For the season 20 leaderboards build that uses frozen orb: Why is everyone using area damage on the weapon/gloves/shoulders?
I was under the impression that the etched sigil legendary proc doesn’t have area damage. Am I wrong here?
havent seen the build but i know that there was alot of actual thought put into it even when meteor mage was still a thing.
It can potentially hit for trillions. And when casted manually it does procc area damage and can be buffed up by every multiplier before and probably shoot even more than one orb before you have to start to channel. The etched sigil is probably just there for the 150% multiplier and not so much for the orb it can shoot.
Yeah it definitely does a lot of damage and seems to be on par with LOD hydra this season. I’m not questioning that at all.
It’s just the area damage rolls on the gear for the EU leaderboards threw me off. And it’s not just one person, everyone in top 10 using the orb build rolled AD on weapon/gloves/shoulders. (and intentionally too) As an example, here’s the current rank 1 world’s D3planner: d3planner/388481026 (Add the “.com” after d3planner.)
I know etched sigil is there for the multiplier but it doesn’t activate until 1 second of channeling. Frozen Orb explodes at 40 yards which is where you do max damage. Testing the build in game, I’m not sure if I can even get one manual cast of FO and then hit one second of channeling before the orb hits 40 yards.
looking at that its probably a more spamming playstyle because of all that rcr.
Still, it should be enough time to manually shoot the orb and start channeling and get the bonus for it. And after that manually casted FO explodes, they cast one again and start channeling probably.
Those manually casted FO´s that you can weave in deal alot of area damage. With those 80% area damage that really bumps up your damage more than intelligence or anything would do.
Alot easier to play with macros prolly 
like alot of those channel wizards things are. Urgh
I don’t think you’re wrong.
But you can maybe toss out manual cast Frozen Orbs while channeling and not lose the Deathwish/Etched Sigil buffs?
I was just checking in town with Mantle of Channeling (since the toughness bonus is visible in sheet stats). It didn’t look like I could get the buff up from a standstill by casting a Frozen Orb then channeling. There’s a delay after you toss the orb for the animation to finish before you can start channeling. By the time the channel buff from Mantle of Channeling is up, the manually cast Frozen Orb had already detonated.
However, if I held down the channel skill, and occasionally interweaved a manually cast Frozen Orb, the Mantle of Channeling toughness buff never dropped off. This was a bit surprising!
That could just be a glitch with the way sheet toughness is displayed, but it could also be that there’s a slight delay before the buffs drop off and if you resume channeling within that window you don’t lose the buffs? If we can assume the Deathwish/Etched Sigil buffs are active any time the Mantle of Channeling toughness buff is reflected in your sheet stats, then that might be the case. It’s possible that you may be able to keep the Deathwish/Etched Sigil buffs up by interweaving manually cast Frozen Orbs while holding down channel. And if that’s the case, then any manually cast Frozen Orbs you toss out like that should benefit from both AD and the Deathwish/Etched Sigil buffs?
EDIT: Looks like it only works with Arcane Torrent. With Disintegrate or Ray of Frost, the Mantle of Channeling toughness buff drops momentarily if you interweave manually cast Frozen Orbs. It doesn’t seem to drop with Arcane Torrent though.
EDIT2: Arcane Torrent + manual interweaving seems to work with most skills, except Meteor. The Mantle of Channeling buff drops off instantly after manually interweaving a Meteor Shower. This is actually weird, normally there’s a short delay before the Mantle of Channeling buff drops. I think maybe they manually coded hard-cast meteors to cancel channel buffs as part of the Star Pact nerf?
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If you say most skills work… does this include Teleport\Calamity?
I hadn’t checked that one originally, but I just checked it, and yes, it would appear so. I could hold down Arcane Torrent and use either Wormhole or Calamity and the Mantle of Channeling toughness buff stayed active.
Again, it only seems to work with Arcane Torrent though, not Ray of Frost or Disintegrate. And I don’t know if the Deathwish/Etched Sigil buffs actually match the Mantle of Channeling toughness buff or not.
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I tried my build (pre Anti-Bazooka patch GR110 without issues) with Arcane Torrent instead of Disintegrate. I did not expect to see the same results like pre patch but still. If it worked somehow with ES/DW then there should be a notable increase in killspeed, but it’s still lame as a can be and struggles to deal notable damage when I hop around. I’d say doesn’t work at all, it’s only a sheet/display thing. Or it only works on Mantle.
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Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of. Thanks for the input.
AD procs off of manually cast Frozen orbs. You have to channel while manual casting those orbs.
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I saw this question in a discord server and did some testing. I didn’t test the channel + skill + channel. I tought about a “combo” likely done on CoE rotation. If you channel, get the buff and then cast FO you can hit several orbs before channeling buffs drops, I think I managed to hit 4 orbs iirc with channel buffs with 2.3 AS I think (also had the resource problem so maybe could be way more).