Click on a field to see details about it here.

Overview

In Path oF Exile (PoE), the Molten Strike skill provides one of the highest single-target damage options in the game. This damage comes from some complex interactions that are not handled in the in-game tooltip or by tools like Path of Building (PoB). This calculator complements PoB to help users estimate their true single target DPS against isolated single targets.

To use this calculator, enter appropriate inputs in all the editable input fields. For more details on a given input or output, click on its description or data field and this help section will be replaced by details about that line.

This calculator is only valid for the 3.11 patch of PoE.

Known Limitations

This calculator assumes all radii are floating point numbers, but some or all are probably integers in the game. Additional experiments are needed to determine exactly how the rounding works. This implies you shouldn't use this calculator to try minmaxing your AoE.

This calculator assumes both bosses and balls have circular hitboxes, but past statements from Mark_GGG suggest that some or all hitboxes are actually squares. Additional experiments are needed to verify this and to determine how square orientations are chose.

This calculator does not account for the new chaining ability of Molten Strike introduced in 3.11 yet.

Version History

2020-06-18: updated for patch 3.11. The min travel distance is now 2 instead of 6 (was apparently incorrectly 5 in the calculator before that). The default max travel distance is now 25 instead of 20. Wildfire has been completely reworked. Projectile speed modifiers now affect the travel distance. Removed the "Effective Ancestral Call Damage Multiplier". It hasn't worked for a while. Depending on how chain works, we may add some calculations for it in the future.

2020-02-04: Fixed the default number of balls (4, not 3).

2020-02-01: Molten Strike has been nerfed in many ways during the last few leagues. This calculator has been updated to account for those nerfs. Note: if you've bookmarked a calculation, it'll still use the old numbers (except for point blank). The new default is 1 wildfire jewel instead of 2. You can still put in a different number if you want to compare against DPS before the cap was lowered (with no legacies). The default number of additional projectiles from the helmet enchant has been lowered to 2. Legacy +3 enchants still exist on permanent leagues so you can change the value back if needed. Point Blank's max more and less multipliers are now 30% instead of 50%. The Ancestral Call trick no longer works, so its default multiplier is now 1.0. Additionally, it's common to download PoB codes from poe.ninja, and it seems to use a Point Blank radius of 10, so that's the new default, instead of blank. As before, when a radius is put in PoB, this calculator has to reverse out those effects then recompute the correct radius interactions internally (instead of just doing the correct calculations without needing to reverse out slightly incorrect PoB calculations).

Additionally, it's common to download PoB codes from poe.ninja, and it seems to use a Point Blank radius of 10, so that's the new default, instead of blank. As before, when a radius is put in PoB, this calculator has to reverse out those effects then recompute the correct radius interactions internally (instead of just doing the correct calculations without needing to reverse out slightly incorrect PoB calculations). 2018-11-01: improved how point blank and farshot multipliers are presented. Also made a few other minor improvements to help strings, internal comments, code clarity, etc. Added a limitations section to the main help string.

2018-10-29: added far shot support

2018-10-28: converted to a Javascript implementation. this version supports bookmarking, has more intuitive inputs that work around PoB bugs, adds more point blank inputs so people don't double-count it, adds an Ancestral input, adds convenient inputs for automating the ball count calculations, lots of documentation, etc.

2018-07-28: added usage notes (thanks xhul for the feedback!)

2017-07-15: fixed projectile spread distribution based based on info tracked down by reddit. Also added a graph for finding the optimal AoE modifier.

2017-05-29: original Google Sheets version

Copyright (C) 2018 by MoldyDwarf, all rights reserved. You are free to use the results of this calculator for your builds and build guides, link to it, etc. OpenARL is free to copy any of these calculations into Path of Building if he so desires, with no restrictions.