Enki's Arc Witch Memorial Page

@DarkRogue_3: I'd prefer a Diamond Ring over cast speed on rings. Reason being is the latter takes up a valuable suffix slot, one more would be taken through mana regen which is absolutely mandatory. This would leave you with only one possible resistance (or allres), which is surely doable but tightens the resistance needs, and thus cost of other pieces.
If you find a great Life/Mana/Mana Regen/Resist ring on a non Diamond base for a good price, it's worth using that though.

Ideally, the base of your amulet should be 30+ Crit Chance, 30+ Crit Multi, 50+ Mana Regen and 70+ Life, with an open prefix to add Mana with Elreon. Getting that together with Spell Damage can get really costly, so i wouldn't aim for it while you're straightening your basic gear.

The helmet and belt are great, no point in upgrading them. Multimodding the helmet isn't worth it since multimod itself takes up a suffix, so all it'll do is let you remove Light Res to add an insignificant amount of ES which we don't scale in the passive tree, and cost 2ex on top of that.

If you can find boots like your helmet but with 30% Movespeed on top, that would be GG.
Ring like mentioned above, Lightning Damage% isn't worth it as it takes a valuable suffix slot.
It's really important to have your resistances capped in Merciless, otherwise you'll die.
Only chaos resistance doesn't need to be capped, the game is balanced around 0% chaos res, but even with -60% you can survive because most chaos damage is avoidable, as in simply don't stand in the poison cloud. Exception are some bosses (mainly Core Maligaro, which this build couldn't do in the current shitty caster survivability meta anyway) where you want positive chaos res.

Lightning Damage% applies also to the converted part, while obviously Cold Damage% would only apply to the converted part. Elemental & Spell Damage is only applied once, together with Lightning Damage% before conversion.

Monster damage will spike up rapidly in higher tier maps, which is why a Lv10 CwDt works well for IC. Together with 3 Endu Charges and Lv12 IC, you'll get roughly 2s of physical immunity.
All damage you receive through hits is counted towards CwDt, no matter if taken to Life, Mana or ES. However, damage you receive from DoT (Damage over Time) is not counted.

My bad about Arc chaining, for a moment i forgot myself that my build doesn't regularly use Empower anymore since 2.0. A Lv21 Arc is somewhat cheap to get nowadays though, priced around 4-5ex in Standard league currently. Sounds much at the beginning, but once you got the game rolling and your gear set up, it's not hard to get. Quality is not needed on the gem.

Currently lvl55, 5k dps. not sure if thats good for my level or not haha but i'm enjoying the build, no problem clearing stuff fast. have dual moonsorrows for lv59 then dual doryanis for lv75 or whatever they are, pretty hype

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure on what kind of DPS numbers I should be seeing either.
As of right now (level 78, just shy of picking up Assassination as the last 'damage' node) I'm looking at just around 8700 DPS. It doesn't feel like it's any better than the damage output on my previous Witch; That one hit around 8600 DPS as well, and the only real difference (setting aside the differing quantity of Spell Damage and Cast Speed) is that she uses a level 19 Arc with a +2 modifier from a Scepter (level 21 effectively), Spell Echo and Lightning Penetration in a 3-link, versus my current Witch using a level 18 Arc in her 5-link.

Judging by the raw numbers, this Witch hits harder, but slightly slower -- my other Witch manages to do ~3.81 casts per second, while this one only reaches 3.5 currently. Survivability is a whole different story, though. This one is far easier to keep alive and less fragile than my other one.

In any case, thanks again for breaking all that down for me.

It sounds like you are advocating against grabbing Cast Speed on the accessories, in favor of using the affix slots on other things. To start off, sounds like Diamond Rings with Mana Regeneration are the types to look out for. Life, Mana, Mana Regen, and 2x Resists should leave one prefix slot open, I believe. If Crit Multi/Chance are suffixes, then there's no more room to boost Crit any more on that sort of Ring, and we're limited to the implicit roll.

As far as the Amulet, getting Crit Chance+Multi and Mana Regen (this one seeming like it would be more important than Crit) means the Amulet would have no resists? If that's the case, I can try to filter out any Amulets with resists on them. This also means I'll have to find Boots and a single Ring with high enough resists on them to cap everything alongside the Helmet and Belt I picked up the other day, since the other ring slot will be the CotB.

Thanks for the information on the multimod. I had thought it would be a 'free' mod, since it seemed silly to occupy one of the slots itself and potentially not allow you to actually craft anything beyond itself. It seems I was mistaken, though. Especially for 2ex, I could probably outright buy something better with that. I'm still trying to make some currency, but I'm not too sure how -- best I have right now is turning in the Chaos/Regal recipes when I can, but the exchange rate for Exalted Orbs is a bit insane. Basically need 50-60 rare Rings to drop just to make enough for a single exalt.

I'm still looking for Boots, but nothing I've seen on poe.trade looks interesting enough for me to sink currency into yet, so I'm still farming with the Wanderlusts in the meantime.

For your explanation of the damage bonuses, I'm slightly confused - You say Spell Damage is only applied once, together with the Lightning Damage bonus prior to conversion, but isn't the part of the Lightning damage that gets modified by the Lightning Damage bonus, when converted to Cold, additionally modified by Cold, thus being applied twice? Wouldn't Spell Damage do the same thing? Or do I have it wrong? I've tried re-reading the wiki page's example several times, but I can't seem to grasp it.

I'll keep in mind the CwDT thing, although I'd have to ask if the reason you took it to level 10 was because lower levels triggered too often, or if there was some other reasoning behind it. As far as the endurance charges go, I'll hopefully have a 4th charge available soon, whenever I get to unlocking that Jewel slot to put in Intuitive Leap. I was also considering trying to fit in Increased Duration with that IC (now that I've moved Frost Wall to the 4-link curse set, I'm not sure a second Frost Wall linked with IC does much.) I'm not sure I can, though; there are too many gems and too few slots.

Time will tell if I can ever get the currency together for a level 21 Arc. Having played a lot of maps with this character (low level ones, but still) I'm not sure if I can go ahead with swapping out Life Leech for Empower as I had intended. The random reflect rares are still more common than I would like, and having the Leech there is necessary when that happens.

Edit:
Also, thanks for the tip on the visual indicator for Reflect. I kind of noticed that various rares sometimes had some sort of aura (the easiest ones are the purple ones that slow you, and the spinning yellow/green ones that makes everyone move faster) but I never actually thought the non-auras also had them. I've taken note now that the Reflect rares all come with a very specific and similar visual indicator, and I've been much more successful at finding reflect rares now than before, although I still have some trouble trying to figure out the difference between the Physical and Elemental reflect indicators.

@roejiley: Your DPS is totally fine for that level. Your DPS will get a substantial boost once you get a Lv20/21 gem and can stack all the crit and crit multi with a good amount of cast speed.

@DarkRogue_3: Cast per sec will improve with good wands (15+ cast speed on each), i had around 5 casts/s with my gear.

Mana regen is really important for us to survive, that's why i prefer that over even more DPS on jewelry. As you figured, one prefix on ring stays open for now. This doesn't just reduce the price for "perfect" jewelry (as you only need 5 specific stats instead of 6), but also leaves room for possible future mods or changes to the build.

Amulet doesn't need resists, keep in mind wands & jewels can also provide resistances if needed (though on a wand i'd prefer crit multi or mana regen, which on the other hand is also more expensive).

You got a little confused by the wiki there. Simplified, let's say you deal 1000 base lightning damage and have 100% spell damage + 50% lightning damage + 30% cold damage. CotB splits the the base damage into 500 lightning 500 cold damage. Now all additive multipliers (in this case spell/lightning/cold damage) kick in - for the lightning part thats 500 * (1 + 1.0 + 0.5) = 1250, for the cold part it's 500 * (1 + 1.0 + 0.5 + 0.3) = 1400, leaving us with 2650 total damage.

This now gets further affected by multiplicative (= more/less) modifiers such as Pain Attunement, enemys frozen with Taryn's Shiver, enemy resistances, resistance penetration and what not. Let's assume the enemy you hit has 0% lightning res and 50% cold res, and you have 39% lightning penetration. Since it's two different damage and resistance types, we can't just simply multiply 2650 * 1.39 (penetration) * 0.5 (cold res) but have to set the respective more multipliers at the according damage type.
For the sake of keeping it simple, i'll leave out the already finished calculation of additive multipliers and just put (1250 * 1.39) + (1400 * 0.5) = 2437.5 actual damage we deal in the end.

Hope i didn't write that part too confusing and even more important, without any fundamental mistakes but it should be right. If anyone finds any mistake, bear with me, just came home from work.

About Lv10 CwDt, i think it's just a good middle ground of damage needed to trigger, and effect of linked utility spells. For something like basic curses or frost wall, a Lv1-5 is often better because you'll want it to trigger as often as possible, for Immortal Call i'd rather not have it trigger on every hit consuming all your endurance charges even against full elemental enemies, and then a phys pack comes and you got no IC nor endurance charges up against them.
Inc Duration is not really worth it with Immortal Call in this setup, as it's only additive with the extra duration from expending endurance charges due to the changes made to the skill.
This means with a Lv12 Immo Call, 20/20 Inc Duration and 4 Endurance Charges up you'll have ~2.8s physical immunity, ~2.5s without Inc Duration gem.

@Enki91 Thank you so much for the build.

Been running dual flame totems for the past few months and looking for something new. Would you think this would be a good build to run for the league starting today?

Wow great guide! Some useful advice in there :)
I used to have an Arc + Herald Of Ice build before the 2.0 update but my tree got reset and need to build it properly now. If you could leave some hints and tips that would be greatly appreciated!

I see some things in the skill tree I would have done differently (but I didn't make any calculations and don't have experience building characters). My character is also a bit different but the main concepts should be the same.
- In the beginning of the witch area in the tree I see you only take the increased crit chance nodes very late (80pt tree)
- You don't take the 25% mana regen as the witches first node. That seems pretty significant for me for a single node. Did you take it and respec out of it or am I missing something there?
- I notice you don't take the Lightning Walker passive at all. Does that mean that the damage elsewhere is higher? And I should not count on my tree for resistances? With crappy gear that node benefits me a lot.
- You also didn't go for the elemental triangle on the left (below Ancestral Bond). That was what I was going for in my old build, but things changed around there.
- Even though it's already on your path, you didn't take the Heart of Thunder nodes. Is it not worth the extra damage? It does use a lot of skill points. I assume that's the main reason.
- I didn't notice there is so much critical strike chance in the shadow area! That's good to keep in mind for my build.

I'm still a newbie to building. I also only have a single character in Merciless. I usually just pick what would benefit me most in the 5 to 10 levels ahead. And most of the time I play self found whatever.
I haven't read through the whole thread obviously but I have already learnt a lot through the initial post and some comments.
Thanks for making this awesome guide!

@pmcgehee: Yeah, it should work very well in the current darkshrine event. It may not be as gear-independant as something like dual FT, but mana builds aren't really meta atm so you should easily find some good deals on proper gear after a few days.

@miva2: Thanks! I'll answer your questions here first, and then go on about what's in your thread:

- I've put focus on crit for high levels as, in my opinion, semi-crit Arc deals enough damage to easily get there. So it's more important that you'll build up your survivability first to be able to survive higher tier of maps. Remember, dead chars don't deal any damage.

- I was a bit torn about that node. it's a somewhat good amount of mana regen but not good enough to kick out any of the other nodes. If you really lack mana regen, it's an option to take that node though.
I'll mention this after remaking the whole guide when another passive tree reset happens.

- Lightning Walker, Heart of Thunder and/or the Celestial wheel have all been left out in favor of better nodes and jewel sockets. Especially for Lightning Walker, you can get the same plus some life/mana/crit through a well rolled jewel for the same points.
I used to have Heart of Thunder in this build, but since patch 2.0 we are more point-starved so it had to go.

About your build: The best synergy between Arc and Herald of Ice is through crits paired with Call of the Brotherhood. You can do crazy things like the double curse charge generation shown in this build due to the fact that curse application happens faster than Arc chaining to that target and killing it.

I feel like i'd just repeat the whole guide going more into detail, so my best advice is to just follow it if you wanna make the most out of Arc + HoI. I'd also recommend to update your gear with more life, and if you decide to use this build, also all other recommended stats so you can easily take on high level mapping.

hey, i really like this build and im still following it (https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/jonysousa/characters) the problem here is that even with 2 "cheap good" wands i still get 10k dps and i can't really clear maps past tier 4. Can you give me some advices in what i should try/change and on what is wrong with the equips? or maybe its just me doing the maps in a wrong way, but still my dps on tier5+ maps is really low and i need a really good couple of shots to kill there.
btw the build is really good and im enjoying it a lot! just this dps trouble that is getting on my nervs..

I'm currently sitting at 24-26k dmg range fully charged. What is the recommended dmg range?

I'm using 1 Void Battery

Tree:
https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwMBAuMEswVCBx4HpQj0DdEOSA5cEQ8RlhOeFm8WvxbzFy8Yaho4Gmwb8R_HIG4i9CSqJLAmPCaVJy8pTyt4LJwtiy-dNuk5UjpYOthBlkV-RZ1JUUmyTLNQMFNSVUtVxlXWVytYB13yXyph4mNDZJ1k52pDavprt2wLbRlwUnDVdFV-M37Hf8aApIIQgpuD24V9idOMNo9Gj_qQVZMnlS6WdJrgm6GdrqIApJGnCKyYrrO2hrzqvYLAVMBm0PXVptte37Dhc-Nq5CLli-vu6_XsOO0g8B_w1fId99f60v6z

Hi I just dropped an ex yesterday and I have 2 divines, my gear is all rares within the cheap budget part you posted.

What should I buy to maximize my dps with that currency?