Elemental Traps - Part 2

Fire vs Lighting
For late game play the lightning traps will attack more quickly, can shoot targets further away and do more damage over the same period to single targets or those in one line. On the down side it has a very large damage range and fires in one tight blast meaning if a critter is a little off to one side you'll miss completely so when using Lighting Sentry on groups you really need to make sure you drop them where they'll do the most good. To fully max out all your lighting traps you need to max five skills (Fire Blast gives bonuses to all but Lighting Sentry) making for 100 skill points and will give you three good attack skills with one being a fire skill, one mediocre one and one you'd likely not use in late game play.

On the fire end their damage level is far more consistent, you'll have two traps that can be used in late game play well that can be used together and fire traps attack over a wider area making them easier to work with when attacking groups. On the down side though with Wake of Inferno the damage is per second unless you add in Fire Blasts you do less damage over time with fire to single targets than with Lightning Sentry on it's own. To fully max out your fire traps you need to max out four skills and drop one into three others to get Death Sentry for 83 skill points. This will give you three good attack skills and one mediocre one for late game play.

Note:
Death Sentry can be ignored in both as really its main use is the corpse explosion and you'll get synergy bonuses for your other three main attack traps from Death Sentry. So both fire and lighting trappers would have this skill anyhow.



Traps vs Sorceress Skills
The equivalent sorceress skill to Lighting Sentry would be Lighting. To fully max the damage on the Lightning skill a sorceress would need to invest 101 skill points, an assassin would need just 81 to fully max Lighting Sentry. Once maxed the Lighting skill will do on average 2983 damage per attack, Lighting Sentry can do just 1287.5 but you can drop five of them for 6437.5 on average. Although in getting Lighting maxed the sorceress would max out five other good skills plus at least one point in another good skill. For the assassin Lighting Sentry and Death Sentry would be the two biggies, Shock Web isn't that great later on and while Charged Bolt Sentry could do more damage per bolt the sorceress Charged Bolt skill can fire out twice as many bolts (22) and has a much higher minimum (112 compared to 1).

The equivalent sorceress skill to Wake of Inferno would be Inferno. To fully max the damage on Wake Inferno an assassin would need to invest 83 skill points, a sorceress would need just 60 to fully max Wake of Inferno. Once maxed Inferno will do on average 2004 damage per second, Wake of Inferno can do just 1482.5 per second but you can drop five of them for 7412.5 per second on average although unlike Inferno Wake of Inferno will not attack non-stop mind you in 28 seconds five Wake of Infernos can still out damage Inferno doing about 89600 damage compared to 56112. Both skills seem to shoot about as far at max though. For the sorceress to max out Inferno she needs Fire Mastery and Warmth, the average sorceress player would put at least one point into Warmth but likely wouldn't max unless they really wanted this skill, Fire Mastery boosts the fire damage of all fire skills so it's pretty much a given a sorceress using fire skills would try to max that, although its not an attack skill. To max out Wake of Inferno you get three good attack skills and one that's not too bad when dealing with groups of weak critters in late game play.

The biggest advantages the sorceress has is the amount of damage her skills can do and the direct control you have over the skills you use as traps fire and target on their own. Assassins on the other hand can be safer when using just the laid traps as they are free to move around, can have an attack point other than their current location so could attack more targets more easily with an attack that has a straight path and also have skills to deal with crowds that do more than just add more types of attacks. Also assassin trappers can add to the damage of their laid traps with thrown traps like Fire Blast, Shock Web and Blade Fury. So sorceresses are more of a click and kill character who deals with groups by doing a lot of damage to them so they won't be a problem for long. The assassin elemental trapper can throw out a good bit of damage but has other ways to deal with groups than just killing them off and needs to look for the right spot to drop their traps so they'll do more damage meaning added types of planing and strategy is involved. Both are good so pick whichever you prefer.




Dummy Barb Tests:

To test skills, builds and so forth I modified version 1.07 single player character files a while back to make blank level 99 and 75 characters for each class that have all their stat and skill points unassigned. In testing the damage of your three main elemental trapper skills I took the level 99 barbarian, stuffed all 505 stat points into vitality then stuffed 20 skill points into Battle Orders and its two synergy skills to boost the duration. With Battle Orders active this barb had 4475 life points and zero resistance. Then from what I can tell you do roughly 17% damage in PvP so that's like a monster with about 26300 life and no resistance.
Now what I did was took my dummy barb with his 4475 life points and had him just stand there while I attacked away with my assassin's traps at different skill levels then recorded how long it took to kill him with Fire Blast, Lighting Sentry and Wake of Inferno with different synergy skills maxed. In the case of Lighting Sentry and Fire Blast they were fully synergized or at least about as close as you can get with Fire Blast (minus 7 points in Shadow Discipline skills so it had a 747% synergy bonuses). The point of using fully synergized versions of each skill is to show their full potential, the same skills with less synergy points boosting them would still be around the same ratios but would just take longer. One note to add though is that if I used more Increased Attack Speed Fire Blast could have killed even more quickly.

Each test was run a few times and the average of each has been noted below.

Lightning Sentry: