Why piercing orb over electrocute?

General Discussion
1

I’m confused why DMO uses shock pulse piercing orb over electrocute? Electrocute chain lightning rune spreads down elemental exposure really well, and doesnt miss the way shock pulse does. I don’t understand why shock pulse is more common

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I’ve been wondering also which is better. I must admit I’ve been using shock pulse because it was the only option some years ago and I just checked other people are still using it.

I guess piercing orb has following upsides

  • In big group it hits more mobs and maybe generates more critical hits → more arcane power (But compared to crits from the frozen orb spam …)
  • Can hit more mobs total per shot for elemental exposure
  • Can shoot to a general direction and still hit lots of mobs and maybe even the important target. When moving and shooting at the same time this makes some difference for me - mouse movement doesn’t need to be so precise.

I’m planning to start testing fire electrocute now when I found primal wand which doesn’t have fire dmg for elemental exposure.

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Longer range, can draw aggro easier.
Electrocute misses unless you actually click on a monster, whereas Shock Pulse is fire and forget.
And because it passes through enemies, it can hit multiples even if they’re not within Chain Lightning arc distance.

But there are advantages to using Electrocute too. Each cast of Electrocute is actually two casts, so you stack Arcane Dynamo faster, if you use that. It’s also easier to teleport out of a channeling animation than a swinging animation.

Edit: Oh sorry, this is probably the big one: Bane of the Stricken. Channeling spells work strangely with it; I think they stack it more slowly than you’d expect, whereas Piercing Orb is obviously 1 for 1.

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4

Yeah, this pretty much covers it.

The only real time to prefer Electrocute over Piercing Orb is for builds running Arcane Dynamo (Electrocute stacks Arcane Dynamo twice as fast because of the faster tick rate).

Outside of that, the bigger AoE and less strict requirement for targetting make Piercing Orb pretty useful.

If you are stepping around tossing out Frozen Orbs, running with Electrocute can feel pretty clunky. Not needing to aim Piercing Orb as precisely makes it easier to handle when stepping around. There’s also something about the Electrocute animation that makes it feel kinda clunky when you are moving too, although I’ve never been quite able to put my finger on it. The Piercing Orb animation just feels smoother when you are stutter-stepping.

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I’d like to know more on this if anyone knows. A few seasons ago I was keen to swap to electrocute to stack stricken faster, and more accurately on elites in a group. But I tested, and it didn’t stack stricken faster (than barrier blades), it even seemed slower iirc. But yeah arcane dynamo is faster, and I think fragment of destiny… I’m assuming it’s something with an ICD of stricken that doesn’t include the higher attack rate of electrocute?