Wondering about the viability of the title question. Does anyone have experience or thoughts on the viability of building a a rifle firestrike character but focusing more on lightning damage as primary instead of fire damage? In my particular case with Shaman that would also feed nicely into Stormcaller’s pact if I go there I think. I’m just not sure if the Lightning Damage provided by the Static Strike upgrade to Fire Strike will be enough to make this viable or not. I am currently at level 55 and working on points into Static Strike and it is hard to get a read on whether my lightning damage will catch up to fire damage in a way to make this workable. Obviously just by virtue of the build my fire damage will still be decent as a secondary source and I got lucky enough to have a Silverbolt drop in the Warden’s Lab last night so I have some pretty good pierce damage right now too.
Well, Shaman can just use Primal Strike, which is better for focusing on lightning damage actually. Shaman may use Demolisher’s skills to boost HIS own lightning damage, not vice versa.
Static Strike is good, but it has its limits. Usually, Fire Strike characters focus on fire/lightning damage, or fire/chaos. If you focus on lightning only, you may lose a big chunk of potential DPS.
If you are playing a Shaman build without 10/10 in Heart of the Wild, you are probably making a mistake. 40% bonus HP is INSANE. So you may want to factor that in somewhere.
Also, like what MortalKombat said, Primal Strike is probably better if you want a Lightning-oriented 2h Ranged build.
Not a big deal just focus on elemental damage devotions and get the ulzuins set.
I also play a Elementalist. The HUGE advantage is that I can put a lot of points in Demo and also focus to get Demo ultimate level. Shaman works with few godlike skills. Namely Hearth of the Wild, Wendigo Totem and Stormcaller.
40% HP, Best heal ingame and 50+% crit are tough to beat. Right now I do believe that Elementalist is superior to Sorc due to the fact that you can invest more into Demo utility (Mortar+Flashbang).
I also have a pretty ass build that I try to make work. It requires a specific items.
If you go Primal Stike that leads me to two questions:
Do you put the point in Thunderous Strike since you are going to use it as your primary attack? And if so is that going to cause you problems with Thunderous Strike not being considered a default weapon attack?
If you hyper focus on lightning damage that much will that cause you problems later on? I have not studied boss resistances so I’m really not sure how many might be problematic if you are almost 100% lightning damage. One benefit of Fire Strike/Static Strike I would think is that it will still have pretty decent fire damage as an alternate source for heavily resistant bosses but I really don’t know how much that comes into play.
Yes always take thunderous strike, huge dps boost on PS alone not to mention more procs for whatever devotion you bind to it. Not being able to use WPS isn’t an issue. The only thing you really miss out on is the healing from feral hunger, but we have plenty of sustain as is. PStrike+torrent is doing tons of aoe obliterating screens on it’s own so really all you lose is the healing
Against super resistant enemies it will slow down you down if you don’t have enough resist reduction, not a big dealio vs 98% of monsters. There is plenty of resistance options available to us
Not an issue at all, because you don’t use any WPS skills as a Shamon 2h Rifle build. It also has super sick synergy with any piercing rifle, like Will of Fate, or the probable BiS Vortex of Souls legendary (Hint, on VoS, you are abusing all the Aether+Lightning devotions. Including Spear of the Heavens. It is a pure Aether damage 2h Rifle that has 100% pierce chance. Also, the only legendary gun that has pure magic scaling damage, which is a real bonus). With Widow to give you Lightning+aether resistance shred, and Aether/vitality resistance coming from that, you have a nice boost to some of the rarer, more valuable resistance types.
Solved above, with Widow Devotion, as well as Viper.
On the topic of the best in slot weapon, it is either Vortex of Souls, or Raka’Jax. Vortex has more value vs crowds, while Raka’Jax would have higher single target damage. If you had both, you could alternate. Then again, Vortex of Souls has the highest AS modifier of all legendary rifles in the game at +22% AS, matching the Hellborne, and only topped by the Epic Rifle Flamekeeper’s Repeater which has a value of +30% AS, which might just be enough to push the Vortex above even Raka’Jax, even despite Raka’s +2 Shaman skills. It’s hard to say without using both, and my current Primal Strike rifle user isn’t that high yet, and I don’t own a Raka’Jax anyway, only a Vortex of Souls.
I put the devotions I mapped out in the build in my OP. I was able to grab pretty much everything lightning but I did skip Viper so that misses some of the resist reduction. I also mapped that to take all points in Spear of the Heavens except the final skill but I’m not sure it is really necessary. I could drop Kraken for Viper (and grab the Spear proc along with the extra resistance shred) but I like the attack speed boost from Kraken.
Honestly, just looking at those devotions I see a lot of issues.
WAY TOO MANY PROCS. You have a grand total of 3 skills that can even proc stuff, and 4 procs. You also have poor synergy on what procs you do have.
Reckless Tempest is ass. Honestly, most mid-tier devotions right now are in a weak-ish spot, short of a few really good ones. But tempest is especially ass. Low proc range, very conditional proc depending on a crit, bad uptime on anything but a caster with at least 40% CDR, who can manage to get it to a perfect 100% uptime, but at the cost of needing those crits to keep it going, and low dph. It has ok DPS at a total of 12 procs per target, for up to 3 targets, but the per hit damage is honestly just too low. The fact the animation is literally just lightning bolts coming down doesn’t help, as that animation is used by 2 other lightning skills on the shaman alone, as well as a few other item procs, in making the skill feel like it isn’t doing anything. The way it feels, it only really works on melee users. Which is a problem, as a lot of melee builds sure don’t want to give up 7 points for a rather weak proc. The only other build which can use it is based on binding it to Wind Devils and having them convey the proc for you at their location. Lightning in general has consistency issues, but this specific devotion takes the cake for being very inconsistent. At least it was buffed to always proc on crit rather than it’s old 33% chance on crit…
On the topic of good/bad mid-tier devotions, Crown, Eldrich Fire, Widow, and Manticore all are top tier, mostly due to all having innate resistance shreds which are really valuable, and let you slot a non-resistance debuff item into your, with Wendigo being good, and the rest… sort of suck. Behemoth is about the only exception, just because it is such good sustain.
Thanks for the responses. Do you consider Hydra and Kraken mid tier? They both look fairly solid to me. I never really put the point in Reckless Tempest to use it as much as because you need to complete the constellation to get the completion affinity and I figured the benefits to lightning damage within the constellation would be worth it even if that point wasn’t doing much. I have not done any switch over to lightning yet and in my current build (more fire focused) I have Eldritch Fire that seems good but I’m not sure that it would fit into a build that is almost all focused on lightning for elemental damage. Crown has what looks to be a clearly superior proc but the rest of the constellation doesn’t seem to offer much over Tempest other than the bonus resistance. (for what it is worth I was planning/hoping to go primarily offensive for devotions and load up resistances and such on gear).
After being confused about how Wendigo Totem works for a while I think I finally have it figured out and it makes me wonder how good it truly is as a heal for a purely ranged class. My observations lead me to believe that Wendigo Totem only heals you if an enemy is in range of the totem to take the Life Tap damage. Considering that you also need to be in range of the totem that necessitates that you stand in such a place that you are within 10 meters at most of a given target to get a heal and this is a huge pain to set up for more than one or two ticks at a time when kiting. Unless you are planning to face tank with a rifle (which I suppose could be possible but is not really my style) the totem’s healing is very high maintenance and by its nature requires you to try to stay closer to the danger zone to make it work. For melee classes having %-based healing sounds awesome but it just seems impractical most of the time when kiting and makes me question the value of sinking points into it for my situation.