The reason spark is so good is because it can stack the damage its dealing with it's multiple projectiles. You can apply the same concept with other skills that creates more projectiles. The more times you can create things that do damage the more damage you will deal. So even if spark gets nerfed it will probably still be the better skill overall.
The majority of damage is actually from Archmage buff. So its like this 1 hit of arc applies 1 hit of archmage. where spark will hit with like 5 archmages its not the 5 extra hits of spark damage but the 5 extra hits of Archmage that's making the major difference.......So reducing the effectiveness of Archmage on spark by 80% would mean that it would effectively take 5 hits of spark to apply 1 hit of archmage which will even out the damage to something like arc. This will still make spark great and useable with and without archmage but bringing it in line with archmage.
You have the idea but it's not solely archmages fault. Build a crit scaling build and spark will out perform arc. Build a shock scaling build and spark will out perform arc. And for this instance archmage and mana scaling, spark will out perform arc. Spark just offers more projectiles for better scaling.
@ True...but I'm just concerned that the only way spark being effective is using archmage...if they nerf spark they make spark only useable with archmage.
@@Basedard Currently, I think archmage is in the right spot for the investment. You require many specific stats on gear and/or unique items to scale it to the absolute top end. This causes expensive currency wise builds that are the "chase" builds. If everything archmage or related to archmage gets nerfed, then those things will become nonviable without archmage or archmage's downsides don't makeup for the investment. I think the real issue is that other options should be buffed, so that spark has competition. Arc should have scaling that chains while forking off the main hits maybe with a "more damage per remaining chain" mod. If other elemental options get better mechancis than maybe fire/ice gets shown to be stronger in certain scenarios.
I know you have issues with the mana cost, but if you want to use arc, you absolutely need to be using mana tempest. The thing with mana tempest is that it turns arc into almost a mini Vaal Arc on demand from poe 1 - it not only drastically powers up the damage of Arc, it is a massive and incredible boost to its mobbing power. If you get quality on Mana Tempest, you can put down MT and cast Arc while constantly moving, and you will get a few empowetef blasts of Arc out which should generally be way more than enough for casual mobbing. It will still struggle in mass AoE scenarios like juiced breaches, however. Regardless, if you seriously want to use Arc, you need to use Mana Tempest. Put Inspiration on Mana Tempest if you need to control its cost, but in general you should not need to be sitting in Mana Tempest for long enough for the ramping mana drain to matter while mapping. Don't forget that Arc gets more damage from more chains. While it is true that the "gain as extra" portion of Mana Tempest falls off as you stack more and more mana for Archmage, Mana Tempest will always remain a significant power boost to Arc in particular. In the end, PoE still heavily favors anything that can either chain explode or offscreen via projectiles. Spark can do the latter while Arc cannot.
good points...but that's an extra button and condition required to make Arc still not as good as spark. Plus given that I use mana as my defensive layer I don't want to be at low mana at any point. Some Adjustments to mana tempest would be cool turn it into a buff that last 2 seconds instead of something you have to stand it would be dope.
I totally agree with your opinion about your playstyle. Same to me I don´t like to search for the most efficient way to farm I just wanna have fun experimenting with gear and skills I like. Thanks for your entertainment! Cheers, Sebastian
I'm pretty sure that they removed flat added damage to spells going into poe2 so they wouldn't have to add any extra lines like you're suggesting. Archmage is percentage added damage, so they would probably just nerf sparks base damage at higher lvls
Yeah but spark without archmage is actually pretty underpowered. Its that 'Extra damage as' that is causing the problem with spark. Because 20 projectiles all get that extra damage for each projectile you hit with 5 projectiles it amplifies the effect. In Poe1 there was the damage effectiveness which seems to be lacking from most spells. What I would do is Add in the 'effectiveness of added damage' to Spark to reduce the amount of power it gets from Archmage. This will allow none archmage spark builds to still be bad ass while at the same time nerfing Archmage spark...but also allowing Archamge to be just as powerful for things like Arc............can't wait for POB2
@@Basedard They have clearly balanced the skills by giving them different base damage instead of added damage effectiveness. Since there are no sources of flat added damage to spells in PoE2, this is effectively the same thing. Archmage and wand modifiers for instance, that are 'Gain % of damage as extra # damage', are gaining a percentage of that skill's base damage as extra damage. Meaning that it would add less flat damage if they were to simply lower the base damage of the skill, having the same effect as added damage effectiveness without having to add it into the game. The numbers are the same for what you are suggesting, it would be an unnecessary additional balancing axis that it is clear they want to move away from. That's why instead of ball lightning having a 30% added damage effectiveness, it just does like 0.002 base damage for instance. So if they lowered spark's base damage by 40% let's say, and then didn't touch archmage, then Arc would be just as effective as always, while spark would just do 40% less damage on average with Archmage.
@@Basedard again, it"s a multiplier on sparks base damage. Any scaling behaves this way with spark. When you use demon form to get crazy multiplier instead of archmage, it's also true that spark is 10 times stronger than arc for example. So it is really sparks base damage in combination with the many projectiles that is the issue. Spark has exponential scaling as both damage and number of projectiles goes up and speed plus fork/chain/pierce multiply the hits again.
yeah I think archmage is perfectly fine as is....They should nerf its interaction with skill the dump out multiple projectiles....Like 50% reduced damage with fireball and 80% reduced damage with spark so other skill like ARC can use archmage and aren't OP with it.
nice video, i just stopped playing after xmas came, chilling out till the big patch drops and I see what is nerfed/buffed so I can decide what I wanna play next
i feel the same way about ice strike, its just better than all the other quarterstaff skills. i have a chronomancer where i use the curse slow/duration nodes and dmg vs ailment/hindered enemies to synergize with ice bite and innervate (25%of dmg as extra cold/lightning) which i proc with falling thunder. with 2 clusters a jewel and a support i got 10 seconds on both, but its pointless because i just hold down ice strike and delete everything anyway.
a couple things i would like to see in the ark vs spark situation: 1: arc and spark swaps cast speed, ie make spark 1.1s cast and arc .7s cast 2: arc should have chance to chain to an additional enemy, similar to fork. 3: arc should be able to bounce off of players if no available enemy in order to hit a single target multiple times. 4: increase the speed of which arc bounces between enemies.
@@GE_Photon_Lord havent seen a meta build using hydrosphere and arc. but would 2/3 be more broken than current spark in poe2? could also make it so instead of chaining from any player, it can be chained to and absorbed by the caster to empower the next cast. just something to make thematic sense of having a chaining arc between the caster and the target to improve arc's single target to make it similar in strength to the shotgunning, piercing, wall bouncing spark.
@@cranberrysauce61 To be fair, poe1 arc has more chains and the alt gem gave a lot more. All of them were shotgunning the boss. It was an assassin burst build that I'm not sure if it got patched already. Here it's probably fine, but people manage to still break these interactions. Maybe 3 chains with high damage in poe2 will be enough to one shot bosses, so that might not be ok.
@@GE_Photon_Lord yeah, its just that i view spark as the aoe clearing skill and arc 'should' be the single target counter part. but spark is outperforming arc in the single target and clearing. so i think either help arc in clearing and/or increasing arc single target would be good for game diversity.
@@cranberrysauce61 Nah arc should also be good for clear, that's the beauty of it. The alt version enabled a busted burst build. In poe1 arc was an insane mapper, but here feels like it's good at nothing. Mid damage mid clear. Spark in poe1 is good at clear and bossing with investment in a lot of places, all these skills should do both things, especially lightning in general.
Ball lightning with the 3 projectile gem + Unleash on Lightning warp is great fun if you're not wanting to just spark spam. I'm running the 12% mana on cull and 4% energy shield on kill gems in lightning warp too so it plays beautifully into the recoup mechanics. It's like playing a flicker strike monk.
@@Basedard You need to cull yes. But lightning warp does cull, and seems to prioritise it over the ball lightnings when it's unleashing. It's a super fun build and frankly requires the same gear and just different support gems to spark, so you can run them alongside each other pretty easy. I keep spark on my bar for when I can't be arsed to run up to a small group of mobs and just wanna zap them from long range.
The reason spark is so good is because it can stack the damage its dealing with it's multiple projectiles. You can apply the same concept with other skills that creates more projectiles. The more times you can create things that do damage the more damage you will deal. So even if spark gets nerfed it will probably still be the better skill overall.
The majority of damage is actually from Archmage buff. So its like this 1 hit of arc applies 1 hit of archmage. where spark will hit with like 5 archmages its not the 5 extra hits of spark damage but the 5 extra hits of Archmage that's making the major difference.......So reducing the effectiveness of Archmage on spark by 80% would mean that it would effectively take 5 hits of spark to apply 1 hit of archmage which will even out the damage to something like arc. This will still make spark great and useable with and without archmage but bringing it in line with archmage.
You have the idea but it's not solely archmages fault. Build a crit scaling build and spark will out perform arc. Build a shock scaling build and spark will out perform arc. And for this instance archmage and mana scaling, spark will out perform arc. Spark just offers more projectiles for better scaling.
@ True...but I'm just concerned that the only way spark being effective is using archmage...if they nerf spark they make spark only useable with archmage.
@@Basedard Currently, I think archmage is in the right spot for the investment. You require many specific stats on gear and/or unique items to scale it to the absolute top end. This causes expensive currency wise builds that are the "chase" builds. If everything archmage or related to archmage gets nerfed, then those things will become nonviable without archmage or archmage's downsides don't makeup for the investment.
I think the real issue is that other options should be buffed, so that spark has competition. Arc should have scaling that chains while forking off the main hits maybe with a "more damage per remaining chain" mod. If other elemental options get better mechancis than maybe fire/ice gets shown to be stronger in certain scenarios.
I know you have issues with the mana cost, but if you want to use arc, you absolutely need to be using mana tempest. The thing with mana tempest is that it turns arc into almost a mini Vaal Arc on demand from poe 1 - it not only drastically powers up the damage of Arc, it is a massive and incredible boost to its mobbing power. If you get quality on Mana Tempest, you can put down MT and cast Arc while constantly moving, and you will get a few empowetef blasts of Arc out which should generally be way more than enough for casual mobbing. It will still struggle in mass AoE scenarios like juiced breaches, however. Regardless, if you seriously want to use Arc, you need to use Mana Tempest. Put Inspiration on Mana Tempest if you need to control its cost, but in general you should not need to be sitting in Mana Tempest for long enough for the ramping mana drain to matter while mapping.
Don't forget that Arc gets more damage from more chains. While it is true that the "gain as extra" portion of Mana Tempest falls off as you stack more and more mana for Archmage, Mana Tempest will always remain a significant power boost to Arc in particular.
In the end, PoE still heavily favors anything that can either chain explode or offscreen via projectiles. Spark can do the latter while Arc cannot.
good points...but that's an extra button and condition required to make Arc still not as good as spark. Plus given that I use mana as my defensive layer I don't want to be at low mana at any point. Some Adjustments to mana tempest would be cool turn it into a buff that last 2 seconds instead of something you have to stand it would be dope.
I totally agree with your opinion about your playstyle. Same to me I don´t like to search for the most efficient way to farm I just wanna have fun experimenting with gear and skills I like. Thanks for your entertainment! Cheers, Sebastian
I'm pretty sure that they removed flat added damage to spells going into poe2 so they wouldn't have to add any extra lines like you're suggesting. Archmage is percentage added damage, so they would probably just nerf sparks base damage at higher lvls
Yeah but spark without archmage is actually pretty underpowered. Its that 'Extra damage as' that is causing the problem with spark. Because 20 projectiles all get that extra damage for each projectile you hit with 5 projectiles it amplifies the effect. In Poe1 there was the damage effectiveness which seems to be lacking from most spells. What I would do is Add in the 'effectiveness of added damage' to Spark to reduce the amount of power it gets from Archmage. This will allow none archmage spark builds to still be bad ass while at the same time nerfing Archmage spark...but also allowing Archamge to be just as powerful for things like Arc............can't wait for POB2
@@Basedard They have clearly balanced the skills by giving them different base damage instead of added damage effectiveness. Since there are no sources of flat added damage to spells in PoE2, this is effectively the same thing. Archmage and wand modifiers for instance, that are 'Gain % of damage as extra # damage', are gaining a percentage of that skill's base damage as extra damage. Meaning that it would add less flat damage if they were to simply lower the base damage of the skill, having the same effect as added damage effectiveness without having to add it into the game. The numbers are the same for what you are suggesting, it would be an unnecessary additional balancing axis that it is clear they want to move away from. That's why instead of ball lightning having a 30% added damage effectiveness, it just does like 0.002 base damage for instance. So if they lowered spark's base damage by 40% let's say, and then didn't touch archmage, then Arc would be just as effective as always, while spark would just do 40% less damage on average with Archmage.
@@Basedard again, it"s a multiplier on sparks base damage. Any scaling behaves this way with spark. When you use demon form to get crazy multiplier instead of archmage, it's also true that spark is 10 times stronger than arc for example.
So it is really sparks base damage in combination with the many projectiles that is the issue. Spark has exponential scaling as both damage and number of projectiles goes up and speed plus fork/chain/pierce multiply the hits again.
I hope they don't nerf archmage too hard. It's the only thing propping up chronomancers ability to do decent damage late game.
*hopefully they buff chronomancer to not rely on one skill to work because it's dogshit and boring
yeah I think archmage is perfectly fine as is....They should nerf its interaction with skill the dump out multiple projectiles....Like 50% reduced damage with fireball and 80% reduced damage with spark so other skill like ARC can use archmage and aren't OP with it.
nice video, i just stopped playing after xmas came, chilling out till the big patch drops and I see what is nerfed/buffed so I can decide what I wanna play next
I'm trying to fight the final bosses before I wait for more content...but its taking FOREVER to get there.
I don’t think archmage is a problem. The forks and chains I think make other skills feel bad.
you could do the lightning warp lightning ball telestomp build and then conduit for big hits after stacking magnitude of shock
i feel the same way about ice strike, its just better than all the other quarterstaff skills. i have a chronomancer where i use the curse slow/duration nodes and dmg vs ailment/hindered enemies to synergize with ice bite and innervate (25%of dmg as extra cold/lightning) which i proc with falling thunder. with 2 clusters a jewel and a support i got 10 seconds on both, but its pointless because i just hold down ice strike and delete everything anyway.
yeah I wish I never used spark...I can't go back to Arc sad face.
a couple things i would like to see in the ark vs spark situation:
1: arc and spark swaps cast speed, ie make spark 1.1s cast and arc .7s cast
2: arc should have chance to chain to an additional enemy, similar to fork.
3: arc should be able to bounce off of players if no available enemy in order to hit a single target multiple times.
4: increase the speed of which arc bounces between enemies.
2 and 3 are broken. We already had a build in poe1 that was bouncing arcs off of hydrosphere.
@@GE_Photon_Lord havent seen a meta build using hydrosphere and arc. but would 2/3 be more broken than current spark in poe2?
could also make it so instead of chaining from any player, it can be chained to and absorbed by the caster to empower the next cast. just something to make thematic sense of having a chaining arc between the caster and the target to improve arc's single target to make it similar in strength to the shotgunning, piercing, wall bouncing spark.
@@cranberrysauce61 To be fair, poe1 arc has more chains and the alt gem gave a lot more. All of them were shotgunning the boss. It was an assassin burst build that I'm not sure if it got patched already.
Here it's probably fine, but people manage to still break these interactions. Maybe 3 chains with high damage in poe2 will be enough to one shot bosses, so that might not be ok.
@@GE_Photon_Lord yeah, its just that i view spark as the aoe clearing skill and arc 'should' be the single target counter part. but spark is outperforming arc in the single target and clearing. so i think either help arc in clearing and/or increasing arc single target would be good for game diversity.
@@cranberrysauce61 Nah arc should also be good for clear, that's the beauty of it. The alt version enabled a busted burst build. In poe1 arc was an insane mapper, but here feels like it's good at nothing. Mid damage mid clear.
Spark in poe1 is good at clear and bossing with investment in a lot of places, all these skills should do both things, especially lightning in general.
Ball lightning with the 3 projectile gem + Unleash on Lightning warp is great fun if you're not wanting to just spark spam. I'm running the 12% mana on cull and 4% energy shield on kill gems in lightning warp too so it plays beautifully into the recoup mechanics. It's like playing a flicker strike monk.
For the Mana on Cull do you need culling strike or does it work just killing?
@@Basedard You need to cull yes. But lightning warp does cull, and seems to prioritise it over the ball lightnings when it's unleashing. It's a super fun build and frankly requires the same gear and just different support gems to spark, so you can run them alongside each other pretty easy. I keep spark on my bar for when I can't be arsed to run up to a small group of mobs and just wanna zap them from long range.
@ Dope if I get time I'll 100% check this out.
Arc unleash plus mana tempest
Genius, but mana tempest is draining your mana so fast, it's like an inconsistent burst button. So it won't work.
yeah I tried it that mana usage is nuts.
@Basedard lifetap on spell. So it won't. Also inspiration on mana tempest helps a bit
@@ifursov doesnt that instant kill you as ci
@sillypuppygurl as ci I'm pretty much sure it will