Insane Lightning Fingers!

Plow through groups of mobs, rares, and bosses alike with insane tendrils of critical lightning!

Intro & Gameplay Video

This was my first build in Wolcen. I altered it a few times as I leveled and finally again at level 20.

The basic idea of the build is to destroy your opponents with vast quantities of lightning bolts emitted from your finger tips!

Guide written for Wolcen Alpha 0.5.0.5c

Pros:

• Strong AoE for packs of all sizes and bosses that spawn adds.
  
• Ranged attacks allow for killing of monsters from a great (safe) distance.
  
• Powerful and effective even without rare, unique, or legendary items.
  
• Quick and easy to level

Cons:

• Bit of a glass canon. Getting surrounded or stunned can be dangerous.

Those nimble Lightning Fingers in action!

Build Tree

The build tree wanders all over with the current state of the released skills.

Build Order:

• Start by filling in the Arcanist part of the tree, including the elementalist section
  
• Don't forget to grab the first node in the assissin 3rd ring, for extra crit!
  
• Grab Legionary, to increase casting speed. Beware this makes you more squishy
  
• Get Hunter, and fill in that part of the tree, 2 nodes into the maleficient section
  
• Drop your last points into the first 2 nodes of the thief section of the tree.

Stat Allocation

Just dump everything you've got into willpower.

Willpower affects:

• Higher spell damage
  
• Health Regeneration
  
• Spell Resistance
  
• Ailment Chance modifier

Obviously we want the extra spell damage for the offensive end of things.
The other 3 items greatly improve survivability, which is quite helpful with this glass canon build.

Skills

Lightning Strike:

The primary skill we rely on for quick, easy DPS is Lightning Strike. The beautiful thing about this skill, is that we get it almost from the very beginning of the game. Once you've got it, set it to the right mouse button, as this is your primary damage dealer for the rest of the game. As you level the spell, select Discharge, Bouncing Light, and Bouncing Light again. Discharge dramatically increases the speed at which the spell deals damage, and bouncing light is the addition to the spell that turns it into a powerful AoE.

Thunderbolt:

An awesome secondary skill to suppliment Lightning Strikes is Thunderbolt. This skill adds even more AoE to the mix, and since it travels slowly, can be launched at groups of mobs or bosses before casting Lightning Strike, allowing both skills to hit the target(s) at the same time, dealing a whopping amount of damage simultaniously. Thunderbolt isn't as quick to cast and hit a single target as Lightning Strike, but if you launch it into a pack before you get to close, it is almost free to cast and can annihilate them before they even see it coming. As you level the skill, select Cost Reduced, Flashing Light, Conductive bolt, and Ticking Bomb. All but one of these are the only options for their respective tiers. Flashing Light ramps up the damage fo the lightning balls as they pass through the groups of mobs or boss.

! NOTE: As it stands, Thunderbolt passes through doors, walls, and other obstacles. You can use this to your advantage, although I suspect this will be corrected in a future release of Wolcen.


Frost Nova and Tremor are both purely survival skills. Their only purpose is to slow down or stop mobs who are attacking us in their tracks. To this end, we level them to CC, not to DPS.

Frost Nova:

Crystallization, Elemental Affinity, Tempurature Leech, Lingering Ice, Winter Garden
- Do NOT select Winter Garden, this reduces the CC components of Frost Nova!

Tremor:

Cooldown Reduced, Earthquake

Brutal Strike:

This melee attack can be used as a quick rage dump to regenerate Umbra!

Spellbinder:

USE IT! Pop it before / during boss or hard fights for that extra damage boost.

Infiltration:

When you get this, feel free to use it to turn invisible and get out of trouble. Another nice life saving ability in our arsenal.

Gear

Gear is pretty simple:

Weapon:

Get a staff with the highest amount of +xx% to Spells Damage (and +x% to Lightning Damage is a bonus that can be looked for later). Don't worry much about the level of the staff or the damage range, since we won't be attacking directly with it anyways! Sockets in the staff are always nice to have as well. They can be Defensive or Support. We'll get into the sockets later in this guide.

Armor Items:

Selecting armor for this build is really quite simple. Cloth with x% to will power and y to Umbra Generation. That's it! Any additional stats that help, such as added willpower, health, health regeneration, and x% chance to gain y umbra points on kills are a nice bonus. Don't be temped to equip some rare or legendary item that doesn't have the willpower and umbra generation!

Rings, Amulet, and Cloak:

Of course items that increase will power and / or health are awesome! Other mods such as Increased resource pool or resistances are also helpful. One of the best things that these items can have though is a support socket! This will be a huge help from level 1 all the way to level 20. I'll get into the sockets in the next section.

Sockets and Gems

As a caster, we get Support and Defensive sockets. Staves don't get Offensive sockets like other weapon types do. So basically there are 2 gems we want to keep our eyes peeled for:

Cyanite:

This is the bread and butter gem for us! It works amazingly well in both the defensive and support sockets of our gear.


When inserted into a support socket, it reduces the umbra cost of spells. This helps us out immensely in preserving our umbra and not running out in the middle of a hard or boss fight.

When inserted into a defensive socket, it increases our willpower. As we already know, more willpower means more spell damage and higher survivability!

Lapis-Lazuli:

This lighter blue gem increases our chance to shock. This will greatly improve our damage, but this gem should only be used in some of our support sockets if, and only if, umbra regeneration is not an issue and we never really run out. Otherwise, it is best to stick with the Cyanite.

Other useful gems include:

• Amethyste: Used as support to increase health
  
• Alexandrite: Used as support for increased experience gain while leveling

Again, don't used these support gems if you're having a hard time maintaining umbra, use the Cyanite gems instead.

TIP: Leveling Spells Faster

Quickly leveling spells:

Spells level as you do, through experience and time. However, they can also be force leveled using a currency item called Knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained by turning in any Tome to the Archavist. The knowledge can then be utilized to level any spell or ability you select, then clicking on the Level Up button. Each level up costs a certain amount of knowledge, and this will be displace on the button when you select the desire spell or ability.

So make sure you pick up all of those tomes that drop, even if you already know them or are not interested in learning them!

[Freaky]

The new patch broke the skill completely, it's now totally lame. The whole responsiveness is gone. They could have nerfed the damage, but they removed the ticks. It feels so bad now that i stopped using it.

[Immortalits]

I've used this build as my own invention, it's not a 'great' thing, it's obvious from start, that the lightning is overpowered... to the point, where I chose to swap out half my gear to phisical enhancements to get tanky and stuff.and I've still managed to oneshot even rares sometimes... this skill is just riddiculously overpowered, nothing else, you don't need a guide for it to have the exact same effect... just equipping it will do the work with whatever build you're using.

[Patcac]

why is ur skill tree like this? mine is half empty and different layout to yours

[Daohor]

I can't resist, but I must say "Unlimited powah!!"

Oh and great guide gonna give this a whirl and see how it melts faces.

[DeadClocks]

Nice guide, Just picked the game up and was looking for something like this to try and experiment with. Thankyou very much for sharing Raligard,
well layed out!

Rak