I have a Void Knight that is in the high 60s that I have been dabbling with in solo mode. I wanted to make a hybrid with both spells and melee abilities like my Spellblade. To that end, I have tried and tried to make Devouring Orb a worthwhile addition to his build. I’ve specced it a couple different ways, first trying to max out what the void rifts hit for and secondly with eruptions and faster cooldown. Both ways do basically no damage (hits for around 50 non-crit).
I was using a polearm for a weapon at first then switched to Last Laugh later on. My melee damage both with Rive and Erasing Strike is good but I kept wanting to make Devouring Orb work somehow so I tried switching to a scepter and shield first for increased base spell damage. That was flat out terrible. My survivability actually went down as my melee damage got so bad that my time to kill even normal mobs increased so much that I would eventually catch a big hit and die.
Someone in chat suggested I try a staff so I did. The melee damage again dipped but stayed at a decent enough level to work with but the void rift damage from Devouring Orb still only hit for about 250. Anything that amount is significant damage to is usually killed by my Erasing Strike anyway. That isn’t enough to make me want to take the reduced melee damage in exchange.
Devouring Orb seems to be useful for little more than a pretty light show. I tried Abyssal Echoes on the dummy (granted, it was unspecced) using the staff and that seemed pretty garbage too. It seems that the Void Knight’s two spell based abilities are basically useless. If anyone has been able to make these abilities useful, short of going with a full spell damage build, I’d love to hear how.
So you want hard hitting spells without having to spec into any spell damage affixes. You might almost be asking for the impossible. Ill give it a whirl this weekend, sounds like a good challenge.
No sir, you misunderstand me. I am not looking for those spells to be my primary source of damage without investing heavily into them. I just want them to not be so pathetic so they are worthy of a place on my hotbar. I want to build a hybrid character and not fill my bar with melee abilities and stances.
I’ll use my Spellblade as an example of what I am shooting for. He is level 52, has 26 intelligence and 20% increased spell damage. I just tested out his Lightning Nova and it hits for roughly 170-230 non-crit on the dummy and crits for around 450-500. His Static orb hits for around 400 non-crit and it crits for as much as 1000. Again, he has only 20% increased spell damage and his staff is only 130% base spell damage.
Contrast that with my Void Knight who is level 64 with 30 attunement. He has 40% increased spell damage and a staff with 216% increased base spell damage. I can’t tell you what his void rifts from devouring orb hit for on the dummy since there is nothing there to trigger them but the eruptions from them hit for about 90. Abyssal Echoes (again, unspecced) hits for about 40 per tick. Time Rot procs hit for 11 per tick.
One character is a viable hybrid melee/caster. The other, not so much.
I think the difference between those 2 characters in my previous post speaks for itself but just for shits and giggles, I will throw my paladin in the mix that I only recently added Smite to for the teleport. He’s level 57 with a whole 6 in attunement. His increased spell damage is 55% and he has no increased base spell damage. His Smite hits the dummy for about 160 average on a normal hit and about 440 average crit. I have 11 points into Smite and none of them are in nodes that increase its damage. I picked it up strictly for utility and it still puts the Void Knight’s spells to shame. Pretty sad.
voidknight is a odd class in any case, you have some spells but almost no options to scale them
devouring orb is basically just a flying statstick in any case, i feel like melee is much stronger than spells anyway, outside a few exceptions, i tried to make a spell totem shaman and it was a total pain to level and play, so i just gave it up, its damage was terrible compared to melee
imo you need more options outside of staffs to actually increase the spell base damage by a good amount
I can’t speak for the Shaman as I haven’t tried that mastery yet but for the Void Knight, the issue seems obvious. The base damage on their spells is just far too low. I don’t see any other reason why my Spellblade with lower spell damage increasing stats across the board would hit so much harder with spells than my Void Knight other than the base damage of his spells has to be much higher. If Shaman struggle with spell damage too, then I would suspect they suffer from the same issue.
Void Bolts node (+2 void damage for spells & throwing attacks with a max of 8 points) at lvl 15
Echoing Strikes (2% chance for melee & void spells to be echoed with a max of 5 points)
Time Legion (1% chance for melee & void spells to be echoed with a max of 10 points)
Avatar of Regret (10% for melee & void spells to repeat, 10% reduced melee attack speed, 10% increased mana cost of spells)
Essence of the End (4%-20% chance to gain an essence on kill, essences last 7 seconds & grant 15% inc void damage, 15% melee damage)
For a total of +16 void damage, 30% chance to be echoed (with 10% increased mana cost) & 45% increased void damage (with max void essences).
For melee, the Void Knight can get:
Patient Doom (30% increased damage per point every 3 seconds, up to 5 points)
Void Blades (+3 void damage per hit up to 8 points)
Finality (cull at 3%-15% hp)
Plate Spikes (+2 melee phys per point up to 5 points)
Woe (+7% increased melee per point up to 12 points)
Rot Grip (melee attacks have 4% chance per point to apply a void dot to mobs hit, up to 5 points)
Echoing Strikes (2% chance for melee & void spells to be echoed with a max of 5 points)
Time Legion (1% chance for melee & void spells to be echoed with a max of 10 points
Avatar of Regret (10% for melee & void spells to repeat, 10% reduced melee attack speed, 10% increased mana cost of spells)
Essence of the End (4%-20% chance to gain an essence on kill, essences last 7 seconds & grant 15% inc void damage, 15% melee damage).
For a total of +150% damage for 1 hit every 3 seconds, +24 void damage, +10 phys damage, cull (bosses) at 15% of their hp, an additional 20% chance to inflict Time Rot (20 void damage per sec, presumably 4s duration), 30% chance to echo (with 10% reduced attack speed), 45% increased void damage & 45% increased melee damage (at max essences).
The Void Knight passive tree is clearly melee focussed & could probably do with some love for spells…
I’m not saying you’re wrong, because you are not. I do think however that the underlying problem lies more with having low base damage on their spells than a lack of passive choices. As I wrote in previous posts, my paladin is not specced for spell damage in any way, shape or form nor does he have any points in Smite that improve Smite’s damage but he does way, way more damage with Smite than my Void Knight that is specced for Devouring Orb damage and has a spell caster’s weapon can do. That tells me that Smite has a much higher base damage coefficient than Devouring Orb does.
Support for void spells, and void damage focus in general is definitely currently lacking in the Void Knight tree, and this is something that we’re planning to address in a future patch.
Well that’s good to hear. The mastery is still fun and quite unique. I look forward to seeing the improvements.
That said, I will update my progress on making a hybrid build work. I was finally able to do it! It took getting a mirage staff with 335% increased base spell damage. That’s a level 62 staff so to say it comes online late is an understatement, but my Devouring Orb is finally more than just a pretty light show. My main damage dealing ability is still Erasing Strike but Orb is contributing a good amount now especially in areas where there is a lot of mob density.
I respecced Orb and took Dark Moon so they orbit me. With echoes it is pretty easy to keep 3 or 4 orbs up at once and when they start firing on large packs, the damage ramps up pretty good and it feels useful now. I still have some tweaking to do but I’m liking where I’m at. It’s probably far from the best build for a VK but it’s fun and that is more important to me.
Remember, voidknight is only void knight if you have mastered it, so listing low tier nodes that any class can get in the bottom part of voidknight, is not as important as explaining the strengths, synergies, and weaknesses with the second half of the tree.
My first caster was a Void Knight with Devouring Orb, Orbs that orbit you and fire out Void AoE. I havent played him in a long time and respec’d him about 2 weeks ago and he wasnt as good because you cannot spam Echoes anymore due to mana
Im lazy and I use autocast to spam spells, Devouring Orb can be spammed on cooldown to keep uptime of it, I use either numlock trick or AHK to spam it and then would add in Echo spell for AoE clear. I have no melee attacks at all and other skills were just buffs like Rebuke defence buff and focus solely on Spell Damage/Crit etc
Damage numbers are low yes but you hit multiple times a second, you also get some passive that echo’s your attacks and the AoE with Echoes was actually decent as you would run the special that casted multiple Echoes one after the after, Devouring Orb would consume all Echo stacks at once from memory
After playing it recently it feels pretty bad now and dont really want to play it again until there is some changes, Mana is awful currently on any build relying on casting and Devouring Orb is a prime candidate why the game needs a relook at skills in general. Ive never used normal version of it but only the skill specialization that changes it to something you can build around
I haven’t found any idols I felt were great for void knights yet. I’ve got some that I think are good, not great though. Can you elaborate on which ones you are referring to?
The % increased melee damage for 4 seconds after a skill echos are decent, but it would be nice if we could have idols that give a % chance for a casting of other spells on hit/kill (eg, Devouring Orb).
Echo proc and echo damage would be nice, I haven’t found any of those yet that didn’t have a lousy 2nd affix on them (for my build anyway.) Time Rot however, it sucks. I know it has a decent debuff effect but the damage is, pardon the pun, abysmal. Mine does 4 damage per tick.
I looked it up on the wiki and it only scales with void damage and increased damage over time and it cannot stack. The base damage however, is so low that it’s not worth investing in IMHO. I suppose if you wanted to build skills that have increased damage on enemies afflicted with Time Rot you could try to get it where you have a really high chance to apply it, but that is too convoluted for my tastes.
Can’t wait. There are so many VK builds I want to try out that are hybrid melee/spell. Warpath + Abyssal Orb is #1, but even the after-effect of Erasing Strike seems gimped without some kind of spell damage to back it up.
i’m already running warpath + orb and even in the current state with no echo idols working it does very good damage with incredible survival. Its a lot of fun to play.
