Cursed Jail - Is it worth it?

Here's the thing:
1.) Either 1 skill hits 2-5 times and it can proc purify or a psy seal/stun

or:

2.) You use your stun, and then you spam other skills and it can proc purify or a psy seal/stun

What's the difference in the end... not much, besides that if you have to spam other skills, it will take you more time to deal the same damage as you would have done in the first situation described.

Say purify proc's at the 3rd hit out of the 5 the skill does, ok, caster runs off but you still have -a chance- that a 4th hit lands in the process.
But what if purify procs at the 3rd skill you use in the other situation? Caster runs off as well, but there won't be a 4th hit because you have to channel a new skill, unless you use knife throw ofcourse.

The odds of it happening are the same basicly.
Each hit has a certain % chance (i'm not sure what % purify spell has) to proc purify.
Hitting faster does not (relatively speaking) make the proc go off faster, it's all chance and luck.

And I know i'm going to get the argument from someone for sure about "MUH APS PROCS IT FASTER"
Well, it -seems- faster.

Lets take a extreme example for that:
A.) Say you are 5 APS with **** daggers and you are attacking a caster with purify proc.
Say purify procs at the 3rd hit. It will have proc'd in 0.6 second, yes, that's fast. Timewise it's fast, but you did hit 3 times(!).

B.) Now lets assume you have a setup with **** daggers and are 1.33 APS for whatever reason, you try to hit the caster 5 times, to hit 5 times with 1.33 APS it would take 3.76 seconds.
Say purify procs at the 3rd hit in this situation. It will have proc'd in 2.26 seconds, a WHOLE LOT slower than the 5 APS situation, right? Yes. TIMEWISE you are correct, but you did hit 3 times, just like situation A.

Point is, in both situation 3 hits landed, but in the end you still did the same damage. Just in situation 1 you did the damage in 0.6 second and in situation 2 you would've done the damage in 2.26 seconds.

Purify can proc the first hit you land, purify can proc on the 20th hit you land...

Conclusion:
If you want to utilize it for PvP purposes, await feedback from people who obtained it and tested / used it in PvP (or go test it at a different place which can not be mentioned here, to see if you like it or not).
If you want to use it to buy yourself some time and are afraid of purify, or if you want to be able to keep someone locked down, don't upgrade.

PooEA - Lost City wrote: »

Since you have both Life Tap and Elimination I've got a few questions for you, if you don't mind testing them for me

As it's during cast time that these hits are dealt for both skills, non-interrupting silence like qpq, whisper shot and SoS should not stop the sequence (compare it to a wiz channeling bids and getting qpq'd -> cast will still follow).
Could you confirm that a SoS-proc after the first hit will disjoint the sequence?

If it turns out that the sequence is NOT cancelled upon non-interrupting silence, could you test if it is true for interrupting silence like FoW/Smack?

Appreciate it!

I also have both and normal silences like SoS do nothing to stop the hits until the skill finishes. Interrupts from bosses still stop the hits as normal though in pve anyways.

PooEA - Lost City wrote: »

Since you have both Life Tap and Elimination I've got a few questions for you, if you don't mind testing them for me

As it's during cast time that these hits are dealt for both skills, non-interrupting silence like qpq, whisper shot and SoS should not stop the sequence (compare it to a wiz channeling bids and getting qpq'd -> cast will still follow).
Could you confirm that a SoS-proc after the first hit will disjoint the sequence?

If it turns out that the sequence is NOT cancelled upon non-interrupting silence, could you test if it is true for interrupting silence like FoW/Smack?

Appreciate it!

SoS only seals, it does not interupt. Interupt skills will state that they interupt in the text description. Stuns and sleeps interupt as part of game design.

Personally, I think the total damage output is just too great to ignore even if it is spread out over five hits. I'd hesitate if it was more than five hits but it is still a good deal if it is just a beefed-up elimination.

If you'd miss lv 11 headhunt for the zerk crits, Earthen rift hits harder on average than headhunt at high refines and is more spammable. We'd have to hit arcanes during the stun to kill them anyways so purify could proc there too. If you wanted to use the stun mainly as a wait for charmtick/skill CD tactic, then I might reconsider but deep sting is a less costly substitute.

Its a gamble like so many of our other skills. Assuming it hits 5 times and the proc rate for purify is 15%, then 44% of the time all five hits will not proc purify. I'll admit going from an 85% stun chance to what is effectively a 44% stun chance is a large tradeoff in this scenario, but you get much more damage on average as compensation. Against LA and HA classes, it is certainly worth it but if you target r9t3 arcanes a majority of the time, I could see the hesitation especially when elimination approaches the damage of cursed jail at high refines.

It can do insane damage via a crit/zerk chain AND leave our target stunned for 3-4 seconds of lifehunter/elimination/earthen rift ownage. It could also proc purify on hits 2-4 and still do a fair amount of damage or proc on the first hit and do lame damage + waste a stun. Purify is to us like our tidal protection is to other classes. You have to roll the dice and hope it doesn't mess up your plans.

Toraah - Archosaur wrote: »

I have been using elimination quite a lot, and I am amazed at the damage output that it is capable of. If this is really a stronger version of elimination, I can't wait to get it lol

It seems to be similar to the headhunt/earthen rift balance. Assuming an endgame sin with ~20k base damage unsparked, elimination should do more damage than cursed jail would. Even assuming 3k wep damage, that is only 57,494 for cursed jail vs 64,000 for elimination. The gap grows even more with sparks because the 320% modifier multiplies the attack boost from the spark. I think cursed jail would be way more useful if it was two or three hits to make up for the lower total damage with higher spike damage. I can't wait until someone hits mirage sky 6 and gets the skill to answer all these questions. b:surrender

PaTMaN - Dreamweaver wrote: »

I got this skill today and overall it seems good. I used Adversity daggers for the testing.

It is a 4 hit skill, the first hit seems to be the stun, and the last hit seems to be the strongest of them all (4th seems to be about 3 times as strong as any of the first 3). Each hit has the potential to be a zerk crit (SS/GoF of course) adding up to huge damage. I'm not sure which hit does the slow effect.

Attacking Psychics:
Soul of Stuning stops the combo after the 2nd hit (not confirmed if always after 2nd)
Soul of Retaliation reduces damage of the 1st hit and hurts the attacker, but does not return the stun effect
Soul of Silence can seal on any hit but does not stop the combo.

Attacking Assassins:
A little obvious but has potential to tick deaden then kill the target due to multiple hits.
Each hit has potential to be blocked by focused mind.
Tidal can prevent the stun/slow (not sure when the slow kicks in, need more testing)

Stone turtle apo does not reduce damage from the skill.

Barb's invoke does decrease the damage from the skill.

Still need to test if it works through Seal of the God cleric skill.

The combo can be interrupted.

I had a barb run past me and my stun landed when he was 9m away, and the following 3 hits still landed at that range.

Overall, damage seems higher than the normal Head Hunt. Also breaking it up into multiple hits has the added benefits stated above.

Interesting! Strange how stone turtle doesn't block it but invoke does.
I'd love to see a breakdown of each hit's damage using npc dags mostly to see how strong the final hit is. How much damage does the last hit do compared to your other skills?

Toraah - Archosaur wrote: »

Where did you arrive at the conclusion that elimination does more damage than cursed jail?

Elimination does 320% weapon damage and a 935% bleed

Cursed jail does 750% weapon damage + 15k

Am I missing something?

Elimination does 3.2x your base damage not 3.2x weapon damage. I'll flesh out my calculations more though. xD


Assume an endgame sin with 20k base phys damage. Elimination does 20k*3.2=64k

Lets be liberal and assume that same sin has 3k for wep damage.
Cursed jail does (7.5*3,000) + 14,994 + 20,000 = 57,494

The more OP sins on rt have base damage around the 20k mark so for them, elimination wins. Throw in the bleed or be more realistic with wep damage and the gap only grows.


For the decently refined but more average sin, its closer to 10k base damage so cursed jail should hit harder with them. Lets assume 10k base damage and not count the bleed.
Elimination does 10k*3.2 = 32k

Lets also assume 1.8k wep damage in this case
Cursed jail does (7.5*1,700) + 14,994 + 10,000 = 37,744

Throw in the bleed and they are closer in damage. In either case, the sin could 2 spark the elimination and get (300%*3.2) or 960% extra wep damage added to the skill and do more overall damage in almost any scenario.

I did some damage testing with lv2 daggers and no gear/cards. The damage numbers came out nicely for this result:

Hit 1: 25% of total damage (Adds Stun and Slow effect)
Hit 2: 10% of total damage
Hit 3: 15% of total damage
Hit 4: 50% of total damage

Olbaze - Sanctuary wrote: »

Quite frankly, I don't like these numbers.

Minus War Avatars, Meridians and Reawakenings, this is about what you can expect from a top sin right about now.

He has 2,577 weapon damage average, with 15,187 average base damage. With those, your figures go from 64k to 48,598 and from 57,494 to 49,508. Well if you have a maxed out S war avatar in Battle or Destruction, you will get over that 3,000 weapon damage.

Rather than theorycrafting based on vague numbers, you should do some real math for a change. If you're so inclined, I can point you into the right direction. Or maybe I should just do the work myself. Hint: It's exactly the same as comparing Headhunt and Earthen Rift.

Btw, considering how damage works, to get 20,000 average base damage, you would need closer to 3,500 weapon damage. Well, that is the case if you have Demon Dagger Mastery and 600 Dexterity.



Holy cake, you have some insane standards for "decently refined but average" sin. My sin gets like 10k average with a +10 G15 dagger. I don't think we're quite at a point where +10 is the average refine. That same weapon also have about 1,660 weapon damage.

You should get your nose out of pwcalc and use some basic logic for once. I'd hardly call any of these damage calcs real math, it's just plug and chug with next to no real thinking involved. I pulled numbers from my behind because I felt like what I was saying was rather obvious given what is available ingame and that anyone so interested could take time to derp around on pwcalc for themselves to get exacts. I was also only trying to show that elimination grew more powerful than cursed jail did as you got stronger like rift does compared with headhunt which is why I only bothered picking numbers and not making pwcalcs to back them up. Note how I also stated that I was being liberal with the weapon damage... it was to help boost cursed jail's damage. You are leaving out a LOT if you neglect the boosts from rebirth and your decked out sin lacks engravings, has no extra stats from rebirthing, no B cards, lacks the dex from armor, dex from dominance tome, etc.

Throw in ~50 dex from rebirthing twice, 50 dex from armor set, 300 p-attack from mix of B cards + addons, 100 pattack from meridian + nuema, and swap out the drakeflames and still ignore engravings and the sin easily approaches 20k. http://pwcalc.com/617050540b810590 It's fair if you choose to leave all that out but I made my arsepull with those assumptions in mind. Only the dominance tome is all that expensive if you are in the market for a +12 r9t3 wep so you can ignore that boost if you want. Is it top tier and are there only a dozen or so sins per server this strong atm? Ofc, but they are the people who have the coin to get the skill or had learned it beforehand because they had the extra cash lying around.

I'm a heavy armor sin with only +7 on his r9t3 dags and a set of B war avatar cards and my damage range atm is 9,100-11,400. Yes, its a fair bit above average for a sin but only a bit over half what the top tier sins on my server are at atm. I'm sitting at ~2.1k average wep damage so a G16 sin should be at least near 1,700 average. A +7 G16 nirvy pure dex sin at second rebirth should have similar base damage to what I have now given the same cards and T3 nirvy really is about average for endgame at this point. I didn't use the stereotypical r8/G13 for average endgame sin because most no longer consider it endgame. Also, next to none of them would bother paying 100+mil for a skill that is nearly nonexistent now or had spent the coin to learn it before the expansion. Discussing their damage with elimination would be nearly pointless so I didn't.

@PaTMaN Very interesting! So it is like a three hit elimination + a headhunt at the end.

LMAO....i can't believe you wrote this after the practice we had. even with average damage, that skill zerked or crit or auto crit is auto kill for most AA's and i am pretty tanky. the problem is getting everything from one stat. and the more points you have the more insipid it becomes. Bro seriously until they come to their senses [which i suspect will be never] milk it for all you got.

So I just got this skill and have been doing some testing. Ultimately, not impressed.

First things first, seems damage is divided between 4 hits, 1st hit doing 25%, 2nd doing 10%, 3rd doing 15% and 4th doing 50% of the damage before crits/zerks are taken into consideration. With a +12 weapon and an average phys attack of ~22k, this skill in theory does about 50% more damage than Headhunt. Sounds great... in theory. But as I see it there are some issues here.

1) With a cast time of 2.5s for Cursed Jail vs Headhunts 1.5s, you could tag on a knife throw, condensed thorn, spell cutter, or twin strike (if you haven't upgraded it) to the old Headhunt and achieve higher damage in the same span of time, every time.

2) The cast time of the skill itself takes away from useable stun time so you are effectively losing one second of stun time, and as stated above, using that 1s to do less damage then all of our alternatives.

3) The possibility of achieving maximum damage is significantly decreased when compared to headhunt. Where, with a crit base of ~65%, you have about a 14% chance to do 4x+ damage with a zerk weapon. The chance of matching the damage of an old headhunt zerk-crit or better over all 4 hits is about 2.5%. Note again that this is with the extended cast time in which another skill could have been used for additional damage. The highest single hit in cursed jail (the last one) only has the potential to do about 75% of the hardest hitting headhunt.

4) More hits = a greater chance to proc purify.

5) No more raving slash for the added 10 attack levels (sage) should it ever be desired

So let's recap: Slower, less damage, less useful stun time, less reliable peak damage, greater chance to proc purify making it's only added benefit (slow) completely useless against endgame classes it might have otherwise been useful against. On top of this it reduces the options we have, where with headhunt we could chose the follow up attack.

Can anyone tell me a benefit of this upgrade? Sounds to me like a nerf hidden in big numbers. I'm rather upset about this. Can someone please tell me I'm wrong and that I missed something b:surrender I wish I'd invested those 60 blood in passives instead.

Borrowed your spreadsheet and plugged Cursed Jail vs Headhunt + Level 10 Twin Strike. Used twin strike just to illustrate as it's the lowest damage 1sec skill.

Cursed Jail
= 57,685
Headhunt + Twin Strike
= 64,813

Are we really supposed to believe that a damage reduction of >10% over the same elapsed time (2.9sec) is an upgrade?

Edit: Found a couple things going for Cursed Jail.. seems (at least the sage version) only ever costs 1 spark.. never 2. Tested it about 20 times in a row. You do need to have at least 2 sparks to use it though.
Also, you are able to cancel the casting after 1-2 hits, so depending on how quick you are and lag you have a .5s cast stun

Toraah - Archosaur wrote: »

The only two upgrades that are worth it is elimination and life hunter, and of course those two skills will be extremely hard to get unless you have the twin strike and puncture wound skills already or you are willing to pay 130m+ OR farm until you go insane.

Not including deep chill because an extra 5 attack levels is obviously better if you are willing to give up 60 bloods you could dump into def passive b:laugh

Luckily for myself I already farmed those before SoT/Aba got their updates b:pleased