Stun Jacks
A relatively green (5a) player asked for some help with a Stun Jacks build tonight. Frankly speaking, their build was more or less irrecoverable save for some total overhauls of their itemization/MI farming, and even then, the end result would have been mediocre at best. They and I decided on their transition to a Trozan build instead and they went on their merry way, but I decided to take a crack at tossing a couple Stun Jacks builds together - the archetype was, after all, one of my favorite caster playstyles pre-AoM.
AoM introduced a lot of problems with Stun Jacks, none of which ever really got solved and all of which were exacerbated by FG. So much so, in this regard, that for the most part the skill more or less slipped my mind and I’ve failed to offer any constructive feedback about it in months, perhaps years. That’s on me, though I suspect I’m not alone in totally forgetting about the skill’s existence.
Stun Jacks has always faced a sustainability and general-resiliency problem. It doesn’t really have any damage issues - the shotgun potential and immense DoT potential of the skill are both theoretically amazing on paper. But AoM introduced a lot of high damage enemies with strong CC. FG introduced a lot of strong debuffs that make weaker enemies comparable to those found in AoM areas. Stun Jacks is hit hard by these factors because it is intrinsically a caster archetype that needs to juggle caster stats (including energy regen/cost reduction) while also being in an opponent’s face for maximum damage. This exposes a historically frail archetype to consistently high spikes in damage.
Stun Jacks Elementalists have somewhat-alright sustain in Wendigo Totem but lack burst-resiliency, the larger health pools of Shamans forever being a red herring to the contrary. Stun Jacks Saboteurs (Harra) or Purifiers (LG/Harra) or whatever you run for Chaos/Aether SJ (conduits) will likely be able to pull solid resiliency (via damage reduction) but lack sustain.
My proposition, then, is this: Add 2-4% (static, of course) ADCTH to Stun Jacks to the Overseer Eye MI.
Knowing that the chance of new items is pretty minimal (aka 0) at this point, and knowing that all variants of SJ suffer from the same issues described above, the Overseer Eye is likely to be the most-capable means of addressing this problem for as many SJ builds as possible - unless you wanted to add the stat to Harra/LG/Conduits innately, which I wouldn’t complain about. Most SJ builds already take the Eye anyways - even Harra, as Cold affixes give a means to get good % Damage and the added projectile is quite powerful, plus Harra converts the Electrocute to Frostburn.
This doesn’t address the resiliency issue for surviving burst damage but what with recent improvements to some defensive options (Turtle) it’s not impossible Stun Jacks can start surviving a bit better to large physical spikes anyways.
Edit: P.S., on paper, Harra seems to have significant OA/DA/Resistance(overcap) problems…like every other Saboteur out there. LG tends to be a little better off, in general. Food for thought.