New 'Elemental Hit' conceptually broken?

As I understand the developer posts 'Elemental Hit' adds all three damage lines on the gem to the hit(*).

Furthermore conversion applies before the elemental choice.

So with a conversion setup like 2x 'Call of the Brotherhood', Avatar of Fire, 'Cold to Fire'(**) it will be possible to convert most damage to fire.

With the 2 respective threshold jewels it will then only do fire damage.

What I dont see here is how it will be possible to balance this gem so that a normal use is competitive with a conversion use. Or do I somehow miss something here?


For maximizing 'Ignite' damage the threshold jewels may not be strictly necessary.

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Another somewhat related point: The damage values on the gem are also subjected to the 188% scaling: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/8mi3cu/shower_thought_the_new_elemental_hit_will_have/dzorx1i/

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Maybe interesting to some - base radius of the explosion is 10: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/8mi3cu/shower_thought_the_new_elemental_hit_will_have/dzot07x/

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(*) The whole thing has been speculated in several threads already. New however are the developer explanations: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/8mi3cu/shower_thought_the_new_elemental_hit_will_have/
Best link in there is probably: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/8mi3cu/shower_thought_the_new_elemental_hit_will_have/dzoru73/
The followup verifies the conversion.

(**) There may be better setups - not an attempt to make the best build.

Wait... the 188% apply to the damage added by the gem O.o

So I assumed that with a 1.5 APS weapon (not much) the pure Firedamage (no conversion) is basically a 990, which is about 100 below Fireball. But with the 188% The base damage is a lot more and moves close towards 1900. And if you then convert Cold and Lightning on top of that its pretty balls.

And of course you should be a lazy bastard and use Ranged Attack Totems with Rain of Splinters (thats the +2 Projectile Jewel right?) as Hierophant and manually cast something that chills like Arctic Breath or Vortex and be done with everything.

@Zrevnur

I was actually thinking of dual element Elemental Hit build scaling elemental damage and taking advantage of EE.

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Emphasy a écrit :

Wait... the 188% apply to the damage added by the gem O.o

So I assumed that with a 1.5 APS weapon (not much) the pure Firedamage (no conversion) is basically a 990, which is about 100 below Fireball. But with the 188% The base damage is a lot more and moves close towards 1900. And if you then convert Cold and Lightning on top of that its pretty balls.

And of course you should be a lazy bastard and use Ranged Attack Totems with Rain of Splinters (thats the +2 Projectile Jewel right?) as Hierophant and manually cast something that chills like Arctic Breath or Vortex and be done with everything.

Wow, I did not expect that. I thought this gem was pretty strong already. But having the 188% apply to the Elemental Hit's listed damage makes it bonkers.

I can only assume this will get nerfed.


EDIT: format

Yeah, the interaction with conversion, ESPECIALLY Avatar of Fire, is going to be problematic.

And in B4 come 2.4.0, GGG nerfs Avatar of Fire to have no upside and just say "deal no non-fire damage," instead of actually correcting their mistakes. :V

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Zrevnur a écrit :

So with a conversion setup like 2x 'Call of the Brotherhood', Avatar of Fire, 'Cold to Fire'(**) it will be possible to convert most damage to fire.

Using a pair of Call of the Brotherhood alongside Avatar of Fire will actually convert away all your lightning damage. (similarly on standard, one legacy CotB with Avatar of Fire will work)

If you have your conversions FROM a type split TO multiple types, they still convert it all if it adds up to at least 100%; the game merely pro-rates it down to 100% if the sum exceeds 100%. E.g:

• 1xCotB (Legacy 50%) + Avatar of Fire = 50% lightning converted to cold, 50% to fire.
  
• 2xCotB (current 40%) + Avatar of Fire = ~61.5% lightning converted to cold, ~38.5% to fire.

And of course, the normal stipulation that you can then move on to convert all that cold to fire still applies in either case.

If we DO want to talk about the ideal builds... We can consider gems, but have to weigh the investment cost compared to adding other gems. Remember that we expect a "more" multiplier out of each support gem slot. If we grossly simplify to say that each element starts at the same damage... (it doesn't; as usual, lightning is arbitrarily higher and cold lower) then in a fire-only setup, Avatar of Fire effectively doubles our damage output, by taking a half-share from the lightning and cold sides and adding them to fire.

The trick then, is once we have that? ~2/3 of our damage is fire, and 1/6th each for cold and lightning. (well, if we wanted to be specific, it's averages of 1,180.75 fire, 245 cold, and 336.75 lightning) This means that converting our remaining cold damage to fire is only worth a damage "more" of 20.7495%. (e.g, adding 245 to our 1,180.75)

On that alone, it'd frown upon use of the Cold-to-Fire Support, since that's decidedly a weak multiplier. However, the gem is the game's only source of "gain xx% of cold damage as extra fire damage," hitting 29% at level 20. Since this step applies while we still have all the cold damage before converting it to fire, it becomes +387.1, or... 32.7842% "more." Not a HUGE amount better, but I guess to where it might start to feel viable.

Of course, if we convert some of our lightning damage over, that does change the numbers further e.g, one 40% Call of the Brotherhood will move 269.4 lightning over to cold, leaving just 67.35 average lightning damage "lost." Such a setup would, BEFORE "Cold to Fire Support," put us at 1,560.45 average Fire damage, with 379.7 cold and 67.35 lightning. Tossing on our gem would be worth +523.986, but our percentage "more" that gem is worth only bumps up to 33.5792%. The lack of huge change is in part because we ALREADY were converting half our cold damage to fire already, and that'd take up half of the additional damage converted from lightning to cold.

This also means that, with so much damage ALREADY converted, some of our flat sources don't add a ton, in SPITE of that 188% effectiveness of added damage:

• Immolate Support: 27.36-40.8401% more (482.22 avg.; max is with just AoF, min is if 100% converted to fire)
  
• Added Cold Damage (if 100% cold-fire conversion) = 25.36% more, or 19.0756% if we have a CotB as well. (+397.62 avg.)
  
• Added Lightning Damage (if 90% conversion; AoF+CotB) = 19.0756% more (+397.62 avg.)
  
• Wrath (if 90% conversion; AoF+CotB) = 11.9054% more (+248.16 avg.)
  
• Herald of Ice: 4.2390% more (+88.36 avg.)
  
• Herald of Lightning: 3.8557% more (+80.37 avg.)

In the end, it seems that POSSIBLY the highest DPS may involve some sacrifice in the base damage, but a LOT of gear investment, since we can use Pyre to gain 40% cold to fire conversion. (100% for legacy) This would go with a Call of the Brotherhood, tying up BOTH of your ring slots for... Not much beyond the damage conversion. GRANTED, that'd bump your damage by 34.2820% more than just taking Avatar of Fire for no gem investment, so it may wind up being what many people build.

I guess part of it will depend on what people decide are good gem choices; Elemental Damage with Attacks and Fire Penetration are no-brainers, but beyond that there's a lot that's not entirely settled; Elemental Focus may or may not be in given the supposed new life ignites will have.

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Abdiel_Kavash a écrit :

At the least I hope that the thresholds will be very rare, so that the build has a price. From the little theorycrafting I did so far, it is absolutely disgusting.

Rarity has NEVER been a good balancing factor in this game. All it's done is ensure that the OP stuff just becomes accessible ONLY to the most elite, further reinforcing the divide between the level of play they can achieve versus all the other players.

To be honest, since fixing this would require GGG's programming staff to learn a couple new tricks (as suggested by Mark's claims that some things are "impossible" in code spite of some of us demonstrating how that's not the case) I'd prefer they just release the gem at full imbalance as we saw it. If they nerf the damage values before release it'll just make it ONLY ever viable to go fire conversion. (with the intended EE abuse route being worse than dominating blow)

Fortunately, since the problems are all within the gem itself, and not something created by a specific data value for the jewels, this could be patched out in 2.4.0 without leaving any legacies whatsoever.

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ACGIFT a écrit :

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Zrevnur a écrit :

So with a conversion setup like 2x 'Call of the Brotherhood', Avatar of Fire, 'Cold to Fire'(**) it will be possible to convert most damage to fire.

Using a pair of Call of the Brotherhood alongside Avatar of Fire will actually convert away all your lightning damage. (similarly on standard, one legacy CotB with Avatar of Fire will work)

What I meant to imply by adding 'most' is that this setup will still kill off 50% of the phys (and all of the chaos if there is any) damage.

(And you are right that my setup isnt a good build - I dont have proper expertise with conversion builds anyway.)

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Edit: Unfortunately the Skill Revamps - Part 6 makes no mention of any planned 'Elemental Hit' changes.

Edit 2: Adding to previous edit - there is this:

"

We wanted to compete with Kinetic Blast if possible, but even after our changes we're not fully happy with the balance between Kinetic Blast, Power Siphon and Elemental Hit. We're likely to revisit wand skill balance in the future, improving the mechanics as well as fleshing out the skill options available.

Looks like they nerfed it a bit in comparison with the first announcement.

From 1104.5 to 827 avg damage per hit.

And the 188% is gone so any "external" damage is nerfed too.

No indication that the inherent issue has been addressed though.

With full conversion this makes for a cumulative maximum of 2481 * 1.3 = 3225 damage per hit at lvl 20.
This looks a bit high to me. (My guess is they will make the jewels rare even if they originally intended otherwise.)
(Assuming 'Elemental Ailment' means 'Elemental Ailment Type' == multiples of the same type dont count.)

Source: Original Announcement
Source: New Gem Stats

the only 'fix' to this blunder is simply disabling jewels. but i presume it is too difficult and shall wait for 3.4

this way they can create a lengthy manifesto about how wanders and single target solution improved: "look! it is not Barrage/KB only! people use various stuff.. like Elemental Hit!"

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Zrevnur a écrit :

Looks like they nerfed it a bit in comparison with the first announcement.

From 1104.5 to 827 avg damage per hit.

Not quite sure where you got that; from where I calculated, the gem's base damage has been amped by approximately 40.8%. (Avatar-of-Fire-only damage went from 1,180.75 to 1,662.0)

And yeah, it'd be weird to get rid of the "effectiveness of added damage" stat, since any single-hit namelocking skill otherwise has a value above 100%. With raw values THIS high (higher than the base damage of any weapon in the game) it likely makes it pointless to invest much into added damage. (e.g, Anger is a waste of mana reservation; haste would pretty much always be a superior DPS effect)

Fortunately, this doesn't change my math that much. It's been a little tricky, but I'm closing in on an "ideal" build for this. (weird thing: I'm having trouble actually making it work on DEADEYE. Y'know, the obvious meta pick for this. Which isn't QUITE as much a problem to me, 'cuz I wanna try a CI Trickster again)

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sidtherat a écrit :

the only 'fix' to this blunder is simply disabling jewels. but i presume it is too difficult and shall wait for 3.4

That'd be more fair than "just make the threshold jewels ludicrously rare" route, at least.

AS making them rare won't stop those builds: it'll just restrict them to the top handful of streamers and no-lifers, resulting in the game's main issue (of being too frustrating for any but the most devoted in spite of Chris claiming PoE is a "game to play while watching Netflix")

I mean, with going AoF being basically mandatory already, even if the jewels were as common as others, I'd expect them to be worth in the exalt range, give or take. Only way to have them in circulation and NOT be ludicrously inflated is if they're made available as a quest reward in Act 5, like many other threshold jewels.

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ACGIFT a écrit :

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Zrevnur a écrit :

Looks like they nerfed it a bit in comparison with the first announcement.

From 1104.5 to 827 avg damage per hit.

Not quite sure where you got that; from where I calculated, the gem's base damage has been amped by approximately 40.8%. (Avatar-of-Fire-only damage went from 1,180.75 to 1,662.0)

The old numbers needed to be multiplied by 1.88 to get their real values (since they were added damage).