How good is lucky hit? How good is lightning pen?
With some context of what this will be applied to, I plan to use Witch Hunter or Deadeye for Plasma Blast. I would be leveraging freeze on WH or electrocution on Deadeye to aid in landing more plasma blasts. I did some calculations and WH vs Deadeye is somewhat equal in terms of damage, with deadeye obviously having an edge in terms of defense.
I am considering 80% increased attack damage or 50% increased lightning damage with lucky hit on non-crits. I feel like 80% more attack damage is better, especially since lightning damage would only increase 70% of plasma blast damage (30% physical/70% lightning). Thoughts?
Lastly, how impactful is lightning pen? For deadeye, I managed 300% increased damage with 40% lightning pen. For witch hunter, 500% increased damage but no lightning pen.
Lastly, does lucky hit stack? I have lucky hit for mobs 40% life or less.
Comments
Penetration is good insofar as you can cheaply obtain a lot of it in terms of passive points, but it also kinda sucks because you can't bring a mob below zero res with it and according to poe2db/experientially a lot of monsters have like 0% base elemental res. Bringing mobs below 0% is a pretty big More damage multiplier, so curse and exposure have a lot more single target value, at the cost of eating gem slots and not always being on.
I think it is good for 2 cases:
Some mobs are naturally resistant, and I think magic/rare mobs have 10%/20% res as well
You need pen or an easy way to apply buffed curse/exposure for +ele res maps or you will do 0 damage.
For my money, like 20% lightning pen is a good value breakpoint and you can get that in 2 jewel affixes, so you're only giving up a little bit of damage. By swapping in a lightning pen gem when needed you'll hit 50% pen and can mostly ignore the ele res affix since penetration ignores any overcap res mobs have, unlike exposure/curse.
Lucky takes the average damage from 50% of the range to 66%, so 32% more dmg
Lighting exposure and curses (conductivity) is much more important than lightning pen imo because it can go below zero. I've been running blasphemy CI invoker with relatively cheap build (not HOWA because i'm using this just for the rarity, and I'm just blowing through end game content.
I did a fair amount of research and that lightning pen can get to 0% but can't go below, however curses and exposure can. Even most bosses in endgame has 0-30% lightning resist from this list here. I could lose a bit of crit and spec into lightning pen to fight Arbiter of Ash, Xesht, Trailmaster because they have 75% for lightning.
Lucky hit is like 30% dmg multipler.
More than 30-40 penetration is a waste, coz of how it works.
I asked awhile back about typical resistances of rares/map bosses/pinnacles, no one could produce any hard info. We can see the little symbols but I'm not sure what they mean numerically, would love to know.
If we go by PoE 1 precedent, pinnacles can have up to 75%, so 75% total of pen + curse + exposure would seem to be pretty good.
People kinda poopoo on Pen because, of the 3, it (a) is applied 1st and (b) can't go negative. Like, 75% from curse/exposure would be a lot better since it could go negative. But as a ranger/WH thats probably not in the cards anyway with doing something wierd.
People all seem to think 30-40 is a good max value for pen but idk where that specifc number comes, from unless they are making assumptions about your curse/exposure