High-End Spark showcase & Spark build FAQ
Hi, I have gone through many iterations of stormweaver spark, from everlasting versions to full mana versions, and swapping to a gemling to utilize their ascendency. I want to use this post as a mean to share my lessons learn and help out all the fellow spark players.
For the most damage and QoL, the stormweaver spark version is the most optimal imho.
My character currently has the following:
-400k+ spark tooltip, 0.16s cast per spark, 3s spark duration
-1200+ int, 9.3k mana, 2.8k mana regen/s
-120% shock magnitude, double shock
Current POB with adorned: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/pob/je49007h
4L jewels version: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/pob/mp3n90y5
FAQ
Gemling vs Stormweaver?
TBH, gemling is good, but it's just a huge mana pool soak. You can get your spark dmg and mana pool high, but you will suffer with mana issues as they don't have the mana regen scaling stormweaver has. The other main reason gemling lost for me is due to cast on shock. Cast on shock too free, it 1 shot bosses, 1 shot elites, with the double shock ascendency from stormweaver, you scale magnitude and get double the effect.
How to scale damage?
Spark levels, Archmage levels, mana, cast speed (to a certain point).
Spark level is the most important when scaling damage. It gives the biggest flat increase. Lucky for all of us, lvl 20 20% 6L corrupted spark is relatively cheap on trade.
Cast speed will need to be balanced with your mana and your regen, too much leaves you open to 1 shots, too little will make you feel clunky.
Spark tooltip dmg
This actually doesn't mean much. If you go crit, you will get a higher tooltip. If you go high cast speed (0.12s or 0.11s), you will hit high numbers but can't sustain your mana properly
Crit vs Non Crit
Crit will show you super high tooltip. However, keep in mind that we are running lightning damage, you can assume 1-50 as the range of a hit. Even if you have 300% crit multiplier, 70% crit, you are still only critting 7 out of 10 hits. But wait, those hits can also be 1 or they can also be 50. On average, you will "miss" crit making your crit nodes useless, and then when you do crit, you will crit low range - making ur crit multiplier useless. This means you are now dealing with 2 layers of RNG, if you crit, if you crit high.
Non-Crit version is the higher "actual" dps version, why? because of lightning rod. Lighting rod wipes the 1-50 RNG for you, as it will let you roll the damage TWICE and pick the highest one - and you don't have the crit RNG cause you are not critting anyways.
Is Melting Maelstrom a replacement for Mana Regen?
No, melting maelstrom is supposed to be your oh shit button. Use it when your MP gets chunked, you don't want to be caught half MP when the boss slaps you. Mana Regen here is a huge QoL, it will make it infinitely more enjoyable than always staring at your mana bar.
Mana on kill vs Mana Regen?
Passive mana regen will always win, especially with high mana pool. Mana on kill doesn't work on bosses at all, you might as well delete that line off your jewel when your killing bosses. Remember mana regen is a way to mitigate your casting and giving you a bigger buffer to take a hit, if you take a hit at all.
Another note for mana regen, you can do more wild things with regen than with mana on kill. My spark per cast is 545 mana, my mana cost per second is 3.5k - but it takes almost 25s with holding down my spark to empty my pool.
Converting Cast speed to Actual Damage
We have way too much cast speed as-is, especially if you are linking spark with Arcane Tempo. We already kind of convert some of the cast speed to raw damage if you did link it with Considered Casting. I actually took Final Barrage (-10% cast speed on full life, 20% cast speed on low life), with Against the darkness - the node converts the -cast speed into 4% int. (Effectively increasing my mana/ dmg)
Why are you not taking CI?
To be honest, I don't get hit - boss or mob die before it touches me. Even if I do get hit, my regen takes over and heals me right up. Another big reason I don't take CI is the other effect of final barrage, I can trigger +20% cast speed by soul offering myself to low hp.
Chest options (Spirit ES vs Morior)
Unless you have a really reliable way of meeting the requirements of Morior, it's just not worth it. Getting 50str, 50dex is insane for the amount of int that you can have instead. Using Morior also implies you will need resist on rings, ring suffixes are super important - you have cast speed, int, mana regen, all attributes.
Morior seems attractive from the % mana standpoint, but the cast on shock along with archmage clarity demands far more, and simply does more damage overall.
Dream Fragment vs Breach/ Normal Rings
Dream fragment is decent for making your mana pool look big, that's all. Damage variant, you will always go with a ring with 24% cast speed. With ingenuity, there are way too many stats you will lose by going dream fragment especially if you are planning to int stack.
4L vs Adorned Setup
This one was a big question for a while, because our jewels does give 4 useful lines. However, adorned actually wins because corrupted jewel can get 3 usable lines. You can definitely corrupt 4L jewels to make 5 usable lines, but it's extremely hard to come by. With a blue corrupted +10 int, 15% magnitude, 12% mana regen jewel for example, I am getting 17 int, 23% regen, 28% magnitude from 1 jewel. You can actually fit 11 of these, and still run all of the unique jewels.
Jewel priorities - non crit
Prefix: shock mag, ailment mag, spell dmg, ele dmg
Suffix: mana on kill, cast speed, skill effect duration, mana regen
Prefix
-
Shock Mag (20%)
-
Ailment Mag (15%)
-
Spell Damage (15%) / Ele Damage (15%)
Prefix priorities are pretty standard, there isn't really much of a choice unless you are not scaling shock magnitude.
Suffix
-
Skill Duration (enough for you to drop Preservation or around 3s spark)
-
Mana Regen
-
Cast Speed
-
Mana on Kill
Mana Regen is ahead of cast speed simply because of the ranges they can roll. A jewel max cast speed is 4%, and max mana regen is 15%. If you take a wand for example, cast speed rolls up to 35%, that's around 6 jewels worth of cast speed. Mana Regen is 69% (approx 4ish jewels). If you have both max cast speed on wand / rings, you pretty much have enough cast speed that will burn through your mana.
Mana on kill being last is not a surprise, it's simply a bad stat for bosses and it's only 2% per jewel.
If you have any questions, feel free to post and I will answer them to the best of my abilities.
Comments
Thanks a lot for the FAQ. Even looking at those nice passives grabbed along the road convinced me to change from Crit to Non-crit.
I did some computation, it seems the lucky aspect of Lightening Rod is roughly 27% damage improvement. We can simply ask this question in DeepSeek r1 pretending we are doing D&D dice of damage of 1D10, and got consistent estimation of 27%-ish damage increments, for crit range of around 5%-10% range. It is still a lot but also not as I had hoped.
A question about cast on shock how important getting it to level 20 (kind of on a limited budget right now)cause when i was surprised but how much damage archmage gave in damage going from 19 to 20
gemling doesnt have mana issue my guy. the ascendancy gives -30% mana cost. 4%mana onkill is enough for mapping. uniq flask for bossing- it fills my 15k mana pool (100d budget) 9 times because of reduced mana flask passives. I dont think there has ever been a boss that makes me use more than 5 times, even when using liberally to stay topped off because that's just how OP archmage is.
"The other main reason gemling lost for me is due to cast on shock. Cast on shock too free, it 1 shot bosses, 1 shot elites, with the double shock ascendency from stormweaver, you scale magnitude and get double the effect."
did you actually test this or is this just PoB? no content in the game rn survives gemling's CoS lightning conduit. That's just how OP archmage is. if we have a boss that goes up to multi billion health, sure. the dmg sorc can put out matters, but there's no such thing in the game rn. I mean it sure looks cool when the boss dies in 1 game tick and you jack off to that feeling of power, but there is no context in the game where it matters that you kill the boss in 1 tick (sorc) or 2 ticks (gemling).
Sorry if it's a dumb question but don't you need to get around 100% rarity?
Does shock magnitude really go over 100%? Last I tried the debuff just showed 100% even though I stacked to 125%.
You have 400k Spark DPS but at what cast speed %. Damn bro, I have 200k DPS without any cast speed affixes on my items, like 0%. Only few passives on the way through the tree. And my build didn't cost 500divs.
In my opinion skill duration is not really useful if you're running CoS lightning conduit. You don't care about all the bolts hitting the boss as they're just going to die in a second once conduit procs.
Is there some other benefit I'm not aware of?
Seems like alot of investment, my 7k mana sacrifice minion detonate dead build worth 10 divine has 10 million boss dps. This is literally a showcase of throw enough divines at something and it'll work eventually.
I’m currently on a low budget, any immediate improvements you would see that don’t require loads of currency to make? https://maxroll.gg/poe2/pob/qj99z07i
So I main support and play a lot of pub games. I meet a lot of people that are very high end geared. The carry ratio is about 70% flurry 20%spark 10%other. Flurry surpasses anything in map clear speed in a high margin. Fact is you have to skill in move speed passive notes, buy move speed jewels + adorned and blink just to catch up. Luckily both of these shitty skills will get nerfed and I hope to oblivion bc there literally is 2 builds in the game right now who both are obviously way too op.
One thing to note on the mana regen vs mana on kill. If you’re planning on playing with a rarity culling bot for mapping, mana regen is better.
You don’t get the benefit of mana on kill and it’s noticeable. Therefore, I would value mana regen over mana on kill.
Crit vs Non Crit
You sure wrote a whole lot just to say "crit is more damage but non-crit is more consistent due to lucky and will feel better"
Such an awesome write up!!
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For Morior, do you think it's worth the ~50 int (100 mana) investment into STR and DEX if you can get all your resists on a hat, gloves, and boots? I'm looking into it and it's much cheaper if you get a single +All resists to one of the jewelry pieces, but definitely possible. Then 70 spirit from hat and amulet. I supposed I'd sacrifice more INT on each of those pieces as well, call it 20 each.
I'd get the %mana and %rarity Morior for like 1d.
Just thinking out loud here. So with EB, all ES goes to mana. So a good chest would have something like 800 mana from ES if I'm on a budget, plus the 50 + 20x3 INT = 220 mana from not using Morior. But I'm struggling with how much mana the Morior would give. How do I find the base mana that the % increase scales from? Just add up all the sources of flat mana including from INT?