Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page & POE 2 Arc Summary

1) So, I'm really not a pro and most of this is simply copy/paste from the Wiki. I'll just try to give some insight into this, from how I understand it. There are probably veterans here that can do a better job than me.

Any hit of cold damage has the potential to chill the target. That's why we look for something that gives any amount of cold damage to our spells, so it applies to Arc. So adding cold damage to Arc allows us to chill (not always of course, but it allows us to chill).

Chilling conflux (from Shaper of Desolation) is a buff that causes hits from all combined* damage types to apply chill, overriding the aforementioned usual rule that only cold damage can do this. That is just on top of it. So even if you had no source for cold damage, when the conflux is up, you still have a chance to chill with other damage types.

*combined: It means that if you hit something with 200 Physical, 50 Fire, 100 Cold and 150 Chaos damage, while the Chilling Conflux is up, that hit will apply chill based on a 500 damage initial hit. This is important when it comes to how the Chill mechanics work.

Because the magnitude of the slow from Chill is directly proportional to the damage relative to the target's maximum life. The slow/effect is capped at 30%. To achieve that slow, you have to deal 10% of the target's maximum life dealt by (cold) damage. From there it scales down to 0% slow at no damage. Hits below the minimum threshold of 1% effect are discarded, effectively requiring a hit of 0.33% enemy maximum life to chill that enemy. This means, in case of the Shaper for example, who has 18.000.000 life, minimally chilling the Shaper requires a single hit of 59.400 (cold) damage.

Since the conflux overrides the rule that it has to be cold damage you can achieve that with your lightning damage from Arc, when the conflux is up.
The conflux helps a lot when it comes to chilling enemies with lots of life and the magnitude of the chill.

Now to Beacon of Ruin: As mentioned already, every type of cold damage has the potential to inflict the ailment chill and if our conflux is up, it doesn't even have to be cold damage. But as explained in the Chill mechanics, the magnitude of it is proportional to the damage relative to the target's maximum life. Let's say you attack something and you chill it, but deal only enough (Cold) damage to achieve a slow of say 3%. That's not a very noticeable effect. Now Beacon of Ruin comes into play. Because it makes it that your chills always reduce the action speed by at least 10%. That's more than 3 times as much as what you would've managed otherwise and a monster being 1/10th slower is starting to be noticeable.

Add on top of that that we take a few nodes that give "increased effect of non-damaging ailments". This applies to shock, but also to chill.

The Chills from your Hits always Slow by at least 10% mod from Beacon of Ruin is increased by this. So if you have 20% increased Effect of non-Damaging Ailments on Enemies, the minimum chill slow would then be 12%.

On top of that, Beacon also makes it that elemental ailments are spread in a certain radius (18 units). https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Distance
Helps when dealing with packs. You don't have to chill each enemy individually anymore. You chill one and it spreads to others.

Also don't forget that you probably do around 5 casts or more per second and that Arc chains, hitting (and each hit has the potential to chill) several targets with every single cast.

Now to Hypothermia: It only works on enemies that are already chilled, but it further increases the chill duration, it further increases the chill effect (the slow), it makes you deal up to 39% more damage to chilled enemies (!), and it gives you a additional chance to freeze chilled enemies (which otherwise is only possible via critical hits with cold damage).

Is it guaranteed that we always chill? No. But to me it feels as if it still happens frequently enough. I think it's not a bad support gem in this case. Chilling/freezing in general is a great help for survivability and works kinda like a passive defense, plus the combination of being able to deal ~40% increased damage to chilled enemies isn't that bad either.

I mean, you could remove your source of cold damage and take out Hypothermia and then just check out what it feels like without it. If you think it's no big difference, then take something else.

I guess you could totally swap it out for another support gem. It's totally possible, and I don't think it would break the build or anything.

Regarding question 4: This tiny delay is even there on PC. It gets better with more attack speed, but it's there. Flame Dash feels "smoother" on PC as well. But it has the nasty, nasty cooldown, which makes it a fairly unreliable movement skill. Faster Casting doesn't help with Cooldown Recovery Speed either. They're different things. Cooldown starts after attack speed or cast speed end. The only way to reduce the Cooldown on Flamedash is a specific helmet enchantment or sources from shaper boots and belts. Whirling Blades is simply way more reliable and quicker.

Sure, you could drop it and go for wands, they'd overall be better stat sticks than daggers, but personally I would never do that.

Thank you! Unfortunately I don't really have enough time or even ideas for more guides.

Your daggers have the most upgrade potential right now, just check the link in my "How to.." miniguide, change it to Synthesis and you can probably find two good daggers with benchcraft potential for cheap. There's also currently no cold damage added to your spells, so Hypothermia isn't working most of the time. Easiest way to fix that is craft or buy a Hypnotic Eye Jewel for your belt. Other than that, all I could think of right now is saving up for a craftable 6L base, and once oyu got your new daggers either fixing the Storm Brand setup or using a CwDt + IC one instead.

To understand Beacon of Ruin it helps to first understand how elemental ailments work. Currently there are four main elemental ailments - Shock, Freeze, Chill and Ignite.

The first three are "non-damaging ailments" and have a certain effect range, the amount of damage of the corresponding element you deal in a single hit compared to the enemies maximum life decides how strong their effect is. Each ailment has different effect ranges and minimum tresholds, which you can find on the wiki. Ignite works differently, it applies a damage over time effect and instead of a minimum treshold, your fire damage dealt in the igniting hit decides how strong the damage over time is.

Those aren't the only factors to apply elemental ailments. Shock, Freeze and Ignite also require their respective "Chance to.." modifiers or a crit, which always inflicts elemental ailments as long as the other requirements are met. Chill works differently, there's no Chance to Chill and it simply requires you to deal enough cold damage for the minimum treshold. Additionally, a frozen enemy is also always chilled.

Now what Beacon of Ruin does is it simply removes the minimum tresholds from Shock and Chill and replaces them with a fixed 20% respectively 10% minimum effect. This means just 1 Lightning & 1 Cold Damage would be enough to inflict those at their new minimum value, but incase of Shock still requiring Chance to Shock or a crit.

The new minimum values also get increased by "increased Effect of Shock/Chill" or "increased Effect of Non-Damaging Ailments", which simply boosts Shock, Freeze and Chill at the same time. This means with 150% Shock Effect you will always shock for the maximum 50% damage increase, and with 200% Chill Effect always reduce action speed by the maximum 30%, regardless of how much lightning/cold damage you deal compared to the enemies maximum life.

This is of course not just theory, you can find all relevant dev comments linked on the Beacon of Ruin wiki page.

About Flame Dash, you would have to go all out to really make it spammable. This means helmet enchantment, Dark Arts nodes and probably also Cooldown Reduction on belt and boots. But if it already works better for you in PS4 like this, then just keep going with it. Just remember that without all that investment, it may not be enough mobility for some of the highend fights.

Looks decent, just know that the Crit Multi on both weapons doesn't do anything due to Elemental Overload. Next i'd recommend a Lv21 Arc and getting the Alchemist nodes.

If you mean in Path of Building, that's simply how the dev coded it. Crit chance only affects the proc probability, the damage increase is always the same and you can easily proc it with secondary skills.