Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page

Anyway guys, I want to try Arc with a Pledge/Lightning Coil/MoM while going crit.

It will be VERY hard to achieve this because of so many drawbacks such as an overly reduced lightning res, a staff with no crit where as 2x platinum daggers, when perfectly rolled, gives up to 400% crit chance and finally MoM, needs to stack mana/mana regen to be effective.

Despite having to overcome so many obstacles, I might see a possibility but I need a general feed back from other people who really knows the game.

Using this tree (hardly any different from most Arc trees), I managed to brainstorm a plausible build.

Gems: Arc - Faster Casting - Lightning Pen - Critical Strikes - Life Leech or Crit Multi - Added Lightning Damage. All in a 6L Pledge. Drop Added Lightning in a 5L.

Auras: Purity of Lightning - Clarity

Curses: Herald of Ice - Curse on hit - Warlord's Mark - Assassin's Mark

Debuffs: Blood Rage - Increased Duration (We lose 1% of max life per sec. Endurance Charges will help a bit but it shouldn't be that much of a problem)

Item wise, I was thinking of using the essential ones which is Pledge and Coil. I also blend in a Maligaro's and the rest of the gear should focus on life/res/crit/mana.

The biggest threat in the game right now are high physical hits. By trying to mitigate half of the damage(40%) with a resistance, you will substantially reduce the chances of depleting too much life/mana hence helping with survivability but also reducing the amount of leech necessary to refill your life pool.

Now given the fact that Pledge gives no crit chance, I wanted to calculate how much crit can we gather using respectable means.

Tree: 435%
Maligaro's: 50%
Crit Chance gem maxed: 167%
2 Diamond rings: 60%
7 Power Charges: 350%

We end up with: 1062%. That set's Arc, using a level 20 Assassin's Mark, at 63.1% critical chance.

Now for critical multiplier.

Tree: 120%
Maligaro's 30% (avg)
Crit Damage gem maxed(if used): 79%

We end up with: 493.5% The final multiplier is 493.5 x 1.41 (lvl 20 Assassin's Mark gives 41% more crit damage) = 695.8%

Then add shock's 50% increased damage after all of the other damage increases/multis.

Now with such high multipliers comes high reflected damage. We try to lessen the reflected damage with a purity of lightning and topaz flask. Paired together, you are sitting at 89% lightning res. I believe when you play alone, monsters hardly have enough HP for you to endlessly damage it till it kills you because you took too much reflected damage. In party, i'd be very careful.

Now the biggest problem I could face is when I need to kill a boss. You can use a separate Assassin's Mark to manually cruse bosses. What I initially envisioned was an extremely fast clear speed with a high DPS so that you spend less time killing a boss than the time it takes for your Power Charges to run out. So in a perfect scenario, you should be critting a boss extremely hard that it would take you no more than a few hits to kill it. Additionally, you can use Vaal Stormcall to nuke the boss.

So that was it. Let me know how you think of it and if you have helpful criticism then do not hold back. Id like to know what could be changed for the better. Thanks

@gtrans: I assume it's simply so the damage multipliers wouldn't apply twice to the converted damage, but i guess a dev can explain this decision better than i could.

The build looks solid, mana should be enough with Pledge even without Sovereignty, probably won't even need the witch mana nodes. You could consider replacing Crackling Speed, Retribution and/or the witch mana nodes with the jewel sockets in 2pt reach if you happen to get some great rolled ones. I'd keep Heart of Thunder for 90+, or maybe even 95+ depending on what jewels you have.

Keep in mind that coil isn't a straight up 40% reduction unless you have 100% lightning res, with 79% it's 31.6% - but that's still really good.

I'm not so sure about Inc Crit Strikes, but since it's same colours you can simply switch it with PCoC for curse immune maps and longer bossfights. Another option for bosses could be a single target EK with Phys to Lightning, should also be easy to get colours for in coil.

Please let me know how this build works out for you.

@enki91: Thanks for your thorough analysis. Definitely going to use jewel once I get DAT JEWEL but only then because they are pretty expensive even in Standard so that's why I didn't spec into jewels up until I get the really good ones. I'll be dropping exactly what you mentioned, had the same idea. Witch mana nodes are not going to be needed once I get pledge. Crackling speed is more immediate damage but will be specced out when I get DAT JEWEL. Same goes for Retribution.

"

Keep in mind that coil isn't a straight up 40% reduction unless you have 100% lightning res, with 79% it's 31.6% - but that's still really good.

What I meant was that 40% of the physical damage is redirected towards resistance. It is much more potent than armor. And ofc I won't mitigate it entirely, just 31.6% like you mentioned.

"

I'm not so sure about Inc Crit Strikes, but since it's same colours you can simply switch it with PCoC for curse immune maps and longer bossfights.

PCoC on curse immune maps is a blessing. Absolutely a must. While I can agree that Critical Strike Chances might be questionable, I really want to take advantage of my critical multiplier. But also, landing a crit is highly needed for a more defensive approach. Freezing monsters then shatter it on death that would otherwise throw projectiles when slain or explode. It is going to limit my exp loss on higher levels.

Thanks again for the feed back, i'll update you with my progression when this build reaches 80+. Hopefully sooner than later.

Quick questions.

First, if we're going to use Lightning Coil and dual wield, how can our 6L be BBBBBR? I mean, Vorici calculator says it would take close to 23k Chromatic to roll these.

What links would you use/change, or is Lightning Coil completly outdated?

Second, I'm trying to play this in HC. My guess would be to use a shield instead of dual wielding, and changing the tree according to that (removing the dual wield cast speed, adding more life). Would you play Cloak of Defense (assuming I can get 600/150) or stick with the Lightning Coil? If you stick to LC, question one becomes even more important.

Thank you!

@Gallaxe: Hey there, a 5b1r is an absolute novelty item and surely not optainable by everyone, i've just put it in as option. Way more realistic is 4b1r1g or as 5l, 3b1r1g and switch Light Pen with Cold Pen - less shock duration, but more freeze duration instead which is also good for HC.
Another, cheaper option would be using a Cloak of Flame, maybe as placeholder until you got a coil and all other gear.

I would only recommend CoD in HC if you struggle getting mana + mana regen on gear, phys damage is just too much of a threat atm.

Good luck in HC, please let me know how far you get with this build!

Hey there, thanks for this build guide, and continuing to answer questions. I think I will be trying this, as my first "do it myself" build is running into some issues -- I don't think it's a bad build, but my lack of specialization (it tries to work with four spells simultaneously) is hurting her; she's fairly well-rounded, but not great in any particular area, and I find it tough to keep up with my Ranger and Marauder friends. I had also specced into Cold for that one, thinking it'd be safer, but it's way too slow to compete with the other two for kills, and I end up using Arc most of the time anyway (which was supposed to be a secondary skill.)

I like that this one still retains elements of Cold while utilizing Arc for faster killing, and I am currently rolling a new character to try and catch up with my old one... It will take a while to get back to 85, though. However, the biggest thing is probably that I don't have the requisite Ring yet. Most are listed for at least 1 exalted, which is all of the exalted orbs I own, and I'm not sure how many Chaos to offer as a fair substitute.

With that said, I do have a few questions of my own:

1. What do the mana numbers look like that high levels? I'm wondering if Righteous Decree and Sovereignty are necessarily required if you can boost Mana regeneration high enough -- What is the mana per second expenditure with Arc going full blast, and what kind of regeneration rate do you have?

2. Alongside #1, assuming regeneration is sufficient, would it be worthwhile to swap out HoT with Wrath?

3. Which of your two Jewel slots is better for Intuitive Leap (if at all?) Of the two Jewel slots you've provided, the northern one could allow me to grab Dark Arts, the Power Charge, and the Spell Damage per Power Charge nodes while shifting the northern pathing nodes down to the middle path and pick up Mental Rapidity for the same 12% cast speed that wouldn't be limited to Dual Wield, and gain another 20% Mana Regeneration. I assume I still need the full Flask cluster, though.

The Western slot, though, could potentially shave off a couple pathing nodes and still pick up the Power Charge, Devotion, and even an extra Endurance Charge.

Are either of these worth it?

4. Alongside #3, I'd potentially need to open up a few more Jewel slots, but that would mean taking points from elsewhere, as you've allocated everything. I'm not sure where would be worthwhile to trade out, though.

5. I don't suppose there's any way to get more movement speed out of this?

6. Celestial Judgement/Punishment and Heart of Thunder seem like they would require a lot of points (and reworking of the tree) to acquire, but would Crackling Speed be worthwhile at all for the extra damage and cast speed?

7. In your Gem setup, specifically the CwDT set, what do you think about a more defensive setup: Instead of cursing, it would be CwDT+Frost Wall+Immortal Call+Phase Run (Or maybe Vaal Grace?) basically something that would protect you from those times where 20 enemies leap at me simultaneously, or I turn a corner and there's an army of Archers waiting to fire or something (assuming they could pierce the Frost Wall) and allow me a way to get out of there. It would consume all of the Endurance and Frenzy charges, though.

8. Finally, for gear, what would your thoughts be on the Blood Dance / Atziri's Step Boots, and Rats Nest / Alpha's Howl Helmets for this build?

Apologies for the large amount of questions, but I would love to see if there's anything I can do to tweak this build a bit for my play style, as I think i would be great for me and my party right now.

Thanks!

Edit:

9. Another question I forgot to ask, relating to the gem setup. For the Arc 5/6L, is Life Leech necessary for general play, or only for Reflect maps? Not taking ZO should mean your life can regenerate passively (albeit slowly) and if so, I was thinking of swapping in Empower (mostly to get that 6th chain by level 19/20) and swapping Life Leech back in for Reflect maps (although for those, I would probably use my Flame Totem Witch instead.) Also, is Faster Casting better than Crit Damage for that 6th slot?

I should also mention that I got a little impatient while leveling, as Freezing Pulse is pretty slow to kill things when they're all over the place, so I've started using Arc in the mid-20's to decent effect. I was using dual Lifesprigs, but for now I've swapped Arc onto a Reverberation Rod, leaving Freezing Pulse in the other Lifesprig. The level 1 Spell Echo makes it bearable with a Faster Casting gem linked as well, until I get high enough to access my other support gems.

@DarkRogue_3: Hey there! I'd recommend to not try to push that many different spells into a build, you simply don't have enough sockets to fully support them all and make them useful. One AoE spell and if it lacks single target damage, also a single target spell is the most you should use.

If you can't afford CotB yet, you could use Three Dragons as substitute until you can afford the former.

Ok but now to your questions:

1. I don't have the build specced currently, but mana cost in a 6L was around 150 mana/s if i remember currently. On top of that comes incoming damage from MoM you need to sustain. I highly recommend all the mana nodes as you'll need them to build a high enough unreserved mana pool for MoM, it's much harder now than it was before 2.0.

With mana + mana regen rolls on all possible pieces i was at around 750-800 unreserved mana and 200 mana/s regen.

2. Wrath reserves too much of our unreserved mana pool, otherwise i'd already use it in the build.

3. The templar slot could be good with Intuitive Leap, but only if you have the jewel already and don't have a better jewel with a mix of crit, cast speed, life and other damage stats.

4. Retribution, Storm Weaver and Arcane Potency could be replaced with jewel slots if your jewels give more for the same amount of points.

5. Most movement speed will come from 30% ms boots and a quicksilver flask of adrenaline. Nimbleness gives another little amount and you can possibly craft 5% on your belt. You could top it off with movespeed corruptions on boots and amulet, but imo that's not worth the risk.

6. Jewels will give you more for the same amount of points.

7. You could put Flame Dash (without Faster Casting, it's not really needed) in a free slot somewhere on your gear and use the free'd up 3L for a CwDt + Immo Call + Molten Shell (very laggy). Vaal skills can't be triggered from trigger gems.

8. The problem with all of those is that they either lack live, mana or resistances, or all three, while not offering enough benefit in return. We highly need all those stats for this build to work properly in high level maps.

9. Empower is possible to use if you watch out for reflect rares. Don't bother running reflect maps, it requires lots of flasking and is still very risky even with leech gem, just reroll the map.

Faster Casting is better than crit damage - lightning damage has a very huge damage range in this game, imo it's better to stack cast speed to overcome smaller hits faster rather than boosting the top-end even more and getting lots of small hits inbetween. Faster Casting also gives you more mobility, which is very useful in bossfights. The disadvantage is more mana consumption per second, but it's managable with mana-based MoM.

Hope i've answered all your questions sufficiently, i wrote this in kind of a rush. Please let me know if there's any open questions and have fun ingame!

Thank you so much for taking your time to respond to each of my points!

To respond in order, I know now that builds are generally best when they revolve around one particular skill or spell, but as it was my first real character, I had no idea which skill I wanted to use, so I figured I'd attempt to try them all out and see which ones I liked. Watching videos and reading about the spells only offered so much, since more important to me was how it fit with my play style (whatever that developed into) and how it felt to me -- whether it was fun to use or not.

Either way, she was a bit of a mess, as she tried to extend everywhere so I could try a little bit of everything. It's actually a little better than my initial plan, as I wanted to try Elemental Equilibrium and use three different elemental spells in sequence, but this game seems a bit more about bruteforcing through with spamming one spell rather than other MMO's I've played which are slower and more about casting a sequence of spells more slowly.

For reference, my plan was to use Glacial Cascade as primary, with Freezing Pulse as secondary, Cold Snap for freezing, and Vaal Ice Nova as my emergency button in case I got surrounded. In my alternate weapon set, I was using Arc for party map-clearing, with Ball Lightning for dense packs. It seemed good to me on paper, as I had most situations covered, but in practice, I basically only ever used Arc and GC in party play (because GC had life leech for bosses.)

I think I should be able to afford a CotB, but I don't know how much to offer. I only have 1 Exalted Orb, but I do have a bit over 200 Chaos Orbs to substitute with. I just don't want to be terribly ripped off, haha. Also, do the stats on it matter at all? I was looking for ones with higher Lightning Damage, and the 16% Resist.

Anyway, your 200 mana/second regeneration sounds about right to me. My aforementioned character is using an EB+MoM+ZO combination, and she tends to run out of 'mana' during extended battles where I'm casting continuously unless I throw up a Rejuvenation Totem to push my ES regen to over 200 per second. Even so, if I'm under fire, all the shield tends to be stripped away and I'm left unable to cast. This, I suppose, is also why I've gotten used to reserving most of my Mana and relying on regeneration to allow casting, but this won't work so well with MoM.

I'll keep in mind that HoT is probably easier on Mana, but I'll try to at least test how Wrath affects things (especially since I can normally try to let our Marauder take the beatings. I only need to be able to survive damage spikes in case I trigger something before he can leap in.)

As far as Jewels go, I have plenty of Jewels, but I don't know that I have any that are particularly good (my only options right now are the unique ones, Assassin's Haste, Survival Secrets, and Conquerer's Efficiency. The problem I have with my other Jewels is that they are all over the place -- I'd have Spell Critical mixed with Axe Attack Speed and Projectile Damage, for example. As far as increasing Mana goes, would Healthy Mind or even Energy From Within be a useful tradeoff at all?

I also do have Intuitive Leap available --- managed to get a drop some time ago from somewhere, but haven't been able to find a use for it. In my suggestions, it looks like in both cases, I'd gain either +20% Mana Regeneration, or +1 Endurance Charge, plus a single extra spec point. I'm not sure if this outweighs the cost of consuming that slot (and potentially having to use two points to open another one. What do you think?

Also, What does the mana situation look like without Righteous Decree and Sovereignty?

Regarding movement speed, I suppose I'll just have to use the Quicksilver Flasks more liberally -- my current character picked up Harrier as well as using Haste, so she felt quite swift without it. I don't see how this build can be made to pick up Harrier though -- even for my build, it was really out of the way -- and using Haste is out of the question if Wrath isn't viable.

To point #6, you say that Jewels would give more for the same amount of points.. can you expand on this? The numbers I've seen so far from Jewels are all quite low, and won't come with Penetration (at least I haven't seen any) so I'm not sure what would be possible there.

On point #7, to be honest, I really don't like Flame Dash very much because of the 3-dash limit. I much prefer Lightning Warp for general teleport-out-of-situations. I didn't think of Molten Shell, although I'm not sure how useful that would be if Frost Wall appears to block melee attackers. The usage of Phase Run is also to try to shed the attention of the monsters away from me and potentially back onto our Marauder -- not sure if it really works this way, though. That's a bummer that Vaal skills can't be triggered, but it sounds like you are okay with replacing the Enfeeble+Temporal Chains 'counter-curse' setup.

Regarding the uniques, that is a fair point, though I've found it much more difficult to find good Rares than it is decent uniques, but I do feel that a full set of Rares would outperform uniques if you didn't need any of those special effects. Assuming, though, that you were able to cap your resists with the other slots, would you consider swapping any one of those in, and if so, which would be your first pick? It doesn't have to be limited to those choices, though, I'd love to see what else to keep an eye out for.

As to Life Leech, Reflect Rares are going to be a pain either way, I think. Right now my character survives simply because she does comparable little damage (our Ranger instantly dies if she accidentally shoots a Reflect Rare off-screen.) That's not much consolation for knowing that I do terrible damage, though, haha. I'll have to play with it and see how often those Reflect Rares cause an issue. For Reflect maps, I don't necessarily need to reroll, as I have a Flame Totem character to handle those maps. I'd simply just avoid any Reflect maps on this character.

Finally, thanks for the analysis of Faster Casting vs. Crit Damage. It makes sense that Faster Casting allows for the benefits you described, but I was wondering if the extra damage would be comparable, if it meant that it would make the mana situation easier to handle. Is survivability hugely impacted if you do not spec MoM (but, say, get more ES to compensate?) I also assume a Shavronne's Wrappings would be a good choice for this build. (Probably won't ever get one, but, hey, nice to dream, right?)

Right now I'm at level 42 and I'm probably at the limit of my level 1 gear, haha. Survived even through Dominus without dying, but Kaom's area killed me a half dozen times. I'll have to start looking at getting some real gear instead of the random uniques I had lying around in my stash. Might be time to retire the Lifesprig and Reverberation Rod as well.

@DarkRogue_3: The rolls on CotB don't matter that much as the ranges aren't high, and implicit can be cheaply fixed with blessed orbs. Around 55-60 chaos is an ex in standard, but if you go to poe.trade, order by buyout and scroll past the 1-1.5ex ones you can actually find a few priced around 40c.

Intuitive Leap would only be useful in templar slot if you take the endurance charge, cuz' you'll invest two points for the jewel socket to cut down two nodes (+10 Str leading to Devotion cluster & Power Charge duration). Other unique jewels aren't really worth using, maybe Chill of Corruption/Sacrificial Harvest for more Vaal Haste uptime but a good rolled rare jewel would probably beat them, would have to test this.

I really don't recommend to drop Sovereignty and Righteous Decree, especially if you don't have a Lv3 Enlighten. With Clarity/HoT/HoI you'd drop down to around 400 unreserved mana - that is assuming you got good mana rolls on all gear. Even worse with Wrath, you'll have around 50-100 unreserved mana, which is simply way too less for MoM and would mean you go OOM all the time simply from projectiles/AoE damage reaching to you. Also, cutting down your mana pool is detrimental for mana regeneration as it's based on 1.75% of maximum mana (+Clarity and then multiplied with mana regen %).

Rare jewels can have up to 4 affixes, and on cobalt jewels those can be stats like crit, crit multi, cast speed, spell/lightning/cold damage and even life/mana/mana regen. A jewel slot is usually considered worth 2 points, as it takes 1 pathing node and 1 point to spec the jewel sockets for those on the pathing of your build, and most builds have several of these on their path - this one has 4 in 2pt reach.
Lets assume you have two rare jewels, one has 7% life, 10% crit multi, 15% spell damage and 5% cast speed, the other has 6% mana, 10% crit multi, 12% lightning damage, 15% crit chance. So for 4 point investment we would gain 7% life, 6% mana, 5% cast speed, 15% crit chance, 20% crit multi and 27% spell damage, which is way better than f.e. Crackling Speed for the same amount of points.
If your rare jewels have random stats and you only effectively benefit of half of them it's usually not worth the slot.
Sure, good jewels like mentioned in this example cost a bit but just as any gear, that's the price you'll have to pay for that advantage you'll gain.

Do not drop the defensive curse setup, it will help not just you but also your friends you play with. I just meant you can add an additional defensive CwDt setup on top.

Alpha's Howl would be the only somewhat-usable unique that's not already mentioned in my extensive gear section, but missing that one life/mana/resist slot will just push up the price for all other gear as you'll have to make up these stats while also needing other, mainly jewelry-exclusive stats such as mana regen and crit stats on top - and items only can have a limited amount of prefixes/suffixes.

Shavs is not good for this particular, you'd have to go Low Life which requires a completely different tree. Same goes for Hybrid Life/ES, which is also a viable solution but definitely requires you to use Life Leech gem + Ghost Reaver, otherwise you'll quickly lose the benefit of ES in sticky situations such as getting gangbanged by a pack of leapers.

What about using Malachai's Simula? With +20% spell damage and +30% lightning damage it seems worthy. You will have to use Blood Magic though.