Extra chaining seems useless now when it’s all about alternating between orbiting you and seeking 3 enemies.
I didn’t see any mention of an unbroken tether rework in the patch notes.
What am I missing?
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its not broken. Problem was, when it procced the return took longer. Which made the explosion took a bit longer to occur.
Personally i dislike Axial completely it plays like a worse version of BL.
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The whole unique felt quite awkawrd and counterintuitive to play with on PTR, not sure if it got polished somehow but I dbout it
There’s no changes to that aspect in the patch notes.
In testing, I never once got to see this actually trigger. Because the Axial Conduit unique says it bounces 3 times, I think that overrides it.
Lightning Rod did however proc an extra hit sometimes but that’s been changed to do more damage (which is nice).
I think Unbroken Tether will ultimately be useless, because with the changes you don’t necessarily want them to keep on bouncing.
The unique flavor text states:
Chain Lightning alternates between orbiting you and seeking up to 3 enemies. When it returns, it drains 6 Mana from you for each active Chain Lightning. After draining 66 total Mana, the bolt explodes for 22.056 Lightning Damage.
What I take this to mean is that if you have 11+ Chain Lightning out, then each time any single one of them returns, it will explode. And because that explosion damage has been fixed (and buffed I believe). It should actually be pretty solid.
You actually want it to explode more than you want it to bounce between enemies, as long as you have good enough mana regen and cast speed to keep 11+ stacks of it out, as the explosion should do much more damage than the chain itself.
If you have mana issues or slow cast speed, then having additional jumps would be helpful in getting your stacks up to trigger the explosions per return, but it’ll take longer for them to return, so it may be a wash as far as damage output goes.
Plus, CL hits 1 target, then bounces. The explosion is an AoE thing, so on trash you want the explosions to go off as often as possible for fast clear.
On bosses Tether might work out better, as the damage will potentially ramp up more if it doesn’t explode, you’d have to try to keep 1 CL out at a time with maximum bounces to pull that off though, meaning you’d have to spec into a 2nd damage dealer to make it worthwhile (so basically just slot the Unique into a Conjuration build or something), and your additional projectiles from the unique will potentially lower the damage of it when it procs.
I’m not sure that would be a better setup though.
Edit: Also, single target, it doesn’t bounce. It just hits the target once and returns. It would only be good for AoE, and it’s not going to be better than having it explode instead.
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The Lightning Rod Aspect
Former:
Chain Lightning has a 5-20% chance to chain an additional time when hitting Crowd Controlled enemies and Bosses, and will seek them as targets.
Now:
Chain Lightning has a 25% chance to deal 50-80% [ x ] increased damage. This chance is doubled against Bosses or Crowd Controlled enemies and prefers them as targets.
Perhaps unbroken tether will remain for CL build without Axial Conduit, and Lightning Rode
can u please stop posting nonsense, unbroken tether works with axial, Lurkin from mobalytics has it in its planner as well. I tested it myself and it works.
Lurkin has it in the planner now, but before he updated it a couple of days ago, his season 5 CL build had a big question mark next to Unbroken Tether stating “does it work?”
Even if it works, the question is still whether it’s useful at all with any Axial Conduit build.
At least Bumblebee worked through the possible pros and cons of how it might work, unlike your Lurkin fanboy post… speaking of nonsense.
Yeah. I saw and liked that change too.
It means that at least they understand that extra bounces are less than ideal with an Axial Conduit CL build.
This makes me wonder if UT was also changed but left out of the patch notes. I hope that’s the case because it’s kind of weird to have an aspect that doesn’t benefit the new buid-defining unique.
There might be other cases of aspects that are useful at low levels and then get left behind once the build takes shape, but I can’t think of one.
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I spent the entire PTR testing this unique and nothing else. Broken tether did not work at all. You may have witnessed some other interaction.
I promise you, it did not work.
Unless you used Lightning Rod, you only got 3 bounces between returns.
If you sent out a single CL, it would explode after 10 hits round trips (3 bounces each) then freely cast a 2nd CL which would alsp go out and bounce for 10x3 times before it exploded. UT did not change the number of bounces in a round trip, and if you’re counting the extra 10 as it working, it does that without UT equipped.
Anyway, even if it does now work, it’s not likely better than Lightning Rod after its change.
Additionally, just because it’s a CL aspect does not mean it should work with this unique. There can be more than 1 CL build with different interactions.
btw ppl cleared 101 with it w/o crown. You saying that it could only clear 60-70 is complete untrue.
There was a bugged interaction that people were using that was causing it to do billions/trillions of damage. I’m not sure what the interaction was, but no, it couldn’t clear Pit 100 on PTR without that bug.
dude i wrote w/o crown
Not sure what you’re getting at… The crown itself didn’t bug out the Axial Conduit. I ran multiple Pits with Crown equipped and never saw damage like what others had seen.
Like I said, I don’t know what caused the interaction, but I ran with literally every multiplier and the best I could hit for was about 90 million.
Now i’m not saying that my build is the best, by any means, but I tried a number of different things to get my damage as high as possible, and this is what I ended up with, and based on discussion with other sorcs in PTR, nobody else saw anything more than this without the bug.
im sorry i looked at your build and its extremely bad.
You didnt got the extreme stacking bug, cause u almost certainly did it wrong. also it scaled with the pit tier, so on your lowlevel tier u wont see much of it.
BTW when the bolt explodes… Where does the explosion damage takes place? I.e. who is damaged by it?
The explosion happens at the last enemy it hits before it returns (as does the mana drain), and it hits all nearby enemies (not sure the range).
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Thanks! Now I understand much better what’s going on…
A few days left before testing anyway! 
I personally saw a 450 million hit in high level pits. it happened.