comet discussion

If you actually wanted to learn about POE, have you maybe had a discussion with any of the people that tried to tell you that a different set up may be optimal?

CoEA triggering more than CoC means you're lacking damage, since CoC energy gain is affected by damage, while CoEA can only scale with the number of ailments you inflict, with ignite scaling as the exception.

Spell Cascade does not repeat casts of Comet. It might look like it but all it's doing is making your cast also target sides of its target area. People use Spell Cascade for the better AoE, as well as the ability to hit the same target multiple times, given the target is large or you've invested enough AoE for all Comets to hit.

Having two Comets means you're doubling the amount of energy required to proc your trigger. The only reason people use two of the same skill in a trigger setup is either to limit supports to use with Uhtred support gems or if they do so much damage that they basically overflow the amount of energy to cast a single spell so they use two so they don't "waste" energy from overflow. This only really applies to CoC because of the way the energy gain is calculated based on its damage. I don't have experience using CoEA but if people are able to get large amounts of energy in one proc with ignites, then that would apply as well.

In your case, based on you saying your trigger is Spark, you're basically doubling the Comet for double the energy investment, which is basically the same as if you had a single comet, effectively wasting a support slot. Yeah, it looks cool for 6+ Comets to all land at once but you could just have 3+ Comets with another support to hit harder and hit about as often.

If you're looking at PoENinja and sort by Comet DPS then yes, it looks like everyone is chasing the big dick Comet but beyond that, there are tons of things people are experimenting with. In the end, none of the content is really hard enough to min max to that extent because, at that point, you could be running any damaging supports and basically get the same result because Comet on a trigger is OP.

I'd like to share my set-up here: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaal/character/Bakokang-3499/BaklaSaBanga?i=0&search=class%3DDisciple%2Bof%2BVarashta%26name%3Dbakla

I've learned that making sure that Comets are fire infused as much as possible is the best way to scale DPS. Most builds rely on Living Bomb which is socketed together with Comet. Unless you're a Stormweaver who specced into the Infusion ascendancy nodes, there is no possible combination of passive points and support gems to ensure 100% fire infused Comets. Therefore, I am using CoEA and socketed Living Bomb there. Ailments would come from your trigger spell (Frostbolt in my case) and mostly from the Fire Comets themselves. Looking at the PoB, infused Comets have almost 100% flammability magnitude and shock chance (I think freeze too). It triggers so much Living Bombs that I constantly run out of mana, hence I also had to spec into mana recovery nodes, but leaves a ton of excess fire infusions on the ground.

I've also wondered about those 10M+ DPS CoC builds in POEninja. Some of them have Soul Offering and Im scratching my head looking for a source of minion to sacrifice from their builds. They also have Archmage which makes their Comet cost 900mana per cast while only having 1000+ mana.