manaforged arrows question

[Clyan]

would manaforged arrows trigger elemental hit if i use frenzy in melee? both skills have a bow tag, however i would want to use sire of shards as a weapon in order to make elemental hit to trigger in a circle.

i suppose it wouldnt be a good bosser but at least it might be able to clear maps.

since i use sire of shards my attack speed probably also needs optimizing, meaning that frenzy is certainly not a bad choice anyway, but i problably need more than 3 frenzy charges, so i might need to play with a character on the right side of the tree, but im not sure of that.

so is this a possible build and do you have any suggestions?

[insectbrain]

Not sure if frenzy having the bow tag is enough for it to be considered a bow attack with any weapon. You might actually need a bow as using a melee weapon to attack with frenzy might not be considered a bow attack and instead a melee attack.

There are some wonky interactions in the game however and it should be simple enough to test to see if it works. Would be a fun interaction if it does.

Let us know how it goes if you test it out.

[acirb]

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Manaforged_Arrows_Support
"Manaforged Arrows is a support gem that triggers a linked bow attack skill when the player spends enough mana on other bow attacks."

The key part being in the very end. You need to use a bow attack (that uses mana) to trigger it.

[Clyan]

so ive tested this and it doesnt work, for two reasons:
using a melee weapon the projectile tag is disabled on both elemental hit and frenzy, so it works as a melee skill only. the second reason is that manaforged arrows has a bow tag only, so i suppose it doesnt work with melee weapons, even tho its description only refers to "bow attacks" and not "attacks from bows". it would be a bit clearer if it said that it works by using bows only.

i guess the only way of making this work (meaning projectile circle) then still is EK of the massacre on a COC build.
ive tried this in the past but couldnt make it work in terms of damage and survivability.

the main attack technically doesnt need to do much dmg, if EK is there to clear, but i struggled to scale its dmg. im also not the biggest fan of this idea in general, as COC means that i lose 2 gem slots which otherwise could help to scale EKs dmg. since two handed weapons are slower i went with squire + sword, however the problem here is that melee attacks dont have much range, which means i need a character with access to melee strike range on the tree. such characters often dont have much access to spell damage nodes. i could try with assassin of course. he both has crit in his ascencion tree and access to melee strike range and increased elemental damage, however EK is a physical spell, so id have to convert it. there is also a cluster of nodes that increases spell damage in general if i use a shield, and since i use squire this would be alright.

maybe i need to theorycraft more, im just not very good at it.

originally when i got the idea i wanted arc to trigger EK, but spells cannot trigger spells via COC, so i had to try with a melee skill.