Best approach for elemental sundering?
So, sundering looks cool and on paper if you can get multiple ailments the damage seems pretty good but what is the best way to approach this?
The radiant grief helmet can give ignites so that's the easiest one to get. Although, infernalist can also make ignites easy to pull off. Stormweaver can make anything shock and chill. Although, from what I saw last patch it isn't possible to consume second ailments. If you double shock you can never consume the second one for some reason (unless they fixed that). Finally invoker can give some cold/lightning damage and unbound avatar might be good? Is it even worth trying to get freeze though? Having to freeze mobs might make it way too clunky. If we ignore freeze then grief/a lightning skill would probably be the best approach. I'm mostly curious to see if anyone has messed around with it/has other ideas.
Comments
I used it a bit on my Painter's Servant / Trinity Lightning Spear build. Going trinity and splitting your ele damage, almost anything you do can inflict or contribute to multiple ailments.
The skill also benefits from some of the best damage supports like Elemental Focus , Excoriate And Rising tempest (I tested, it procs all 3 elements for 36% more damage). Since it doesn't inflict ailments anyway, there's no downside.
I'm still not sure it's worth using though. For starters, there's an unnecessary delay between using the skill and it actually doing damage. There's the attack animation, and the pulse that goes out, but then there's another animation on each ailment in range before it finally explodes to do damage. All that takes long enough that I could have cast sniper's mark and threw Storm lance with scattershot (20% less attack speed).
Second, I'm not sure attack scaling applies to it, or something strange is happening with scaling. Using it on a target that's at least frozen, but likely shocked, and ignited as well, it seems to do less damage than one throw of storm lance. But has the additional downside of consuming those ailments, breaking freeze or whatever else you've stacked.
Theoretically my plan was to drop frenzy charged lances on a boss to stack all the ailments, then nuke with sundering once it's all set up, but after a couple hours of testing couldn't get it to play out like that.
It's very possible I missed something with it, maybe someone else knows something I don't to make it pop off like all of the numbers and set up imply that it should.
I'm a sucker for tri-elemental builds. Made a throwaway just to comment. Caveat to everything below: I started late and just made it to cruel, so this is from a campaign perspective. Maybe someone can get it to work in endgame better.
Pros: It's a REALLY cool looking skill. Base damage effectiveness is pretty darn high. Good AoE. Three elemental tags means +gem levels are easy to get (Sunsplinter Array Buckler gives +6).
Cons: It's SLOW. 55% attack speed. Delay before the explosions actually hit. Delay from reapplying elements.
I've been trying to use Elemental Sundering as a main skill as soon as I had access to it. As mentioned, Radiant Grief enables the fire portion of the skill which lets me kill trash pretty handily. Even though the skill has a large AoE, you still need to be somewhat in melee range as Radiant Grief only ignites in your presence radius. You can, of course, increase your presence AoE.
Tried Thunderous Leap with Shocking Leap to make shocked ground, but it was too inconsistent. I'm not skilled enough with perfect timing to use Gathering Storm. I decided to try Wake of Destruction to leave shocked ground, and that was MUCH more satisfying... the 10% movespeed hurts though. I also don't like using minions, so taming a beast with shock was out, but maybe it can help someone else.
So now I had two elements and really pretty fire and lightning explosions. But how to freeze to get that elusive third color? Say hello to Shattering Palm. On the surface, it's actually a pretty similar looking skill: big non-damaging circle followed by smaller damaging explosions. The numbers on Shattering Palm feel a bit low though.
"Rotation" is basically just Shattering Palm to dash through a pack (aim for the mob furthest away) so that Wake of Destruction leaves a trail of shocked ground, then spam Elemental Sundering. The first fire/lightning hits should trigger Shattering Palm explosions. This is more than enough to kill most trash. If they survive, hopefully Shattering Palm has frozen somebody, and the second Elemental Sundering will have all three colors!
Visuals aside, it's a pretty painful skill to main. Bosses are... tedious. And dangerous because of being in melee. Also, switching back and forth between Shattering Palm and Elemental Sundering means I'm basically required to anoint (or path to) Quick-change Act for weapon swap speed. And finally, after you consume the ignite/shock, there's a delay before the ailments are reapplied by Radiant Grief/shocked ground... so attack speed scaling for Elemental Sundering is soft-capped in terms of DPS contribution. Though it will sure make using the skill feel better.
Really hope someone smarter than me can make this work, I love the look of the skill.
Anyone thought of maybe a stormweaver/invoker sundering build?