How to best scale 100% fire damage molten strike?

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Peterlerock a écrit :

1. Life management:
Avatar of fire forces you to use either the life leech gem or those two items:

Life leech gem: serious blow to damage
Doryani items: pretty good (though nowhere near "ideal"), but that's only 2% leech (3% when dualwielding Doryani's).

True, leech is a bit rough with full elemental damage. But as an alternative to using those uniques or the LL gem, it's also possible to get fire damage leech off of Vaal'ing items, and Level 6 Catarina can add '1% fire damage leeched as health' onto a few weapon types, including staves.

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2. Mana management:
You'll either need Clarity + mana (regen) on gear and tree, or the mana leech or blood magic gem.
There's no "Fire damage leeched as mana" available on gear.
Paying with mana regen can be done, but it costs skillpoints and affixes and aura reservation.
Paying with gems is again a serious blow to damage.
During testing, I found that "mana on kill" or "gain mana when hit" from the tree is not enough to sustain a full 6L molten strike.

Get Revelry in the duelist area, and get some cost reduction nodes (there's gonna be a solid cluster between the marauder and templar, 20% health and 19% reduced costs for 4 points). If nothing else, you can also carry a Hybrid Flask along in place of a second health flask (or instead of a 3rd utility flask.

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3. To use hatred to 100%, you need Pyre.
Pyre is not a great ring.

Yeah, can't really argue with that. And if you're taking Pyre then the cold-to-fire aspect of Avatar of Fire is kinda worthless. It's not the worst ring, but you can do better for sure.

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4. Avatar of Fire's main benefit (I would even say: "only" benefit) is that the high "more damage" multiplier of the Weapon Elemental Damage gem now applies to 100% of your damage.
Everything else gets weaker!

Well, there's also the ability to get higher magnitude Ignite procs than you'd be able to get without AoF.

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5. Fire Damage % from the tree is not only lower than normal weapon damage %, it is also inferior in general (doesn't apply before Hatred/HoA damage is calculated).

that's not the way it works, there is no 'before' and 'after' timing when it comes to when bonuses are applied in conversion cases, meaning something like '20% increased physical damage' produces just as much of a bonus to HoA's added fire damage as '20% increased fire damage', regardless of how much other increased fire or physical damage you have elsewhere. Since all of his damage in some regard is derived from physical damage and all of it winds up as fire damage, increased fire damage is virtually identical to increased physical damage, and he in no way has to bother with fire damage nodes to scale his damage.

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Shppy a écrit :

Get Revelry in the duelist area, and get some cost reduction nodes (there's gonna be a solid cluster between the marauder and templar, 20% health and 19% reduced costs for 4 points).

Again, that's skillpoints.
Skillpoints for travelling there (you maybe don't want to), skillpoints for mana cost, mana management.
Skillpoints that are neither damage nor survivability (ok, there's this new life/mana cost cluster, but that also may be off your pathing and therefor quite expensive).

Without AoF, you don't need any investment at all.
One affix on gloves or jewelry and enough int to use your blue skillgems, and you're pretty much set.

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themoleium a écrit :

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Boem a écrit :

Another funny thing is, you can link "more melee damage" and "more weapon elemental damage" and "fire penetration" on your attack to get 3 active MORE multipliers on your damage

I think it's important to note that the more melee damage multi here doesn't affect the projectiles, so if you're not using melee splash* it's not worth using this as the more will only affect a single target.

If you can reach them the Iron Grip + Point Blank keystone passives are awesome with molten strike, or you can use the skill gem versions of point blanks (not iron grip, it sucks unless you have stupidly huge str).

*No one seems to use melee splash with MS, but I've found if you're not scaling projectiles directly then the clear speed boost this gives is awesome, and with LGoH you get instant leech from both your AoE melee hits and the projectiles.

Also there's a really good thread about molten strike here if you haven't seen it:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/911557

This is incorrect.

The projectiles are directly scaled of your initial melee hit.

Increase the damage of that initial hit and the projectiles will also deal more damage. You can scale the projectiles separately if you want, but then like you mention, you lose out on initial hit damage.

The reverse however is not true.

@Peter, the ability to utilize 4 MORE support gems is a powerfull tool.

more melee on full life/more melee/more WeD/fire pen

All of these can be applied to a AoF char and act like more multipliers if you convert 100%, it is extremely powerfull for a RT character that otherwise has very limited scaling potential.(due to not having crit obviously)

Another thing to note is that you can use LgoH if your going molten, coupled with good attack speed the sustain on this is beyond ridicules.

I agree with your main point do, this build is not easy and requires investment both in gear and passive tree, but when done correctly it can be very powerful.

Peace,

-Boem-

(OP, it might be worth investing in the double curse node if your going to the fire circle above witch, double curses to reduce resistances act like another MORE multiplier with this build)

edit : typo

Thank you for all the further insight and advice, noted!

I planned to scale my projectiles heavily, using point blank and iron grip. I am also toying with the idea of using conc effect, but also grabbing the amplify nodes so I gain the "more" Area Damage from the gem plus 8% inc AoE damage from node while only losing 10% of my radius. If not I will maybe use conc for single target if I need to and skip the amplify cluster.

My tree plan passes through the life and mana reservation cluster, AoF and also the Revelry node (also the +8 mana on block looks nice and I planned to grab the block nodes there) so I am not spending points to travel to them as such, but I plan to tweak as I level up... starting off I will grab the BM node, then as soon as I get a 5L I will use BM gem and get Hatred and Herald of Ash on my Mana (maybe tempest shield too).

Later on I will either grab a doryani's or soul taker (if the build is working well). I am also considering running a low-medium lvl clarity on my HP. If I get soul taker then mana will not be a problem, but if not I have some plans to take care of mana.

The life and mana leech problems from no physical damage is something I have considered, Life on Hit worked great for my molten strike in the last league due to high attack speed so that should sustain me until I can work something out.

I will also have an energy shield pool, aegis shield and decent armour (for es on block). I am not going to attempt to max my block as I have done in the past, but with a sufficient es pool to let the es gain from block stack up and "ok" block chance for attacks and spells I think it should give me great survivability.

Also a note on the Pyre, I know it sucks a bit.. but I do love to blow stuff up! Infernal blow melee splash just desyncs like crazy for me, even though I love it. At least with the pyre I now have a kinda "Molten Blow!" it should be fun :P

All of this is still just ideas in my head and nothing is set in stone yet, I have a new idea every 5 minutes waiting for this league to start it seems!

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Boem a écrit :

(OP, it might be worth investing in the double curse node if your going to the fire circle above witch, double curses to reduce resistances act like another MORE multiplier with this build)

Great idea! so I can curse with Flamm and Elly Weakness? sounds like fun for 100% fire damage :)

Some thing's to note.

Forget pyre imo. get a better overall ring for more EHP.

Maybe go with a 2-hander instead of 1h/shield.

Now that you don't have pyre you can use proliferate to spread the burn.

Don't use conc effect, it is senselles since you can use other MORE multipliers.

I did a 2-hander AOE/prolif build like you are thinking off with mokou's embrace ring and gang's momentum boots (look at the wiki unique list if you don't know these items)

It had around 55% ignite chance with doryani's fire belt and all of those %ignite items + passive points.

All i did was run into a pack, use a potion(to activate doryani's ignite buff) and hit two times in a row and then everything burned to dead around me.

I used herald of ash i think and hatred(no pyre) and i just used a tabula rasa for the 6-link and it performed excellent.

The thing is, for fire based builds with ignite etc, doing a very strong single hit will always trump a succession of small rapid hits. Because of the way ignite works. (and also prolif if your smart)

Maybe if the build proves successful you could swap to 1h+shield at a later stage with a doryani's i agree, but i would definitely start out with a 2h-mace or something strong for leveling purposses and gathering initial gear.

And proliferate is OP¨with stuff like this.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Boem a écrit :

Forget pyre imo. get a better overall ring for more EHP.
-Boem-

But my poor Molten Blow :(

I see what you guys are saying, I lose room for lots of potential mods using pyre. Would I not lose damage from my Fire Pen nodes + Gem + Curse if I am not dealing 100% fire?

If you utilize molten strike + AoF you are already dealing 100% fire damage.

AoF does not allow you to do any other source of damage then fire.

In terms of hatred, that means it is only giving 50% damage instead of 100% without pyre.

For me this worked out since i was using a slow heavy hitting 2h-mace, it gave me more damage then "anger" aura. If you are going with 1h/shield and will be hitting rather fast, "anger" will be better for you since it adds fire damage per hit.

Also the reason why i say "don't use pyre" is two-fold.

It's a ring with mediocre stats at best, a good ring might be better in the end-game for you. (preferably with fire damage on it or physical/hp/ + resists)

Also it destroy's corpses, and i would highly recommend using the "proliferate" gem with this build, sadly you cannot use proliferate if there are no corpses.

Basically with proliferate you turn molten strike from a single target strong skill with a little bit of build in AOE, into a heavy single target nuke skill that turns AOE when you ignite.

You can do the herald of ash proliferate trick, but that will use a lot of mana reservation. I found prolif on my molten strike directly more efficient.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Vipermagi a écrit :

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Boem a écrit :

The projectiles are directly scaled of your initial melee hit.

Nope nope nope nope nope nope.

The Projectiles are entirely separate from the Melee Hit.

Strength increases the Melee Hit Damage, and it has exactly zero effect whatsoever on the Projectiles, directly or otherwise. After all, it's a Melee-specific modifier, and the Projectiles do not deal Melee Damage, nor are they relative to the Melee Hit Damage.

Don't the projectiles deal 60% of the melee hit ? So if you increase your melee initial hit, that 60% will be higher then without that scaling?

like initial melee hit 100 damage = projectiles do 60 damage

increase initial hit to 200 damage = projectiles do 120 damage

Or am i missing something?

Peace,

-Boem-