S5 Sorcerer Axial Conduit build related issues

Sorcerer
1

I’ve run into a few issues/bugs with Sorc in S5.

The first one is kind of a build killer.

Axial Conduit
When using Axial Conduit against a single enemy, unlike how Chain Lightning is supposed to work (bounce between enemies, or yourself if there’s no enemy to bounce to), when using Axial Conduit the Chain Lightning hits the boss, can’t find any enemies to bounce off of so it ‘returns’ to you, doing its mana drain and causing it to disappear after only hitting the boss 10 times.

In multi-target scenarios the chain would hit 30 times total, and if the chain bounced off of the character, you’d get 20 hits from 1 Chain.

Not only does this effectively half your damage output from Chain Lightning on single target enemies, but because the mana drain is much quicker, your Chain Lightning casts are now much less efficient to cast - resulting in less procs of “Recharging” if you’re using that aspect, and more mana issues (resulting in chains just disappearing instead of exploding).

If Axial Conduit chain lightning can bounce off the player when there’s no target before its 3rd bounce, this will drastically improve our single target damage with this unique.

Weapons
This is less of a bug, but more of a “why?”

The only 2h weapon that Sorcerers can equip is a staff, but it has +DoT damage on it.
This is only useful for DoT builds, and even then likely not for the Sorcerer.

We’re losing a major aspect doubler here by having to equip a 1h sword (for crit damage, because why else would you choose anything else). We should be able to equip a 2h weapon that provides crit damage, vulnerable damage, or hell, even a sorcerer specific affix.
E.g.,
2H Staff - +20% Lightning/Fire/Cold Damage (maybe just 1, maybe all, not sure).
This can be a random roll even, so that not all staves will be good.

Not being able to put Storm Swell, Lightning Rod, or whatever other great aspect for a build uses on a 2H weapon because we don’t have any need whatsoever for DoT damage is a major oversight of the weapon changes.

The alternative for this could be that you allow aspects applied to weapon slots to double up. If I put Lightning Rod on the MH and OH then it stacks?? This would be good too.

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Axial Conduit is basically a meme. The writing’s on the wall. Even if you could get it to work without any bugs, there’s simple no way to scale chain lightning high enough to do anything other than farming Helltides.

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The whole thing was a terrible design to begin with. Instead of giving us a spam chain lightning build that actually does damage like we all wanted, they decided to reinvent the wheel and turn chain lightning into another spell altogether. Nobody wants a spell that fizzles out because of some complex mana drain mechanic and then disappears…

I wanted to give the devs a shot after a whole year of release, but these people are brain dead and incompetent. Even if we tell them exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it, they go off and mess with something else and ruin that too…

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I like the concept of it, and it works really well at lower levels, allowing you to walk around and just have everything explode.

I’ve cleared Pit 50 and IH T5 (although with difficulty), but Pit 60 was too much.

I’m still missing items though, because I can’t get Varshan matts to drop I can’t farm him for my ring. Without Tal Rasha’s I’m losing a TON of damage.

But yes, the mana drain thing is their “boon & bane” design that they’re going with. I think they could have chosen something else, that doesn’t go against the core design of the game play.

If the item worked slightly different, such that it only mana drains and “explodes” when you have at least 10 mana or something, and never ‘expires’, but just returns and goes out again, and if the mana drain was 6 each time for each bolt, rather than scaling based on how many bolts are out etc… Then you wouldn’t lose damage because of chain casting, you’d actually gain damage.

They could even change Unbroken Tether to help with the build, although I get the idea behind keeping it separate.

In my build I have 18 ranks of Chain Lightning, but I only have 8 equipped right now because I can’t get items to drop (and the planner was based on PTR, I can’t get that many skill ranks anymore).

Other skills that DO scale well are able to get 25+ skill ranks. If we could have 25+ Chain Lightning skill ranks, they don’t dissolve, drain mana so you can’t cast anything, become useless on single target etc… then this could be amazing.

Little changes can make a big difference, but it’ll be at least 2-3 seasons before any meaningful changes come to this I fear, if ever.

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Axial conduit is crazy fun in big groups. I throw out a couple of chain lightnings during an infernal horde run and just melts everything.

With that being said, the axial conduit build for single target has a larger requirement pool for being viable. The highest recharging aspect possible on the amulet and resource generation over 50% should be the first things to look for. With these two things, you should be able to keep up at 2-3 chains for bosses. With 80% regeneration, it should be even more.

I haven’t tried yet, but if resource is an issue, you could always swap pants between mob and boss fights.

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The easiest solution to this would be to have ST chain lightning bounce on the player with Axial conduit equipped. The damage should multiply each time after bouncing on the player (while providing the player a buff or barrier) to justify a single CL costing 60+(</=35) MANA against a ST. Or simply multiply its damage if it orbits the player after only striking once. Unless the expectation is to need to switch pants everytime we face a boss, locking the build out of solo Pits, and handicapping the entire build.

Chain lightnings this expensive per cast should = 1/3 of a regular bone spirit or more. With the crown of Lucian, this build should be able to throw out lightning bone spirits using their entire mana pool.

They really need to address this fast because the ST is actually impossible with that unique.

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you have to stay close to boss to get a more effective damage… the problem is that in NMD 70+ almost all bosses are doing 1 hit kill in season 5. I am combining chain lighting with lighting spear (which is the S tear in season 5) just because I have builds with only 1 skill.

I am using both passives Invigorate Conduit and Fiery Surge to generate mana, using Recharging Aspect, Chain Lighting with the option to generate cracking energy and still not enough to kill the mana up in single targets.

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Yes. Standing in the boss does increase the damage a lot, but if you use the maxroll builds that are based around survivability, you lose a large amount of multipliers.

I haven’t tested them out, or really looked at my dmg numbers properly yet, but my lvl68 druid is doing way more dmg than my sorc, and my druid doesn’t even have half his gear yet.

That alone shows that Chain Lightning doesn’t scale at all, as my build is using basically every multiplier available to me.

It’s tanky enough that I don’t get 1 shot by bosses in Pit or Lillith until i get 3 stacks of the debuff, but somehow i pick up stacks out of nowhere, so that’s a problem.

Once I get Starless Skies that’ll make a difference, but probably not enough. T6 IH is basically impossible for my build.

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It doesn’t, I have Starless and in terms of mana management It’s worse than just running Recharging. Even if you run both of them (and lose out on the insane damage multiplier from Tal Rasha) and mana regen/max mana gear to boot it’s still not enough. The problem is with the way the unique works and the ridiculous mana drain component.

This 1000%! It’s the same thing they did with the Meteor unique. Players just want to spam their favorite ability and not have to deal with stupid mechanics and limiting factors like cooldowns and mana. They seemed to realize this with the rework of the two Fireball uniques where that kind of playstyle is finally possible.

I say “they” but it’s apparently completely different devs that design each unique without much if any input from the collective which is a terrible way to do it. It appears they basically have devs come up with ideas, throw them all out on the wall and pick whichever they seem to like the most without any consideration, rhyme or reason. I kept seeing the dev who designed the Axial Conduit replying to YouTube build guides saying how great it makes him feel that people like it… smh

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This IS how they come up with new items.

A lot of them were probably designed 2 years ago and put in a backlog, and each season they take what they think are the best for the builds that are lacking and see how it works.

I think for this, they wanted it to be like Ball Lightning from S2, but without it being OP like that was.

They’ve somewhat achieved that, and it does work, but the question is whether or not anyone will use it beyond S5.

I like my build, but without any Mythic it’s doing max about 3m per crit op. I just got a couple Mythics and might get my starless tomorrow, so I’ll play around and see if I can put together a build that’ll clear t6 IH with it, but even that isn’t good enough really.

I really wanted this to be good, and it’s so close to being so. But i been playing landslide druid, with only 6k armor and 60% resistances and I’m clearing stuff out much faster and with more enjoyment than the sorc (admittedly lower levels but I’m only 90 atm).

At least it’s not necro though. My necro feels AWFUL this season. Every thing I’ve tried (and it’s normally my main) is just super squishy and barely tickles enemies, they absolutely ruined necro this season.

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Sounds pretty fair. Did the axial thing and I was happy. It’s great, engaged with content past level 100 with it. Fractured Winterglass unique just totally outperforms it though. That does not change it being a decent build though. Way more gear dependent though.

Interesting season, for sorcs. We actually have options. I feel though that if you want to be “top”, you’ll be shuffled towards cool down reduction/fractured winterglass/lightning spear.

The nice thing/change is that you at least have options. They may not be as TOP as Fractured but you can get really far with chain lightning, firewall, incinerate, ball lightning, fireball, etc. You CAN go the BEST route but you also have really decent alternative options.

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The meta Lightning spear use two handed staff to double the power of Splintering Energy. Most of the inherent affix is additive, therefore it has very little impact to your damage. You can ignore the DoT on staff and assume it has no affix.

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Im currently running a CL build with Axial and am clearing pits 100+ with ease. 60k HP with elixir. Axial is pretty much a requirement because all the mana it uses to bounce back counts as mana spent for Banished lords and hydra. It seems like a meme, but overpower sorc is a thing that works well with these pants.

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Finally just switched to a lightning spear build. It’s so much better with so much less effort. AoE clear is just as good as CL and single target is 50x better without needing so many mana crutches.

Maybe Andariels + Starless Skies brings it up to par with other builds? Without mythics it’s just way worse. I did finally find a starless skies after I swapped specs since I was now able to do tormented bosses with a couple friends where we all got destroyed before, but I’m not swapping back to CL to test it.

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Can anyone explain exactly how it works?
1 cast bounces many times and explodes with 6 mana being drained. 2 cast drains my mana more and I have enough for it to complete its full chain but it oftens fizzles before it completes all the chaining its supposed to do even though I got plenty mana? Three cast fizzles and 4 at one time always quickly does without it draining any mana at all? How does this supposed to work?

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1 Chain will drain 6 mana after its 3 bounces.
2 Chains will each drain 12 mana after their 3 bounces.
3 Chains will each drain 18 mana after their 3 bounces, and so on.

When you’ve drained 66 mana total the Chain that caused the drain explodes.

If you have an 11 stack of Chains, they pretty much all explode when they drain. Of course the drain amount reduces for each that has exploded, but it makes for a lot of explosions.

The upside is that if you can spam cast quickly you can just explode on bosses, whilst having the rings of lightning circling you (which do the majority of your damage).

The downside is that you lose up to 27 hits from each cast, so you’re effectively losing about 96% of your CL damage output in favor of them exploding.

For aoe clearing, i tend to stutter step/cast, and end up with 4 to 6 out at a time, and stuff melts. But for ST I just stand on the target and spam cast.

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all addictive dmg are summed and turn into a multiplicative in the final formula.
So addictive does count.

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The bucket is extremely large, it end up to thousands. The additive damage from the weapon inherited affix is less than 100. 40 divided by few thousands the result is merely 1%. Which is negligible, especially every of your attack is randomized in ± 50% damage range.

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Hydra? Manually pressing hydra?

Wow maybe I should not have gotten rid of that unique neck.
I’m having severe issues doing any decent dmg to pitt bosses or anything past T3 hordes.

This is not encouraging at all.
I really don’t want to play FO/Fractured Winterglass.

I don’t know, it’s just not working for me for ST dmg. I’m stuck on high 20’s pit and doing 30’s the pitt boss takes 5-7min to down. Can’t imagine P70+ like really?

What is the highest Pit/IH you’re clearing?
What glyphs/aspects are you using?

Is it because I’m not using Splintering Energy on staff? I do have LS on my bar but I find it’s not much dmg.

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I cleared Pit70 while carrying. I got to Pit90 boss easily while carrying, but the boss was too strong (level190) but solo I could probably do Pit100 now no issue.

I can solo T7 IH, and the last 2 days I carried a friend from high 70s to high 80s through some T6 IH, NMD100, and Uber Bosses (they take 4x as long to kill while carrying).

Axial Conduit is doing fine. I have posted my build, I don’t have the link handy right now, but if you wanna take a look at it reply and I’ll post it again in the morning. I’m using 8 glyphs and 2 legendary nodes with 3 mythics.

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