Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page

It depends on what you feel is 'enough' damage.

Certainly with my current setup and not-quite-optimal gear, I feel like I can clear most of the easier maps without much issue. The problem is with the more difficult maps like Crematorium which has bosses that are capable of one-shotting you outright, or else dealing massive damage. Those maps are much more difficult to clear since you need to be able to withstand or avoid the damage long enough to fire off a couple casts of Arc, and this is primarily why I think this build seems to focus so heavily on cast speed.

In terms of numbers, at level 88, my Arc lists a tooltip DPS of about 13.3k while in the Hideout without any charges. There is definitely more room for my damage to rise, though, because my gear is still not final -- getting an actual set of Wands with the affixes I like will definitely help out, as well as getting the last two pieces of Crit gear I need. Finally, I'm still only on a level 19 Arc gem. Level 20 should bring another thousand or so DPS to the table at minimum.

Sorry for the late replies everybody, was quite busy the past few days!

@BundesHeinz: That's mostly due to Void Batteries still being very expensive when i made the last bigger update to this guide. A perfectly rolled Void Battery gives 145% Spell Damage (Implicit + 9 PC up), 20% Cast Speed, 115% Crit (Global Crit + PC) and 50 Mana.
While that's pretty good statwise, it was possible to get similar/better wands for a cheaper price due to stats like xx Flat Damage added to Spells and/or Crit Multi, and having somewhat better crit until charges are up.
With the droprate buff and the associated pricedrop of Void Batteries, they definitely have become a more attractive choice again which i'll mention in the next big update in a few days.

If you feel comfortable with your current flask effects, i would recommend to go for either Arcane Potency, or jewel slots if you got jewels giving better effect than the former cluster.

Gearwise you only really should switch your belt to a Leather Belt with atleast 130 Life and trires. Otherwise your gear is really good, you could get similar amulet and ring with mana/mana regen, a helmet with flat mana or even legacy Malis, but those are just really small, but potentially costly upgrades and there's a patch around the corner which may changes some thing anyway. Save yourself that currency for a Lv4 Empower, it may gets its uses back in 2.1.


@Hellsmith: DarkRogue_3 already gave some clues, another thing you could do is the maybe boring, but effective Flame Totem + Firestorm combo until you get to maps, where you switch gems to the actual build setup. Arc really needs good crit and high gem level to be somewhat acceptable for single target, that's why i'll include some solutions for that in next patch.


@Xenyum2468: As DarkRogue_3 pointed out, unless the tooltip specifically states damage per use, like it's the case with some spells such as Cold Snap, the DPS shown in tooltip is your actual DPS output. What isn't accounted for in the tooltip however is the chaining - the shown DPS values are per target, and due to chaining mechanics a single cast can end up hitting the same enemy twice, or even up to 3x with a Lv21+ Arc, dealing way more damage per cast to a single target than the tooltip suggests.

This different form of damage application per skill is why you never should compare two different skills tooltip DPS, or even care too much about the tooltip in the first place.


@DarkRogue_3: From what i read, new passive tree will be released on monday and patchnotes on wednesday, so then i'll be able to start finalizing my current 2.1 template.

If Megaera is still such a big threat to you, i recommend to just skip her. The devs explicitely stated that it's intentional that not all bosses will be killable with all builds, and some will be harder but possible. I'll include a list of which bosses fall under these two categories, while also trying to keep that list at a very minimum through improving the build further.

Keep your currency for gear, and especially potentially useful uniques coming with 2.1.

Hmm, very interesting. Where do you find this information? I haven't seen anything about a timetable being announced, but I really would love to see that new skill tree. Thanks for the heads-up on that; I'll try to keep an eye out on Monday for it.

As far as Megaera goes, I basically have been. She simply isn't worth the trouble for me. On the other hand, I can deal with her more easily than my Marauder friend, haha.

Anyway, unless I'm misunderstanding, you're advocating holding on to my currency and hold off on purchases until 2.1 hits? I wouldn't mind that, as it's only a week more anyway, although at that point I may want to start a new character in the new league for something different. I've been thinking about trying a Ranger next for some diversity (since I basically have three level 85+ Witches now.) I'll be on the lookout for the new recommended gear for this build, though, since one of my friends doesn't seem to want to start another character. Just means that I'll still be on this Witch build whenever we play.

I must be missing it somewhere....How do we go about dual cursing with the CWDT setup?

Thanks for the help.

You're stuck with a single curse until you pick up Whispers of Doom on the tree, unless you have room for the unique items that grant +1 Curses (Doedre's Damning, and Windscream, I believe.) I didn't bother when I was leveling up, partly because I was just bum rushing through with whatever random gear I had lying around my stash, and partly because I couldn't afford to expend a slot for them due to those random pieces of gear not being able to cap my resists.

While I only had the one curse going off, what ended up happening was the Curse on Hit setup was only applying Warlord's Mark (more important for me since it meshed together well with my Immortal Call plus Kingsguard setup, allowing IC to last a bit and get some healing at the same time to counter the amount I must have taken to trigger it in the first place) while my CwDT was triggering IC and Frost Wall, and I believe Temporal Chains, but it could have been Enfeeble instead. I don't remember at this point, but it was only one of them.

Personally, I kept using the Flame Totem until I picked up Whispers of Doom (all the way into Merciless!) when I reworked all of my gear and gems to support the dual curses.

Is it just me or i see some potential in this build ;)

Magma Orb and Arc (Buffed)
Magma Orb now gains an additional chain when the gem reaches a certain level, and Arc gains additional chains more frequently. This is because the damage penalty of the Chain support gem didn't justify the additional targets hit, so in practical usage, these skills didn't scale the number of targets hit as well as other skills did.


Leech (Buffed)
Life and Mana leech granted in the passive skill tree is now much larger. The Strength area of the tree has the highest values, while the Dexterity area of the tree now includes Elemental Attack Damage as well as Physical Attack Damage as leech granted. The Duelist now has a combined life and mana leech cluster, to reduce the traveling distance required to make the best use of Leech


i hope now we can replace life leech back to empower...

I don't think that will be possible unless there are other changes to Leech in gear and such. I looked over the leech nodes on the new tree and as before, they are all based on leeching damage off of Attacks. Arc, and spells in general, are not attacks so they still won't be affected by these new nodes, unfortunately.

I am happy about the general spell damage buff toward end-game as well as Arc receiving more chains, though. I just hope this means Arc actually gains some additional chains at the top end, rather than simply shifting the first 5 chains down a bit and ending with the same number.

Otherwise, as far as I can see, the tree isn't all that different for this build.

The Assassionation notable did lose two of the smaller Crit nodes around it when it moved, but this build skipped those two to begin with.

The Shadow area did lose the 5% Shock/Freeze/Ignite nodes, but that shouldn't affect this build too heavily, and now for the same amount of points through Elemental Focus, our overall damage in those three nodes increases from +28% Lightning damage to +32% Elemental damage.

Blood Siphon, unfortunately, lost a bit of Life (in general the Shadow gets even less Life now) and the Shadow area Power Charge requires one more point to get to now.

Elemental Dominion in the Witch area is now Occultist's Dominion, and slightly buffed in that the wording has changed from +16% Elemental damage with Spells to simply +16% Spell damage, no doubt to account for the new Chaos and Physical spells.

The major changes really were in the whole Ranger/Shadow/Duelist areas of the tree, with some changes in the Scion/Marauder areas, and light touch-ups in the Witch and Templar areas related to AoE.

The one thing I think is that with Surgeon's Flasks being nerfed, we had better get all of our Surgeon's stuff crafted this week before the update rolls out.

Very well written guide! I have had a lot of fun playing this build in the Darkshrine league. Had a lucky Call of The Brotherhood drop in my second map, which made it even better :D I think I will be playing it in the Talisman league too. Can't wait to see the tree and updates that you are planning for 2.1.

@mindfreakk: Thanks! Always glad to see people enjoying my builds.

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Some thoughts about currently released 2.1 changes:

More flat mana per level and ~20% higher base spell damage will be a substantial buff to this build. Leech hasn't really changed at all, but i'll find a way to get Empower back into our main setup.

I hope the change to Arc's chain progress means we can reach 7 chains without a +1 gem level chest, or even get beyond 7 chains. The wording is pretty vague in this regard to me, let's see what the patch brings.

Not much has changed in regards of our passive tree. I will include a base ~100pt tree goal, and additional higher level trees for specific gear choices. I'll also work on simplifying the whole guide and explain a bit more about why some choices were made and all that.

For the first few days after patch this guide will only include passive trees, bandits, gems and some rough gear recommendations. It may take some time for me to finish the fully updated writeup, but i'll promise this guide will be better than ever.

Sounds good. I do have a couple Empower gems, but they are all a huge PITA to level up, especially since I haven't been playing on my farm character much lately to level them. If you're trying to replace the Life Leech gem with it, and since the tree basically gives casters no leeching, does this hint at new gear requirements with Leech on them?

Otherwise, my conclusions on 2.1 were roughly the same as yours -- basically no real impact, tree-wise, and hoping for the best with the Arc and general spell changes.

The one other thing I'm hoping is that the new boost to flat mana is large enough to be worthwhile, as in addition to simply providing a larger pool of mana, it should also indirectly increase the mana regeneration rate, which might help us afford to respec a couple points on the tree elsewhere. (As of right now, I've still avoided speccing toward Sovereignty, although I don't have MoM yet either. Even without it, though, my survivability hasn't been that bad -- only deaths have been Megaera, and those unique bosses that summon those EK Totems, or something, next to me.)

Let's hope we get some clear answers and a better picture of what everything will look like in a few days when the full changelog comes out. I'm excited to see how this build will improve. I do have a Vaal Storm Call in my stash somewhere; I just hope I have enough gem slots to put it in, since I'm already pretty full with my addition of a second CwDT+IC chain.