Dark Catalyst and Elemental Lores Research?

[Dhe'nar Witch]

Has any research been done on the exact effect Elemental Lores have on Dark Catalyst? All I can find are some six year old posts with a few people saying "It's not worth it," a blurb on Krakiipedia that diminishing returns kick in at 10 ranks, and some more recent posts on the officials with a few people saying that with a large amount of ranks(maybe 30-40+) the crits are significantly better from that element. None of these show any hard evidence towards exactly how the Lores effect the spell, and what thresholds are reached at what ranks.

[subzero]

I'm not doing any real research, but I finally got a bug up my ass about it after years of believing it's not worth it (and I'm still mostly on that train of thought; if it doesn't kill something in one hit without lore, it's generally not going to do better the second time around simply because of how the spell works. I want to see if I can notice a kill increase in situations that aren't generally favorable to DC usage, such as vs square/semis and longer genned, out of mana caster mobs)and have begun picking up elemental ranks to see how it feels. Only 10 air so far, but I think I'm going to get 10 in each initially, then bump them 20-25.

[Fallen]

I thought about doing research but the phrase "Logarithmic Curve" came up so I passed.

[Buckwheet]

Any additional info subzero?

[crb]

I did a bunch of research some years ago.

http://www.virilneus.com/blog/2009/06/18/719-lore-benefit-research/

[Darcthundar]

I have only done empirical research with the following lores:

Elemental Lore - Air...............| 5 1
Elemental Lore - Earth.............| 126 33
Elemental Lore - Fire..............| 128 34
Elemental Lore - Water.............| 126 33

I usually have about a 90% kill rate on the first cast. I do not have an estimate on the kill rate is without lores. I could do some research, but why bother, I am happy with my current end results.

[crb]

What possessed you to train in those lores in that distribution?

[caelric]

That is an odd lore training; I can see that it adds up to 101, which is 1x in lores, but that is still odd, even having that much (1x) elemental lores for a sorcerer.

[Fallen]

All I can think of is it may be in the order which the flares occur.

[caelric]

Just as a side note, my main is a war sorc (swinging THW's), and he has 48 ranks of air lore. This is specifically because of haste. Since haste is a major circle spell, and thus, lore ranks or considered at half normal, 48 (48/2=24 duh) is the cutoff for an extra second RT reduction with haste.

I have noticed that the vacuum crit (or whichever crit air applies to) always hits pretty hard, but that alone would not be worth the ranks in air lore.

Similarly, at some point, when I run out of other things to train in, I will get some earth lore ranks, solely for the AS bonus to self cast strength. Again, though, I doubt it would be worth it for the effect it will have on DC, and it will not be much return for the TP cost on the physical AS, either. Thus, it will be one of the much later post cap things I train in.

[subzero]

I've had 20 ranks of each elemental lore for a bit now. As I'm not one for formulas and all that mathy shit, I can't say exactly how it affected the kill rate. I can say the increase in damage is obvious and there have been times I've noticed crit kills 'out of the blue' (situations where the other flares are all doing 5-20 damage or so) that I assume have to be due to the lore training, but the damage is mostly irrelevant in my opinion.

I'm not as against training elemental lores as I have been in the past, though it isn't exactly high on the list of priorities. Things like 3x spells, 1x CM, and maybe some MoC to offset a little FoF should definitely take precedence in your training plan.

[crb]

The bonus is supposed to zero out after 20 ranks, so going beyond that should provide no help to DC, so, for a sorcerer, bringing some lores to 30 while leaving one at 5 doesn't make any mechanical sense.