Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page

Flat Damage from gear only adds to attacks, but not spells (unless mentioned otherwise, like on Apep's Rage). It's one of those things that still remain a bit non-transparent for new players, maybe GGG should improve on that since you can't always expect that every player knows about the wiki.

For this particular build, 10% Lightning/Spell/Elemental are almost the same. Since we run Herald of Ice, a small part of our Arc is Cold Damage, which will be affected by Spell & Elemental Damage, but obviously not by Lightning Damage. The difference is quite negligible, that's why for this build it doesn't really matter if you get either of the three.

Chaos Res is so-so. In softcore i usually don't really bother, most chaos damage sources don't really have high burst, special cases like poison clouds on a vulnerability map can easily be bypassed with an Atziri's Promise until you moved out of the cloud. In hardcore however i value it a lot, since GGG seems to always want to remind us "Hey, Chaos Damage exists" with special league modifiers.

The game is said to be balanced around 0% Chaos Res, so if you get close to that you're good already.
Ming's Heart is rather detrimental for this build, so no, don't use it.

Well, It's nice to hear that because ming's heart is expensive.

Thank you alot for THE HUGE AMOUNT of information you gave me .The build is amazing & i still love Arc even though it needs many modifications now & for sure i will PM you when i need any advice :)

Thanks again & Best luck for you :)

Really fun build this. Thx for sharing!

Huge update. If you followed the old tree, the new one isn't that far off and possible to respec within the free respec points you can get through quests.

Great and detailed information. You really put a lot of work into your build.

It looks like the analysis with Pledge of Hands isn't sufficient though, to highlight the benefits from a 6L Pledge of Hands.

[More flexibility in build]
It's accepted that a 6L PoH is expensive, but the 100% increased maximum mana means that at least 4 of the ES and mana nodes on the right branch of the Witch starting tree don't need to be taken, freeing them up to be used elsewhere, which is a pretty huge plus. (this is going by the PoH testing build you posted)

After reading up on many Arc builds, I decided on Zhenia's Arc build below and expanded on it a bit since a 5L/6L chest to gem up is very beneficial. Both Zhenia's build and your build are very similar. The main differences are gear selection.
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1194524

[Indirect boost to damage not shown on tool tip]
The added benefit of allowing your 5L or 6L chest to have HoT/HoI/Clarity/Reduced mana to be linked to Curse on Hit with Assassin's Mark means even more added damage (more crit chance, more crit damage, more power charges, a bit of life/mana back as you casually play - no need to constantly disrupt play to cast anything extra). Since this set-up auto generates power charges for you, you can use something like Added Chaos or Crit Multi instead of PCoC. This likely outdamages any of the other set-ups in the weapon comparison.

Since all 4 buffs are in the same item you even save on a gem socket since there's no need for an extra reduced mana gem.
(This is just a suggestion of gems - there are other combos too, of course.)

The idea was based on Aim_Deep's Ice Nova build thread since he also uses a PoH.
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1164327

[More survivability]
Also with PoH, you have at least 9% (9.1% if lucky corrupt) LL with a quality LL gem, which is enough to mitigate reflect (according to Zhenia) even without Purity of Lightning or flasks. If there's worry, PoL can always be ran instead of Clarity or one of the Heralds. Zhenia doesn't run PoL.

Zhenia:
"21LL 9.1-60%=3.64%
Reflect in map 14% 14-75%u res=3.5% u get back dmg and 3.64% u have LL
u can kill himself if u have more 40k dps one shot."

There isn't a need to use Doryani's belt for extra LL. You can use a high resist leather belt with high max life roll which should give you around 400HP more with life nodes.

[MF with similar clear speeds as normal grinding]
Given the damage with Arc is pretty much overkill for most high level maps already, you can even switch in an Item Quantity gem for PoH to do some MF and still have the power of a 6L for similar clear speeds.

Overall, using PoH with a 5L/6L chest means more survivability than dual welding wands/doryani/divinarius, and likely more damage as well depending on how the gem set-up is (6L PoH + 5/6L Cloak).

Fair enough, however all setups i've tested came down to dual wielding wands being the best choice for Crit Arc - Dark Arts is just an extremely good cluster, and Arc scales best with cast speed.
The 4 nodes you could save up for the 100% mana on PoH don't cut it, PoH was always slightly worse than 2x Catalysts in all setups.

The thing about survivability is right, but i feel like i've balanced this build that much that additional survivability is not needed. I've soloed 200+ 78 maps and all unique maps before updating the guide and claiming the things i do claim in here, the only thing that has a chance to kill this build is lagging out while in an extra dmg chaos cloud, due to low chaos res and no life regen. Or careless playing, but that's a players fault.

I've tested the charge generation through HoT + CoH + AssMark and even blindly put it in this guide in the last iteration, but i'm clearly not a fan of it. You probably didn't read the Detailed Gem Breakdown, where i've mentioned why PCoC is just so much superior for Crit Arc. More damage isn't needed either, and can even backfire in reflect cases.

Note that i don't say PoH is a bad choice for Crit Arc, it is a solid choice. I just say other choices are better based on months of testing.

Hey, it's great to be able to have a discussion like this. Agreed that the charge generation from HoT/HoI for Arc is much worse than PCoC.

The test build used for the PoH comparison isn't on par with your actual Arc build when you consider the bonuses of the weapons you're comparing. My post noted 'at least' 4 passive points can be saved, but since PoH already has 100% increased mana, you can save 8 passive points from your PoH test build. To do a fair comparison, we basically even out the trees so that we're comparing apples to apples.

Build used to compare PoH:
http://poeurl.com/zgQrnr0
*Note, I would never get all those extra cast speed nodes in the test build. I got them just to even out the build for comparison. Would much rather take Celestial Judgement or Celestial Punishment.

Old fashioned number crunching can shed light on the differences between using 2x Doryani and 6L PoH for Arc. I've put together a spreadsheet showing the build stats side by side, stats from weapons also considered in the comparison.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11SCuynRUV9hUYvqM8_nz6Z74SIRqnRFozfq93rNEpBM/edit?pli=1#gid=0

The results are below if you don't want to look at the spreadsheet:
2x Doryani VS PoH
All stats are the same between the two weapon set-ups except for the below.
-----------------
+10 to Intelligence VS +10 to Dexterity [PoH is better]

6% Cast Speed VS 30% increased Global Critical Strike Multiplier [PoH is better]
40% Elemental + 10% Spell Damage VS 1 Additional support gem for Arc (7-Link) [PoH is better]

All the mana related stats below VS 46% increased maximum Mana [Doryani is a bit better]
30% Mana Regeneration
+20 to maximum mana
12% increased maximum Energy Shield
+20 to maximum Energy Shield

3% LL + 6% reduced Mana Cost of Skills VS 9.8% LL [PoH is better]

PoH has added bonus of possible 5L/6L chest set-up (Curse on Hit w/ Assassin's Mark, etc.) [PoH is better]
-----------------

Basically, Pledge of Hands is better than any of the dual weld set-ups, except for your dual rare wand set-up. Considering how OP and insanely expensive your rare wands are, that's totally understandable of course.

Let me know if any corrections needed. Thx

Did some more testing on PoH vs. Catalysts with this setup. Excluded Moonsorrow, Divinarius and my wands cuz' it was obvious from beginning the the first two will be worse, and my wands will be better.
The tree used for PoH was this one: http://poeurl.com/zgTIsFK Also emulated a 6L by using Empower instead of Life Leech.

With Catalysts i had 48489 DPS (V. Haste + Flask), 5.3 casts/s, 52.1% crit chance, 374% multi, 3% leech, 2823/938 Mana and 360.7 mana/s.
With PoH i had 47656.1 DPS (V. Haste + Flask), 5.2 casts/s, 52.6% crit chance, 419% multi, 9.8% leech, 3277/1142 mana, 379.5 mana/s.

DPS wise they're pretty close, PoH wins in survivability while Catalysts take the cake in terms of price (except temp HC). I'll rewrite the section about PoH when i find time, but i won't change my opinion about using it with Crit Arc and will keep recommending dual Catalysts for the casual budget section.

Btw. my wands were with 9ex total cheaper than you may expect. But as mentioned in the guide, finding good ones can be a struggle and fitting ones possibly more pricey than the ones i found.

The PoH test build this time around is still taking too many ES/mana nodes at the beginning of the witch tree (~450 more mana than your Arc build), which can be used for fast cast or damage nodes instead. PoH would probably end up being at least ~2k more damage than 2x catalysts. The auto-cursing of Assassin's Mark/Conductivity/Elemental Weakness from HoT/HoI would put it at noticeably higher damage as well.

Totally agree that 2x catalysts is what should be recommended as the budget build set-up. PoH is better, but definitely more expensive. However, PoH is a few multiples less expensive than your rare wands in price. Searching on poe.trade with stats close to your Rage Spire wand and which still have one free craftable slot for the 1% lightning damage leech, costs a mirror (some of which are even lower stats than your Rage Spire).

Overall, Pledge of Hands is probably the best set-up for most spell caster builds that go MoM/EB without a shield (not just Arc). A shield is great in certain situations, but as most players say - "offense is defense".

Thanks for taking the time to test and post numbers. It really makes this a great guide and thread.

Didn't change the witch starting nodes cuz' that would require some completely new pathing, too much off from the original tree for comparison.

I personally prefer the better crit consistency and reliability of rare wands over PoH for unlimited budget, after testing both for quite some time wands just feel better to me.
But as you said, PoH is a good choice and if someone wants to use that, there's already countless Crit Arc guides based around that staff they can use.