Are Elemental Weakness type curses a newb trap?

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elitedesolator написал:

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suszterpatt написал:

Except the curses reduce resists before they are capped. So instead of 90 resist getting capped to 75, you reduce it to 80... which gets capped to 75. So your curse didn't do anything.

And which monster in the game has 90 fire resist?

That's pretty much what I'm asking here.

On my Arc templar, i have Conductivity scketed in a ring. It does wonderes for mobs even when not linked with anything and with no curse nodes taken.

It's also absolutely necessary because everything in this game and their mother resists lightning or elements in general.

Those mobs are a pain in the ass uncursed, but i pretty much destroy them with a simple conductivity curse.

The pain in the ass are those Curse immune, Lightning resist Necromancers (all of them are lightning resistant)... If they have ele reflect too, well, it's the game's way of saying fuck you to me. :P

Other than that, Conductivity works great, and i'd imagine all the other elemental curses do too.

Now if i can only get a 6l Pledge of Hands to slot in that Lightning penetration, i'd be set. :P

EDIT: Pro tip - Don't cast Conductivity or simmilar curses on elemental reflect mobs. I got raped by my own Arc because of that lol. The mobs themselves didn't do as much damage to me as i did to myself with that. So yeah, Elemental weakness curses aren't bad.

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Veprovina написал:

On my Arc templar, i have Conductivity scketed in a ring. It does wonderes for mobs even when not linked with anything and with no curse nodes taken.

It's also absolutely necessary because everything in this game and their mother resists lightning or elements in general.

Those mobs are a pain in the ass uncursed, but i pretty much destroy them with a simple conductivity curse.

The pain in the ass are those Curse immune, Lightning resist Necromancers (all of them are lightning resistant)... If they have ele reflect too, well, it's the game's way of saying fuck you to me. :P

Other than that, Conductivity works great, and i'd imagine all the other elemental curses do too.

Now if i can only get a 6l Pledge of Hands to slot in that Lightning penetration, i'd be set. :P

EDIT: Pro tip - Don't cast Conductivity or simmilar curses on elemental reflect mobs. I got raped by my own Arc because of that lol. The mobs themselves didn't do as much damage to me as i did to myself with that. So yeah, Elemental weakness curses aren't bad.

Sure, it works great on trash mobs, but that's where you need it the least. Between Fire Pen. and Elemental Equilibrium, my Flameblast witch deals enough damage that I usually don't even bother cursing white mobs, they die from 1 cast anyway. Where you really need more damage are rares and uniques, and that's where these curses start to fail.


I just had a quick flick through poedb. It seems that almost all map bosses have 30 resist to various elements, many of them have 45 (the Pier map boss has 85 fire resist, but that's an extreme case). The Incombustible/Grounded/Molten map mod gives 60% resist on mid tier maps and 80% on high tier maps. So, once you start running rare mid tier maps, you'll have a pretty good chance of encountering a map boss with at least 90% resist. A level 20 Flammability/Conductivity/Frostbite curse does absolutely nothing against that, and quite a few high tier bosses will have a whopping 125% resist.


Of course the story changes significantly once you start stacking curse effect bonuses and multiple curses. But, you can get that 75% max resist down to 38% for the price of a single gem socket, and you can spend a few skill points to get Elemental Equilibrium for a guaranteed -50% resist on bosses. So the return on investment is comparatively low.


So I guess the lesson here is: if you want to reliably use -resist curses in endgame, you better build for it.

I wasn't talking about white trash mobs, i don't bother to curse them either, i was talking about rares and bosses. Elemental curses work well, it's just not "OMG I'M SO OVERPOWERED LIKE WITH EVERYTHING ELSE" well. Elemental resist mobs will always be a bit harder to take down for elemental casters. The problem is, there's just too many of them. Especially the ones that resist lightning specifically.

It doesn't really bother me though. Conductivity works ok, and they die much quicker than they would without using the curse.

I'll go a step further and say that in most cases elemental spells in general are noob traps. Due to monster resistances both a curse and a penetration gem are needed to do roughly half the dps of melee, bow skills, or phy / chaos spells.

Fortunately in this age of chaos conversion no one has to fall to the trap of elemental spells if they are using either fire or cold, and lightning at least has shock to make up for the loss of a better curse and gem slot.

Well on a crit build you certainly want to use Assassin's Mark instead, for a noncrit elemental build ignite is a legit way to scale single target damage, in which case reducing resistances becomes extremely valuable thanks to the double dipping effect. If you pick up double curse on the tree in a build like that you're already looking at 20% curse effectiveness with a quality curse support gem.

But yeah in the current patch there's little point to doing that when you have super op chaos damage everywhere without having to worry about resists and penetration gem and chance to ignite.

The conversation seems to neglect that most ele builds combine the curse with a penetration gem. Let's say you get a boss with 90 lightning resist.
Level 20 Conductivity gem = 44% reduction x 60% reduced effect = 17.6% reduction

Boss is now at 72.4% resist

Lightning penetration = 37%

Effective boss resistance is now 35.4%, as well having an increased chance to be shocked due to the curse.

It's possible that I'm mis-understanding the mechanics, but it seems an ele curse is still extremely valuable in this situation.

they are still best damage curses for any non-crit elemental build

altering enemy resists can be super strong. Probably the strongest for ignite scaling (because both initial hit and burn benefit from it). one of my builds (thread 1488376) has -163% enemy fire resist, and around -115% on 60% curse reduction bosses.. the bosses burn like paper

Investing heavily in them is punished rather hard by Hexproof map/monster affix; you cannot count on them to even do something all of the time. In that sense, they tend to noobtrap a bit. However, they are strong enough that you want to have (at least) one to use for any battle lasting longer than 2 seconds or so.