thoughts on lightning?

[Icemephit]

Specifically compared to fire and ice, does lightning feel a little underwhelming? With the synergy items (sight applying burn staff for instance) burn and to a lesser extent chill seem quite a bit easier to stack, and outside of the resistance modifier lightning doesn't seem to get any direct scaling to damage off of spark stacks. I know wet factors into it but it suffers from slow stacking as well. It feels like by the time lightning can get to around 1k damage(with a 7 cost spell no less) fire can be approaching 4k on a 2 cost(with combustion). Is there some kind of synergy I've missed or is lightning just a bit behind at the moment?

[chono]

My biggest issue with lightning is that sparks feels bad to stack. Your either doing a bunch of small hits to stack it with spells that jump or chain resulting in a bunch of monsters with low stacks. Or you focus down one target and then it dies with a large number of stacks that might never be proced.

Even then of your not playing wilbur and you didn't take his perk for it stacking sparks on a single target just lowers resistance. Also sparks does lightning damage but it doesn't seem to proc the extra damage from wet

[Fendelphi]

Remember that WET gives additional damage to lightning as well. So if you go for Thuls with poison rain and a character that focuses on Lightning and Sparks(as well as a few Cold spells for Wet), it becomes pretty disgusting, very fast.

[Twogs]

Funnily enough the first time I managed to defeat the boss of the game was with a spark/lightning based team (Magnus, Wilbur, Evelyn, Reginald)

[Rhapthorn]

I think fire is 100% the strongest but lightning is still good.

If anything Chill seems the weakest to me.

[MagiKarp]

Originally posted by Rhapthorn:

If anything Chill seems the weakest to me.

Yeah, since AFAIK there's really no difference between an enemy having 0 speed and -26 speed, while the secondary effect of the other two will keep adding more damage with each stack.

[OoOoOoooOOoOoorgle]

Yeah I'd like spark to feel a little better. Though I'm honestly not sure whether it does or doesn't math-wise, somehow it always at least seems like it's underperforming.

I agree that Chill got the shortest straw, though. Outside of crack combos, there is no meaningful synergy to recommend chill charges beyond speed = 0.

[Fendelphi]

Burn is good in terms of damage and have good synergies across a few classes and items, but is also the easiest to remove of the elemental DoTs(either on purpose or accident) and only damages 1 enemy(the one it is on).

Sparks is more difficult to remove and is, at it's base, an AoE tool.
Wilbur can make it a single target effect in addition to AoE, which makes it far superior to Burn, if wanted. It can be enhanced with Wet, which makes it synergize very well with repeated- and 0-cost cards.

Cold is a control debuff that helps ensure that your team acts before the enemy(helps a lot with damage mitigation). Their spells have reasonable costs and a lot of them are AoE or multi-hit types.

They each have their strengths and roles.

[Icemephit]

While I agree with spark at base with Wilbur being a bit stronger that's only looking at it in a vacuum. Burn has a large number of synergy items (rings and weapons that apply it when applying another debuff) that make it much easier to stack, as in hundreds in a single turn. This combined with combustion kind of leaves lightning in the dust I feel. If anything this might be a bit more of an item problem than with burn itself, as chill and spark don't have secondary application methods outside of a couple on hit weapons; and perhaps combustion is a bit strong but I supposed its supposed to be the fire version of bane or something.

[Fendelphi]

Originally posted by Icemephit:

While I agree with spark at base with Wilbur being a bit stronger that's only looking at it in a vacuum. Burn has a large number of synergy items (rings and weapons that apply it when applying another debuff) that make it much easier to stack, as in hundreds in a single turn. This combined with combustion kind of leaves lightning in the dust I feel. If anything this might be a bit more of an item problem than with burn itself, as chill and spark don't have secondary application methods outside of a couple on hit weapons; and perhaps combustion is a bit strong but I supposed its supposed to be the fire version of bane or something.

I dont think that Burn has better itemization than the other 2. It is just a bit easier/more straight forward, and can work across a few classes(especially the Priest).
The Charged Trident combined with spells like Ball Lightning or Winter Orb(Winter Orb is one of the best "stacking" enabling spells for the Mage class), is extremely effective in stacking both Spark and Wet on targets, greatly empowering your Lightning damage.
And then you have either Storm Tiara or The Polluter, which empowers Wet in various ways(you could use The Polluter with Thuls and Toxic Rain).
Similarly, the Frostfire Ring, which lets you apply Burn for every Chill you apply, actually lets you stack Burn faster than most burn based builds, especially if you also use the Glacial Hammer. Again, due to spells like Blizzard, Icicle Barrage and Winter Orb. Mix in 1 or 2 Combustions, and you have a cold based deck that has both utility and very high damage.

Burn is limited by which spells you can use with it. You HAVE to focus almost exclusively on Burn and limit the card selection of other characters as well, due to Wet completely negating Burn.
You cant add utility spells to the deck, if they have a Wet component.
If the enemy has ways to dispel effects from themselves, you usually lose more progress with pure Burn builds than with Spark+Wet. And Burn based builds typically have poor versatility, as they dont really add anything else than damage(no slowing effects, energize or armor gain).
The 3 best Burn cards are Combustion, Meteor Shower and Scorching Ray. My reasoning being that they either provide very high burst damage to a single target(when properly set up), or can hit multiple targets, to limit the chance of overkill.
However, one of them is super rare and very costly(10).
Fire also has the worst "book" in my opinion. Both Lightning and Cold books allows you to reuse powerful spells in your discard pile for a reduced cost(like Ball Lightning and Winter Orb). The fire book simply adds a few 0 cost fireballs to your deck, which is not bad per se, but unless you have a lot of draw, it will hurt your overall performance in my experience.

Fire and Burn spells are good. No doubts there. But I dont think they are strictly better than other elemental builds that you can make.

[xRainZx]

lighting works but feels a little on the weaker side without proper gear, that is due to it without the charged trident, it's hard to stack charges on them, and 100% needed the hydra's +1 charge to spark and wet for it to actually work.
(Luckily, both gear can be gathered quite constantly due to them being unique to boss loot/ event loot on adventure mode)

After that, you just need to have tons of cards that gives you little to no cost and does alot of multi hit like repeat AOEs, or chains, after that, each hit will stack atleast 5~10 spark/wet, and can stack from 50~100 stacks depending on your hand, (to be honest, the mobs probably already died, caz mobs will takes over 50~100 dmg per hit from a single 1 cost lighting spell by that point)

The other good thing about spark is it deals dmg to not just the side of the target, but to the stack holder itself if the lighting mage is in the party, combine it with evelyn to stack spark, and you can see the crazy amount of stacks you can inflict in a single turn (though beware that evelyn kinda removes wet stacks very easily due to burn stacks being applied constantly if you use fire spell or her 1 turn unique skill, resulting in total damage lost.)

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On the other hand, fire stacks can be easily stacked up due to easy access to gear to apply burn on enemies, and fire tend to have alot of low cost aoe spells.
But one thing about burn is that if you accidently applied wet or enemies did, all the effort to stack them become wasted.

Also, not to mention the lava boss kinda heal itself using burn stacks, making the fight become longer and more dangerous as it spams the 10 cost meteor if you don't kill it fast enough.

[Fendelphi]

Just wanted to add, that I turned 400 poison stacks into 400 wet stacks(Priest spell Dillute) against the last boss, then, when it was Wilburs turn, blasted it with 2 Lightning Balls back to back.

Of course, this strategy will be limited with some of the Madness modifiers, but same is true for the other debuffs.

[forcecomdr]

It always seems like by the time i get a decent sized stack of spark, the mob is almost dead. then it dies wasting all that effort. Though i'm sure if you spec specifically for it, it may be better.

[Crim]

I personally feel Lightning is the strongest of the 3 elements

There are plenty of Wet combos that can drive Lightning damage to absolutely absurd amounts

Spark is basically irrelevant since it doesn't work with Wet


Tho, Fire is neck and neck with Lightning... Cold sucks, I have made a post about Cold sucking in the past

[KeohZ]

The only weakness of Lightning is that it lacked a Detonator. If it had an equivalent card to Combustion for Burn, Lightning would be the best element. As it stands, it's a good Hallway Fight clears. You can easily take 1 turn to stack AOE Wet with Rain, Healing Rain, and Squall, then wipe the enemy line up with Shock Nova/Superconductor. It's much quicker than stacking debuffs on enemies one at a time like you'd with Burn or Bleed.

[mdart]

Originally posted by KeohZ:

The only weakness of Lightning is that it lacked a Detonator. If it had an equivalent card to Combustion for Burn, Lightning would be the best element. As it stands, it's a good Hallway Fight clears. You can easily take 1 turn to stack AOE Wet with Rain, Healing Rain, and Squall, then wipe the enemy line up with Shock Nova/Superconductor. It's much quicker than stacking debuffs on enemies one at a time like you'd with Burn or Bleed.

thats the problem though lighting needs both wet and items to be good while both fire and ice dont. and the fact that you dont need any form of wet is also good since you do somthing like mangus with the volcano axe malukah nez and corn. both malukah and nez lose nothing and are able to apply tons of stacks with the right items hell you talk about a 2 to 3 charachater combo to to kill a wave but malukah with injustice ring and yin yang badge can kill the waves with just a couple of spells and apply the burn to finish them off if need be. the fact remains that spark need wuilber and items to be good and wet for extra damage. while burn and ice are easy to stack and does not need a set character to make them stronger. hell in a small run to show off the game to some friends in round 1 i had over 500 burn stacks with out a mage using burn cards. the part that makes spark ok is the fact that its key items are boss drops otherwise it would be in a worse spot.

Originally posted by Talamare:

I personally feel Lightning is the strongest of the 3 elements

There are plenty of Wet combos that can drive Lightning damage to absolutely absurd amounts

Spark is basically irrelevant since it doesn't work with Wet


Tho, Fire is neck and neck with Lightning... Cold sucks, I have made a post about Cold sucking in the past

dissagree lightning is the worse since it needs the most including other elements and spells to work well. burn is just plain strong with a small weakness to wet but seeing as only mages and healers can do wet and most healers have healing rain set to team only wet is never an issue. cold is good due to the fact that it can stack fast and lowers the enemys speed allowing you to control the game more. lighting while strong when paired with wet, items and wilbure. is only good when you get said character items and wet spells.