 - 318 cold and 33 - 640 lightning, so 623 - 1737 base damage. You could use the phys to fire conversion quiver too to add 135% your phys damage(50% from avatar, 50% from the quiver and 35% additional phys as fire) from a bow which is probably going to be the better way to deliver damage on ele hit, especially with some chain way with the overlapping aoe if stuff is packed similar to lightning arrow. That's a lot of base damage, with pretty minimal investment(avatar of fire keystone and a unique quiver that's common and generally worth jackshit+prophecy to make it better). Cold to Fire support might also be a fairly substantial damage increase especially if you have say Hatred with a high phys bow.

Hell just throw a Quill Rain on a char who can get avatar of fire early(templar/witch/marauder) and you can probably level just one shotting everything even with quill rain and without the mana issues of explosive arrow.

There's also always a reddit post before the start of every league(but after patch notes) with the usual starter builds, sometimes with video links so you can see how they play.

But really most builds other than lab/boss farmers/summons are going to fit in your categories. You want a "fast" build that can be as slow as ED, which is like one of the slower builds so that's most builds, and then it can be ranged but also melee if it's fast, which again is most (good) builds.

You'd be better off picking a skill you like in terms of how it looks/functions, and then finding a build for it. There's only a few skills that aren't good for speedclearing, if you exclude the single target melee skills(which are pretty much all garbage for speed for obvious reasons).

Deathwing said:

Yeah, definitely starting out with arc. Damage add and min damage got nice buffs, damage max got a very minor nerf, and does 150% more damage damage to single targets with helm enchant.

Vaal arc got a ton more damage and damage add, and an out of nowhere lucky buff. Does that mean your crit is lucky and the target's dodge is unlucky?

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Well they said in the Q&A with Rory that they would give Vaal arc a buff to arc on top of its usual stuff and that because they moved the former "will target an additional target each chain" aspect directly on the base skill, it'd be new. Not entirely sure what the wording means, I'm thinking it only means lucky crits on arc, which is still great because of all the other shit. Vaal arc is going to shock the fuck out of bosses too probably with all these modifiers, so you'll get a huge damage boost from that shock.

It's nice that they weren't too scared of overbuffing stuff with this patch. They could have went with a series of garbage buffs like that one time they said they would buff a ton of skills and then they gave Glacial Hammer 7% more damage and shit. They're for sure going to miss the mark on one or several of these skills and some of these old ass skills are going to be top tier meta again and then everyone will whine to nerf them, but at least it'll shake up shit for a while, and it's cool to go back to using beta era skills and not have them be some hipster shit build just because.

Deathwing said:

How are you going to shock bosses with Vaal Arc?

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I think with the amount of chains it has and the base damage, it should hit for at least 2% of a boss health. That's 20% increased damage for 4.6secs with no other shock duration/effect modifiers. I assume you'll grab shit on the tree too. I mean maybe I'm misjudging the amount of damage it does compared to a boss health and it'll hit for less than that.

Byr said:

I guess they gave up Lacerate changes. I thought someone from GGG said it was getting looked at at one point, shame. I really liked the skill until the AoE nerfs.

On a second note ... why does Arc have a Duration tag in that screenshot? It doesnt have any time related effects.

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The lucky buff is affected by duration I'd assume. It also says base duration is 4secs.