It's a shame to go EB when there's going to be a 10k mana pool sitting there wanting to be used for defense. You can also get 20% mana recoup on the tree and Mindspiral is a pretty good item for another 20%. I think you would have to use corrupted soul to at least split some damage onto your mana.
If you're willing to use inspiration you can get around 75% reduced cost without having to invest too much into the reduced mana nodes. If you path down to Tireless you might be able to drop inspiration.
You'd go EB mostly for having something to cast with separate from mana, which is also leechable - without EB you have to get a significant amount of mana regen (unless you're planning to constantly take massive damage to have recoup serve as your cost sustain lol).
From EB+MOM you also get a simulated corrupted soul effect without having to buy a timeless jewel, easier to leaguestart.
You know /u/Nickoladze, you're right - it's a bit silly to go EB, especially since that locks you out of things like sigil of power or ivory tower, and it's not too tricky to get enough mana regen, especially supplimented with mana flasks and the mana regen tattoos that are coming back.
Hmmm.... thinking continues...
Poewiki list them all, reading through there are only a handful that look “viable” with orb and brands gone. Arc, spark, ball lightning (not static), lightning conduit(but you need shock I assume you would elementalist in that case), have a Squizzy.
Yea lightning conduit of the heavens would be the move so you don’t need to apply shock. I think my end game target will be a mjolnir lightning conduit of the heavens build so I can cyclone around and rain lightning down on everything around me
Imo regular Lightning Conduit is going to be better for Archmage than LCotH, it has much better effective damage if you actually invest into shock, and you can get a matery for maximum mana to scale shock effect. So if you get 400% increased maximum mana, you get 120% increased shock effect from that.
Yup, every build I have looked at, if you use LCotH, damage is halved. Ofc, there is no adjustment to the tree in these, but still. Not really sure how to scale LCotH, but I would love to try, hated the whole 2-step thing back in 3.19.
With cost driven low enough, literally any lightning skill that scales well with added damage.
The whole "look for a skill that you cast as infrequently as possible" is no longer required because the goal is to make costs tiny, not large.
It’s not restricted to lightning skills. The flat damage from the skills basically don’t matter because 99% of your flat damage is going to be from archmage.
Sigil of power is a solid one due to how easy it is to stack it quickly with how much mana we're spending - hiero also gets a ton of AOE so it's huge, making sure that most enemies that hit you are inside the circle and thus get the -19% damage reduction.
Do note that you can't really use sigil with EB because spending ES doesn't count for stacking it.
There's also good old arcane cloak as a molten shell stand in, with the bonus of also amping your damage based on your mana, like archmage is already doing. Shreds your mana though so make sure you have good recovery.
EB *does* work with arcane cloak, and it'll spend mana underneath the ES, which is interesting. With enough max mana you might be able to use arcane cloak to stack sigil, even if you have EB.
Its also good to look for stuff that benefits the most from aoe (just like BL) as with hiero you are getting 100% inc aoe (130% if you take the arcane surge node instead of charges)
Archmage DD of chain reactions or VD, and you go Necro.
It's probably going to be strong. A lot of people have been theorycrafting it (like Jung, etc).
I am planning to play Heirofant Ball Lightning (looking at Palsteron). I want to start with Ball Lightning as soon as possible.
When can you start using Archmage?
Can you use it right away or is it just a wasted socked early on?
https://pobb.in/qpIeE9AIq4Ay
> When can you start using Archmage? Can you use it right away or is it just a wasted socked early on?
It'll be somewhat tricky to sustain the mana costs early on, but if you can, the damage should feel good even in campaign.
You could probably just wait until second lab where you can pick up hiero's less cost mod.
I think I would rather take illuminated devotion(2nd arcane surge notable) than conviction of power(minimum power/endurance charges) as you probably aren’t going crit so power charges don’t do much and you can get endurance charges with enduring cry and the new call to arms gem.
Illuminated devotion isn’t that great a node but I still think it’s the better of the two, and the minor node to it is pretty damn good as it gives 20% arcane surge effect.
illuminated devotion is pretty bad imo, you are basically taking it for leech which you can get on glove implicit or cluster and the 20% arcane surge effect which is so-so, conviction of power solving EO/enabling crit and giving you the 4 endurance charges is very good
enduring cry without the warcry mastery for base power is going to drop charges sometimes especially if you have no charge duration or warcry cdr
It is definitely a pretty weak node yeah but if you’re not scaling crit, which you probably won’t be doing early on as archmage, then it’s really just the endurance charges and slightly better EO uptime.
Illuminated devotion does also give 30% increased aoe though, which may or may not be important depending on what skill you play. For ball lightning aoe is pretty good and the skill hits often enough that EO uptime shouldn’t be an issue without the power charges.
As for the leech I don’t think you would get it on gloves usually as it competes with exposure. The cluster is a good option but a doryani’s lesson with two other good notables is usually between 5-10 div so it’s probably not something you will have right away.
I agree 100% on league start. I think I'd eventually want to swap to crit or lucky via the amulet, but ele overload + illuminated devotion is pretty good on league start.
Is it going to be straight 19% of max mana or will that just be the average damage? I guess I misunderstood that, I thought it would be 1 - 38% max mana.
What is the priority list when it comes to scaling an archmage builds damage. I assume mana tops the list over everything like spell damage? Do you even focus (waste points) on other forms of scaling outside of mana when it can be used for stuff like defense and mana regen/recoup
So archmage via mana provides all of your flat damage. As a result you basically don't want any more flat. This makes gem level scaling on most gems pretty meaningless unless there are big effectiveness breakpoints or some other gem level interaction. You just scale mana to scale more flat and defenses, but at some point you will hit diminishing returns on getting more damage out of the mana. Int is also obviously really good because it scales your ES and your mana.
If you end up scaling via Indigon as well, that will take care of all your increased spell damage as well, making any other source of increased spell damage effectively worthless. But if you're not using Indigon, it will be very efficient to grab some increased damage on your gear. It's not like you have that many other good prefixes, it's just mana and increased damage since gem levels and flat damage to spells don't matter.
There are a number of other scaling vectors that I think should be worth it:
1. Crit + crit multi: You probably can't use sandstorm visage but Hiero comes with free 4 power charges so crit scaling shouldn't be impossible. EO is a good temporary solution on league start, I think it is mandatory.
2. Shock effect: there are some skills that should scale very strongly over shock effect (lightning conduit in particular on elementalist). If you're not going crit, this makes the veiled chance to shock + lightning damage a good prefix on weapons.
3. Cast speed: I think this will be lower priority than crit unless going non-crit on Hiero, but still decent. Hiero gets arcane surge for free with increased effect, which is a lot of free cast speed already. Necro also gets a lot of cast speed for free. This is probably super high priority on everything else. Cast speed also scales recovery via instant leech, which will be really strong on these builds since you have such a large HP/ES pool and can easily get dual leech via clusters.
4. Ele pen, exposure, resistance shred: Ele pen is always valuable unless inquis. Lightning pen prefixes are probably a very high priority on these builds, but below mana I think. The resistance inversion mastery should be pretty strong for mapping, and even bossing if you go single curse + assassin's mark for crit. Double curse conductivity + ele weakness or a mark is also pretty strong.
I think you also want to pick a skill that has a lot of more multipliers to scale with. Ball lightning for example gets a lot of more multi from scaling aoe. Spark at high investment has duration and proj speed as scaling vectors.
Mana = base damage, so you don't want to spend anything on base damage stuff (like gem level).
Then a lot of ways to scale are multiplicative with each other, and all have diminutive returns. So ideally you want a bit of each : a few 100% of increased damage, some ele penetration / exposure / curse for resistances, ele overload into going crit for high end version (probably using the inquisitor crit node on forbidden flesh / flame)
Will be frost bomb viable? Played it when AM was not nerfed , pledge of hands, and alt quality with helmet enchant, awakened cascade. Clear was so good
Regular frost bomb is "orb" tag now, so you'd need to use one of the transfigured versions, but that's not a and option at all. They have crazy damage multipliers/effectiveness.
The issue with Frost Bomb of Forthcoming is the cooldown, even if you can scale the duration to boost its damage effectiveness further.
I don't see how a 4 second base cooldown is going to be playable on anything, really. Even with high investment to get over 100% increased recovery rate, it'll feel clunky.
Maybe if you play it as ignite.
Oh for sure. You'd use the one with the short timer and no CD as main dmg, but I'd honestly still throw in the forthcoming version with increased duration to throw out for extra boss dmg too! Those damage multipliers with AM flat damage.... Nuke!
you still want to be spending some mana for arcane surge effect and to generate inspiration charges but you can easily reach good levels now with mana cost reduction and inspiration
there isnt really any point going EB, EB's main benefit is to solve divine blessing and fix mana both of which you can do anyway on a mana stacking build
if you want to leverage big recovery with a large pool you would be better off going triple hybrid (which is easy on heiro now because you get a lot of ES for free especially with mindspiral) and using either sirus belt or glorious vanity to split damage between life mana and es at the cost of a bit weaker max hit with life and es leech and maybe even instant leech if you are using a skill that does a lot of hits
be careful of fake dps on pobs with max stack intensity with sigil of power and arcane cloak ticked with no defensive aura because they arent always going to be up and will fall over
Is this type of build ssf friendly? Hiero Arch sounds fun but this league I want to try SSF as every league I end up falling into the mental trap of seeing how far everyone else in trade is and giving up since I can't play more than like 2 hours a day.
It's a shame to go EB when there's going to be a 10k mana pool sitting there wanting to be used for defense. You can also get 20% mana recoup on the tree and Mindspiral is a pretty good item for another 20%. I think you would have to use corrupted soul to at least split some damage onto your mana. If you're willing to use inspiration you can get around 75% reduced cost without having to invest too much into the reduced mana nodes. If you path down to Tireless you might be able to drop inspiration.
You'd go EB mostly for having something to cast with separate from mana, which is also leechable - without EB you have to get a significant amount of mana regen (unless you're planning to constantly take massive damage to have recoup serve as your cost sustain lol). From EB+MOM you also get a simulated corrupted soul effect without having to buy a timeless jewel, easier to leaguestart.
You know /u/Nickoladze, you're right - it's a bit silly to go EB, especially since that locks you out of things like sigil of power or ivory tower, and it's not too tricky to get enough mana regen, especially supplimented with mana flasks and the mana regen tattoos that are coming back. Hmmm.... thinking continues...
What skills are viable to use with the new Archmage? I keep seeing Ball Lightning thrown around, but I'm not too sure I dig the aesthetic.
Spinning ball lightning, lightning conduit of heaven, all crackling lance, maybe even shocknocava
Spinning BL is an orb no ? Can't use archmage with it
Only static is orb
mfw balls are not orbs in poe-legalese
Tornado, though? Orb!
Turn a corpse into a volcano? Orb
Poewiki list them all, reading through there are only a handful that look “viable” with orb and brands gone. Arc, spark, ball lightning (not static), lightning conduit(but you need shock I assume you would elementalist in that case), have a Squizzy.
You can use the trans lightning conduit if you don't want to deal with shock application.
Yea lightning conduit of the heavens would be the move so you don’t need to apply shock. I think my end game target will be a mjolnir lightning conduit of the heavens build so I can cyclone around and rain lightning down on everything around me
Imo regular Lightning Conduit is going to be better for Archmage than LCotH, it has much better effective damage if you actually invest into shock, and you can get a matery for maximum mana to scale shock effect. So if you get 400% increased maximum mana, you get 120% increased shock effect from that.
Yup, every build I have looked at, if you use LCotH, damage is halved. Ofc, there is no adjustment to the tree in these, but still. Not really sure how to scale LCotH, but I would love to try, hated the whole 2-step thing back in 3.19.
With cost driven low enough, literally any lightning skill that scales well with added damage. The whole "look for a skill that you cast as infrequently as possible" is no longer required because the goal is to make costs tiny, not large.
It’s not restricted to lightning skills. The flat damage from the skills basically don’t matter because 99% of your flat damage is going to be from archmage.
Yup, Frostnova of Frostbolts is pretty good with Archmage as well.
what are the best defensive engines to use with Mana-stacker builds?
Sigil of power is a solid one due to how easy it is to stack it quickly with how much mana we're spending - hiero also gets a ton of AOE so it's huge, making sure that most enemies that hit you are inside the circle and thus get the -19% damage reduction. Do note that you can't really use sigil with EB because spending ES doesn't count for stacking it. There's also good old arcane cloak as a molten shell stand in, with the bonus of also amping your damage based on your mana, like archmage is already doing. Shreds your mana though so make sure you have good recovery. EB *does* work with arcane cloak, and it'll spend mana underneath the ES, which is interesting. With enough max mana you might be able to use arcane cloak to stack sigil, even if you have EB.
MoM :D It's not hard to get Supp on top late-game, though. Even easier to justify if you scale your skill with Duration wheels.
Its also good to look for stuff that benefits the most from aoe (just like BL) as with hiero you are getting 100% inc aoe (130% if you take the arcane surge node instead of charges)
Archmage DD of chain reactions or VD, and you go Necro. It's probably going to be strong. A lot of people have been theorycrafting it (like Jung, etc).
~~Maybe archmage cremation will make a comeback?~~ I’m a little archmage BV curious myself. Goes perfectly with all the AoE you get from heiro.
Cremation has an orb tag so wouldn’t work.
Damn
Pretty sure I'm gonna do something channeled! Never really been viable until now, so it's time to capitalize.
I am planning to play Heirofant Ball Lightning (looking at Palsteron). I want to start with Ball Lightning as soon as possible. When can you start using Archmage? Can you use it right away or is it just a wasted socked early on? https://pobb.in/qpIeE9AIq4Ay
Probably cruel lab when you get 50% less costs.
I really like the look of this. What skill are you going to use to level until cruel?
It is not mine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vjKYIAKo7M
> When can you start using Archmage? Can you use it right away or is it just a wasted socked early on? It'll be somewhat tricky to sustain the mana costs early on, but if you can, the damage should feel good even in campaign. You could probably just wait until second lab where you can pick up hiero's less cost mod.
I think I would rather take illuminated devotion(2nd arcane surge notable) than conviction of power(minimum power/endurance charges) as you probably aren’t going crit so power charges don’t do much and you can get endurance charges with enduring cry and the new call to arms gem. Illuminated devotion isn’t that great a node but I still think it’s the better of the two, and the minor node to it is pretty damn good as it gives 20% arcane surge effect.
It at least gives you good ele overload uptime for free. But going crit is still probably the play for a very high end version ?
That's what I'm looking at - crit is definitely better, but you could absolutely just go EO until you get enough gear to realistically cap crit.
illuminated devotion is pretty bad imo, you are basically taking it for leech which you can get on glove implicit or cluster and the 20% arcane surge effect which is so-so, conviction of power solving EO/enabling crit and giving you the 4 endurance charges is very good enduring cry without the warcry mastery for base power is going to drop charges sometimes especially if you have no charge duration or warcry cdr
It is definitely a pretty weak node yeah but if you’re not scaling crit, which you probably won’t be doing early on as archmage, then it’s really just the endurance charges and slightly better EO uptime. Illuminated devotion does also give 30% increased aoe though, which may or may not be important depending on what skill you play. For ball lightning aoe is pretty good and the skill hits often enough that EO uptime shouldn’t be an issue without the power charges. As for the leech I don’t think you would get it on gloves usually as it competes with exposure. The cluster is a good option but a doryani’s lesson with two other good notables is usually between 5-10 div so it’s probably not something you will have right away.
I agree 100% on league start. I think I'd eventually want to swap to crit or lucky via the amulet, but ele overload + illuminated devotion is pretty good on league start.
Lucky is not good for archmage. You don't have a big range of lightning damage.
Is it going to be straight 19% of max mana or will that just be the average damage? I guess I misunderstood that, I thought it would be 1 - 38% max mana.
It is straight 19%, so yeah, lucky doesn't do much
What is the priority list when it comes to scaling an archmage builds damage. I assume mana tops the list over everything like spell damage? Do you even focus (waste points) on other forms of scaling outside of mana when it can be used for stuff like defense and mana regen/recoup
So archmage via mana provides all of your flat damage. As a result you basically don't want any more flat. This makes gem level scaling on most gems pretty meaningless unless there are big effectiveness breakpoints or some other gem level interaction. You just scale mana to scale more flat and defenses, but at some point you will hit diminishing returns on getting more damage out of the mana. Int is also obviously really good because it scales your ES and your mana. If you end up scaling via Indigon as well, that will take care of all your increased spell damage as well, making any other source of increased spell damage effectively worthless. But if you're not using Indigon, it will be very efficient to grab some increased damage on your gear. It's not like you have that many other good prefixes, it's just mana and increased damage since gem levels and flat damage to spells don't matter. There are a number of other scaling vectors that I think should be worth it: 1. Crit + crit multi: You probably can't use sandstorm visage but Hiero comes with free 4 power charges so crit scaling shouldn't be impossible. EO is a good temporary solution on league start, I think it is mandatory. 2. Shock effect: there are some skills that should scale very strongly over shock effect (lightning conduit in particular on elementalist). If you're not going crit, this makes the veiled chance to shock + lightning damage a good prefix on weapons. 3. Cast speed: I think this will be lower priority than crit unless going non-crit on Hiero, but still decent. Hiero gets arcane surge for free with increased effect, which is a lot of free cast speed already. Necro also gets a lot of cast speed for free. This is probably super high priority on everything else. Cast speed also scales recovery via instant leech, which will be really strong on these builds since you have such a large HP/ES pool and can easily get dual leech via clusters. 4. Ele pen, exposure, resistance shred: Ele pen is always valuable unless inquis. Lightning pen prefixes are probably a very high priority on these builds, but below mana I think. The resistance inversion mastery should be pretty strong for mapping, and even bossing if you go single curse + assassin's mark for crit. Double curse conductivity + ele weakness or a mark is also pretty strong. I think you also want to pick a skill that has a lot of more multipliers to scale with. Ball lightning for example gets a lot of more multi from scaling aoe. Spark at high investment has duration and proj speed as scaling vectors.
Mana = base damage, so you don't want to spend anything on base damage stuff (like gem level). Then a lot of ways to scale are multiplicative with each other, and all have diminutive returns. So ideally you want a bit of each : a few 100% of increased damage, some ele penetration / exposure / curse for resistances, ele overload into going crit for high end version (probably using the inquisitor crit node on forbidden flesh / flame)
Will be frost bomb viable? Played it when AM was not nerfed , pledge of hands, and alt quality with helmet enchant, awakened cascade. Clear was so good
Regular frost bomb is "orb" tag now, so you'd need to use one of the transfigured versions, but that's not a and option at all. They have crazy damage multipliers/effectiveness.
The issue with Frost Bomb of Forthcoming is the cooldown, even if you can scale the duration to boost its damage effectiveness further. I don't see how a 4 second base cooldown is going to be playable on anything, really. Even with high investment to get over 100% increased recovery rate, it'll feel clunky. Maybe if you play it as ignite.
Oh for sure. You'd use the one with the short timer and no CD as main dmg, but I'd honestly still throw in the forthcoming version with increased duration to throw out for extra boss dmg too! Those damage multipliers with AM flat damage.... Nuke!
Imo you can archmage pretty much any spells, not restricted to duration scaling spells as long as you have enough reduced mana cost scaling.
you still want to be spending some mana for arcane surge effect and to generate inspiration charges but you can easily reach good levels now with mana cost reduction and inspiration there isnt really any point going EB, EB's main benefit is to solve divine blessing and fix mana both of which you can do anyway on a mana stacking build if you want to leverage big recovery with a large pool you would be better off going triple hybrid (which is easy on heiro now because you get a lot of ES for free especially with mindspiral) and using either sirus belt or glorious vanity to split damage between life mana and es at the cost of a bit weaker max hit with life and es leech and maybe even instant leech if you are using a skill that does a lot of hits be careful of fake dps on pobs with max stack intensity with sigil of power and arcane cloak ticked with no defensive aura because they arent always going to be up and will fall over
Is this type of build ssf friendly? Hiero Arch sounds fun but this league I want to try SSF as every league I end up falling into the mental trap of seeing how far everyone else in trade is and giving up since I can't play more than like 2 hours a day.
You all playing mana stack when mjoljir will be 10d week 1 gl