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If you want to use them well you'll need to know what
they do and how they work.
Notes:
- There are two types of elemental traps, those you
lay and spit out their damage and those you toss actively.
The laid ones do not work with +mana/life after kill
items but the two you toss do.
- The "Max Average Damage Over Five Traps"
value is the total possible damage either per hit
or per second but only applies to the traps you lay.
Due to the nature of Charged Bolt Sentry though this
value can not be used with it as it is just too chaotic.
- Lightning traps can obtain a high maximum damage
but their minimum damage will always be just one or
two points of damage. Due to this the damage they
do can be all over the place, sometimes you'll do
lots of damage, other times you'll barely hurt them,
the rest of the time you'll fall somewhere in the
middle.
- With traps that shoot in a straight line (Lightning
Sentry, Wake of Inferno and the lighting attack of
Death Sentry) be sure to place them in line with the
most creatures so it can effect the most targets and
therefore shorten the length of a fight. This is one
of the reasons why a shadow dropping traps can be
such a pain. You put them where they'd do the most
good then she goes and drops them where ever.
- +Skill items do not give synergy bonuses, only actual
skill points do.
- Boosting the base skill level will in general give
higher returns than boosting their synergies so first
pump the skills you plan to use then start in with
the synergy skills. Due to this one idea would be
to try and store up some skill points if you don't
plan to use the early skills so you can boost each
of the ones you'll be using each level for a while.
Don't do this too much though or else you won't be
able to do enough damage while trying to level which
in turn slows down the levelling process, just save
up a few points.
- Stacking the same trap or different traps in the
same spot will let them attack targets from the same
location and together. This way your modest individual
trap damage becomes far more potent as you could have
five of the same trap attacking all at once.
- The most beneficial aspect of traps you lay is the
ability for you to drop them in a location then do
other things while they attack. This could be in the
form of tossing in Fire Blasts, Blade Fury blades,
Blade Sentinel or other tasks like controlling the
crowd with Cloak of Shadows and/or Mind Blast. Mind
Blast could be used on most uniques and champion class
critters to keep them in one area while your trap
blasts away at it so don't just drop your traps and
wait as there are many other things you could do.
- "Trap Duration" and "Average
Max for Damage Trap Length" was added for
just Lightning Sentry and Wake of Inferno since those
would be the two main attack elemental traps you'll
be using. The point of that is to show how fast it
does the damage it does, it should be noted that there
is a pause of about 1 second roughly between when
the trap first starts firing, between shots and at
the end before it crumbles so traps do not attack
non stop.
- From what I can tell you do about 17% of a traps
damage in PvP.
- The rate at which the traps actually attack is fixed,
you can not change that. The rate at which you drop
them though is fixed to your attack speed.
- Placement of your laid traps is more important than
how fast you can drop them so Fade would generally
be what you use with trapper builds. The only time
Burst of Speed would help is when tossing in Fire
Blasts.
The below values are with each skill at level 20 and
their synergies also at level 20 unless otherwise
noted.
Fire Blast
Synergy Skills: 6 - Shock Web, Wake of Fire, Charged Bolt Sentry, Lighting Sentry, Wake of Inferno, Death Sentry
Max Average Damage: 905; 824-654 (where you'd more likely fall between)
Max Average Damage Over Five Traps: Not Applicable
Max Charges: Not Applicable
Extra Note: Is a thrown trap.
You toss a small fire grenade that does damage over a small area (3.3 yards). Due to how many synergy skills it has it's impossible to fully synergize this skill but with this at a high level and a lot of synergies boosting it this skill can do a surprising amount of damage. Then while this skill starts out with a small base damage value that value scales up at a good rate and the higher it goes the more damage it picks up. In fact as the base damage of Wake of Inferno scales up more slowly with enough +skill items the base damage of Fire Blast can be right in the same damage area of the base damage of Wake of Inferno then with this many synergies the damage done by this skill at higher levels could be in the area of 3000+ per toss. With some increased attack speed, +skill items and enough in the other elemental traps to boost its damage this skill could work rather well as your only fire damage skill. The only thing Wake of Inferno actually has going for it is the longer attack area and that it's a laid trap while Fire Blast is a thrown trap. This is the only elemental trap that increases in it's mana cost per skill level though so you'll need a good mana reserve to keep using this at higher skill levels. Your attack speed with this skill is based on the attack speed with your weapon or claw in the left weapon slot if using two so if you want to use this skill keep your faster claw in the left slot. Getting some Increased Attack Speed items and popping on Burst of Speed will help you get more Fire Blasts out and wit claws it's very easy to attack at a rate of about 2+ per second. This skill can be useful right from the beginning to end when boosted enough and can even bring single targets or small groups down faster than Wake of Inferno at an equal level.
The 905 max average damage listed is if you put all of your 110 skill points into those elemental traps, as you'd much more than likely put at least some in to the Shadow Discipline skills it's more reasonable to expect your max average damage to be around 824-654 per blast. Due to the number of synergy bonuses though +skill items can really cause the damage of this skill to take off quite a bit.
Shock Web
Synergy Skills: 4 - Fire Blast, Charged Bolt Sentry, Lighting Sentry, Death Sentry
Max Average Damage: 451.5 per second with 17 spikes over 3.6 seconds
Max Average Damage Over Five Traps: Not Applicable
Max Charges: Not Applicable
Extra Note: Is a thrown trap and the damage is per second, not per hit.
With this you create a small field of electric spikes so any target that enters it suffers electrical damage. As this is one of the traps that does damage per second rather than per hit to make full use of it you would need to keep your targets inside it's attack area as long as possible. As it's damage is rather low it is not all that great of a skill later in the game but if you can get enough +skill items boosting it and enough thrown out it's not that bad, still not great though.
Wake of Fire
Synergy Skills: 2 - Fire Blast, Wake of Inferno
Max Average Damage: 283
Max Average Damage Over Five Traps: 1415
Max Charges: 5 (fixed)
Extra Note: This is a laid trap. The damage done is per side of the wave.
This skill spews out five waves of fire at a very fast rate and when you first get this skill will be very effective due to it's fast rate and wide area of effect. In late game though the damage is too low and the trap dies out too quickly so other than helping you clean up a number of quickly moving weak critters it would be of little use other than boosting Wake of Inferno and Fire Blast.
It should be noted that the damage this trap lists is per each side of the triangular wave. If you can get a target in the middle of the wave it could be hit by each side of the wave and take twice the damage.
Charged Bolt Sentry
Synergy Skills: 4 - Fire Blast, Shock Web, Lightning Sentry, Death Sentry
Max Average Damage: 192.5 per bolts with 5-11 bolts (boosted by Fire Blast; 1 every 3 levels) per charge
Max Average Damage Over Five Traps: Not Applicable, too chaotic
Max Charges: 5-10 (boosted by Lighting Sentry; 1 every 4 levels)
Extra Note: This is a laid trap.
This trap will spit out a number of randomly moving bolts that wiggle wobble along till they hit something or die out. It's possible for the same target to get hit by multiple bolts, it's also possible they'll all miss completely. It's not bad when you drop it in an area with a number of critters moving around but not accurate enough for use then there are few to one targets. It's not that bad of a trap later in the game but you'd likely just use this for the Lighting Sentry synergy than as an attack skill by then, it would really only just help when fighting groups of weak critters.
Lighting Sentry
Synergy Skills: 3 - Shock Web, Charged Bolt Sentry, Death Sentry
Max Average Damage: 1287.5
Max Average Damage Over Five Traps: 6437.5
Max Charges: 10 (fixed)
Trap Duration: about 14 seconds
Average Max for Damage Trap Length: about 920 per second pre trap, about 4600 per second with five traps
Extra Note: This is a laid trap.
This will be you main lighting trap for most any build. Aside from tossing out damage you can use this to effectively scout out the area ahead of you, just drop one towards the edge of the screen in the direction you're going and see if and where it shoots so you know if and where there are any creatures ahead. This trap can also attack creatures off screen if you're lucky so if you walk along and see some corpses when playing on your own, this trap would have most likely been the cause.
This trap can sight from about 75% of the length of a 800x600 screen and shots can continue on for I don't know how long.
When using a dummy barb to attack each trap did about 1900-2900 damage (tested about fifteen times). Figuring at 17% damage that worked out to roughly 13900 lightning damage per trap on average. So this trap will do less damage than Wake of Inferno per trap and the damage is far more erratic but as it takes about half as long to finish this skill should on average do more damage in the same amount of time than Wake of Inferno does. It can also shoot much further (right off the screen actually) and sights from further away (about 50% further) so will start attacking a target sooner and makes a better scout. So as long as a critter isn't immune or highly resistance to lighting this is a good skill to use.
Wake of Inferno
Synergy Skills: 3 - Fire Blast, Wake of Fire, Death Sentry
Max Average Damage: 1482.5 per second
Max Average Damage Over Five Traps: 7412.5 per second
Max Charges: 10 (fixed)
Trap Duration: about 19 seconds (Wake of Fire level 1); about 28 seconds (Wake of Fire level 20)
Average Max for Damage Trap Length:
___about 640 per second per trap, about 3200 per second with five traps (fully synergized)
___about 450 per second per trap, about 2250 per second with five traps (level 20 Death Sentry/Fire Blast, level 20 Wake of Fire, level 1 Fire Blast/Death Sentry)
___about 220 per second per trap, about 1100 per second with five traps (level 20 Death Sentry, level 1 Wake of Fire, level 20 Fire Blast)
[Fire Blast and Death Sentry add the same amount of synergy bonuses so are interchangeable]
Extra Note: Is a laid trap and the damage is per second, not per hit. There appears to be a display bug with the Mac version.
The thing that confuses people the most about this is that the damage is per second, not per attack/hit so you need to keep the critter in the path of the blasts for this trap to do the most good. If you want to use this skill though you will need to fully maximize Wake of Fire and at least one of the other synergy skills, without Wake of Fire the pauses between attacks are about as long or longer than the period it actually attacks so with it's damage being per second rather than per hit that drastically reduces its damage potential. More in Wake of Fire also lets it shoot further so it can hit more targets which will be very important to make the most of this skill considering how little damage over time it could do compare to Lighting Sentry or even Fire Blast. So if you don't have enough skill points to max this as well as Wake of Fire and either Fire Blast, Death Sentry or both you may as well skip this skill.
This trap can sight from about a little under 50% of a 800x600 screen but with 20 in Wake of Fire can shoot out a little beyond 50% of a 800x600 screen.
There appears to be a display bug in this trap in the Mac version (Carbon version at least) when playing single player or hosting a multi-player game. What happens is that it does not show the full blast of this skill, it still does it's full damage and over the same area but does not properly display it.
Death Sentry
Synergy Skills: 2 - Fire Blast, Lighting Sentry
Max Average Damage: 520.5 (lightning attack) / 40%-80% of a corpse's life (corpse explosion)
Max Average Damage Over Five Traps: 2602.5 (lightning attack)
Max Charges: 5-11 (boosted by Fire Blast; 1 charge every 3 levels)
Extra Note: Is a laid trap and can also blow corpses over an area for 40%-80% of their original life total.
This can be an extremely powerful trap, not due to the lighting damage but the corpse explosions that do 40%-80% of the life a corpse once had which is half fire damage and half physical damage and can cover a small area to a good chunk of a 800x600 screen. Now one good way to use this trap is to put your damage traps out front then stuff Death Sentry in back a ways. This way Death Sentry won't attack with it's lighting damage while the other traps attack and sight for Death Sentry so it can just blow corpses, if you don't have much in Fire Blast this tactic can really extend the usefulness of the corpse blowing function of this skill. Now this trap will only blow corpses when a critter is in range of a corpse and the range is the value listed with the skill info in the game, the higher the skill level the longer the range (increases by 1/3 of a yard per skill level). To blow a corpse this trap will need to be able to see both the target and the corpse which can be aided by the use of other traps in other locations as each laid trap can sight for the other but that has its limits. It can be a bit slow to blow a corpse at times though and seems to get stuck in lighting attack mode at times so you may need to drop another to get those corpses blowing if the one near-by just keeps shooting lighting. For elemental trappers once you have your main attack traps maxed max this one next to increase their damage and the range of the corpse explosions. |
