Elemental Lightning - am I doing it wrong?

[Soth]

I've seen a lot of praise for this spell. i've farmed poor boss to get it.
I am right now a mage with 38 Magic skill, Exceptional Oak Staff, Horned druid helmet, Bracelet from the same boss (+11 magic damage).
I've tested it and... it's kinda bad? Yes, Lightning has a very (VERY) long range but it is also astonishingly sluggish to cast - not only does it have a long cast time but after casting before starting a new cast my hero for a long time is just standing there doing nothing.
Even the most slow monsters like golems and trolls are able to waddle all the way from the maximum distance of Lightning to my face alive after suffering 2, maximum 3 lightning strikes.
What am I doing wrong?

[holyjay]

It has utility as a pulling tool and getting some extra damage at the start of a fight.

The issue with it is that it has a 5 second duration-much longer than the animation-which makes its dps extremely low to use continuously in a fight and causes the character to not act/move during its wind-down. There are abilities with long recovery times or lower than average range which make them clumsy and sub optimal to use, shield bash and wrathful torrent being some major ones.

The game's combat could definitely use some tuning to make it more fluid and enjoyable, like the character keeping in range of moving enemies between attacks, but as for right now you can mitigate these things a bit with some micro. Some things you can do are comboing abilities and attacks with proper timing which can cancel the recovery time of abilities and auto-attacks to increase damage and decrease downtime. You can also manually move while your next attack is on cooldown after an ability or auto-attack to position yourself closer or further away to improve efficiency depending on the situation. Gets tedious for sure, but there's a noticeable improvement with some effort.

Honestly in my experience the best use I had for Elemental Lightning was catching deer for achievements since they run away from you. But some offensive abilities are usable right after it hits to deal some damage in the downtime before the next cast/auto-attack.

[Soth]

Thank you very much! After all the praise for this spell that I've seen elsewhere I was wondering if there is something obvious that I miss in making it useful...