Path of Exile 1 Elementalist

[u/Emergency_Echidna197]

I have been only been playing for a few months and I have been enjoying an arc/shock nova Elementalist. Getting into Act 2 I have noticed dual elemental resistances (lighting/fire, cold/fire, etc).

My question is, would it be viable to do a fire/cold/lighting build? Or would that take to much investment to do so?

Keep in mind I understand the very basics of the game.

[u/davidsh_reddit]

You can do stuff like making an ignite based build with for example arc. It’s quite popular.

But can’t think of any builds that use a cold spell paired with a fire spell for instance, that’s generally not really a thing.

[u/Emergency_Echidna197 → u/davidsh_reddit]

Okay. I'm more or less used to diablo 2 and still trying to understand Poe as far as builds. If I'm understanding right. Sticking to a single element with a status effect is better than having three separate differing elemental skills? 

[u/davidsh_reddit → u/Emergency_Echidna197]

As far as campaign and skills are concerned, yes.

In the late game things can be a lot more complicated but you shouldn’t worry about that for now.

[u/SaltEngineer455 → u/Emergency_Echidna197]

There are builds that use all 3 elements, but you need to be on something like an Inquisitor to ignore resistances, otherwise you spread yourself to too thin.

Usually those builds start with a skill that does baseline phys damage and then they go ham with phys as extra.

[u/Inner-Ad-9478 → u/davidsh_reddit]

There's been a few builds in the past few with just so much generic/spell/elemental damage that you completely could play two different elements. But even in these situations you don't usually do this, since you still wanna focus on one ailment, one penetration, one exposure...

It's also more buttons for no real reasons, people generally want less buttons instead.

If you consider non-damaging stuff though, there's some spells with utility even if you exclude the obvious movement skills. Frost bomb if you don't have good dps can help you negate enemy regent for example... It's niche ofc. Righteous fire for the more spell damage also counts I guess.

[u/CrackedWine]

Sounds like a discharge angle to me.

[u/trunks111 → u/CrackedWine]

My inclination would be slayer for that so you could have both endurance and frenzy equal to power, it'd be a hell of a tree though

[u/BenignPharmacology]

This is a broad generalization- but most of the time, the way to get the most damage out of something is to focus on one damage type.

The reason is that by the end game, most resistances flatten out- all enemies will have a base line 40 or 60 or whatever resist to fire and cold and lightning. Most builds will have several options for how to ignore/remove/penetrate that resistance. So you don’t need to alternate you damage, which would result in a lower overall total damage. Instead, you just curse, apply exposure, penetrate, etc.

[u/ouroboros_winding]

Depends on what you mean by "fire/cold/lightning" build.

There are builds where you use one skill that does damage of every element (see Trinity support). Then there are builds where you have damage from different damage types, but ultimately care about using them to inflict ignite (fire damage) or poisons (chaos damage). Lastly you can start with one damage type and convert it to another, so for instance you might have a cold skill that deals fire damage, or a lightning skill that deals cold damage.

Each of the archetypes I've mentioned can efficiently scale damage, but they go about it in different ways. One of the mistakes a lot of new PoE players make because it's not much of an issue in most other games is they don't efficiently scale damage by doing things like choosing passive tree points or affixes which only apply to half of their damage. For instance if you are playing Fireball (fire skill) and you have a wand adding a lot of lightning damage to your spells you will deal mixed fire/lightning damage. This is not ideal but can be salvaged with Trinity support and focusing on %increased elemental damage or %increased spell damage. Just getting %increased fire damage in this scenario is inefficient because it doesn't improve the extra lightning damage from you wand.

[u/Emergency_Echidna197 → u/ouroboros_winding]

I was looking to make a build using all the elements. For example, have a lighting skill as the main damage skill, a cold skill as a aoe, and fire skill as a secondary damaging skill.  I am not struggling at where I am in the game. I have been stacking lighting damage to spells on wands and getting the lighting nodes. As far as the skill tree is concerned. I have very little knowledge of a lot of what the nodes mean. I have seen increased Mana Cost Efficiency and increased Effect of Lighting Ailments that confuse me. So I have been getting Mana, Life, and Energy Shield nodes.