The Cast in Hades II no longer fires a projectile. It drops a binding circle on the ground, and almost every Cast boon is really a statement about what happens inside that circle.
Seventeen boons fill the Cast slot. Before you compare any of their numbers, there is a constraint that invalidates most Cast builds people plan on paper: five of those seventeen are documented as incompatible with each other. Not discouraged — incompatible. The game will not let you hold two of them.
The five you can only pick one of
| Boon | God | What it does | Common → Heroic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glowing Coal | Hestia | Hold Cast to aim a fireball; the circle forms where it explodes | 60 / 90 / 120 / 150 blast |
| Lightning Lance | Zeus | Hold Cast to aim where the circle appears | 50 / 70 / 90 / 110 bolt |
| Howling Soul | Hades | Cast launches a seeking projectile; the circle forms where it hits | 200 flat direct-hit |
| Tipsy Shot | Dionysus | Hold Cast to lob a large explosion | 300 / 450 / 600 / 750 blast |
| Local Climate | Demeter | Your Ω Cast deals more damage; doubled if you stand in the circle | +20% / +30% / +40% / +50% |
Every one of the ten possible pairings among these five is stated as “cannot be combined” in the notes of the boon’s own wiki entry. That is not an inference from how the effects look — it is printed on the pages, in both directions.
The logic behind the first four is obvious once you see it: they all answer the question where does the circle land? and they answer it differently, so only one answer can exist. Local Climate is the odd one out — it does not move the circle, it modifies the Ω Cast inside it, and it is still excluded from all four.
Pick your circle-placement answer first, then never think about it again. If you are going to take anything else in this slot, this decision has already been made for you by your weapon: ranged aspects want Tipsy Shot or Lightning Lance, melee aspects do not need placement at all and should skip this group entirely for a damage ring.
Two more boons sit on the edge of that group. Tidal Ring (Poseidon) is incompatible with Local Climate and Tipsy Shot; Hostile Environment, the Ares/Demeter Duo, is incompatible with Glowing Coal, Lightning Lance, Howling Soul and Tidal Ring. So in practice a build gets one placement boon, and then either Tidal Ring or Hostile Environment depending on which one it took.
Winner’s Circle is a trap for three of the rings
Hermes is the Cast god on paper — Winner’s Circle gives +100% / +125% / +150% / +175% Ω Cast Speed. It is easy to assume that multiplies everything about your circle. It does not.
Winner’s Circle makes your Casts expire faster and channel faster. It does not make anything tick faster. The wiki states this per ring, and the split is clean:
| Ring | Tick rate | Winner’s Circle |
|---|---|---|
| Storm Ring (Zeus) | every 0.35 sec | Does not benefit |
| Rapture Ring (Aphrodite) | every 0.85 sec | Does not benefit |
| Smolder Ring (Hestia) | every 1 sec | Does not benefit |
| Arctic Ring (Demeter) | every 0.5 sec | Benefits |
| Engagement Ring (Hera) | one burst per circle | Benefits |
| Solar Ring (Apollo) | one burst per circle | Benefits |
The pattern is the lesson: rings that damage on a fixed interval ignore Winner’s Circle; rings whose payload is a burst tied to the circle’s life are helped by it, because a shorter circle means the burst comes back sooner. Taking Winner’s Circle with Storm Ring buys you a faster Channel and nothing else.
Damage per second, computed from the actual tick rates
The published numbers for these boons are wildly misleading side by side, because they are numbers per tick on different intervals. Dividing each one by its interval puts them on the same scale:
| Boon | Common per tick | Interval | ≈ damage per second at Common | at Heroic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storm Ring | 25 | 0.35 sec | 71 | 114 |
| Anvil Ring | 60 | 1 sec, 3 hits | 60 | 90 |
| Smolder Ring | 40 (Scorch) | 1 sec | 40 | 100 |
| Arctic Ring | 10 | 0.5 sec | 20 | 50 |
| Rapture Ring | 10 | 0.85 sec | 12 | 29 |
Zeus’s Storm Ring is roughly six times Rapture Ring’s sustained output on the same circle. What you pay for that is targeting: Storm Ring strikes one foe at a time, so a crowd walks out of it doing almost nothing to the ones it is not currently hitting. Rapture Ring does the opposite — it drags every foe toward the centre and inflicts Weak, which is why its damage is allowed to be that low. Aphrodite’s ring is a stickiness tool with a damage number attached; Zeus’s is a single-target grinder that needs the crowd to be held still by something else.
Smolder Ring’s 40 per second looks competitive until you notice two restrictions in its own notes: the Scorch is capped at 999, and Cast-damage increases — including Arachne’s outfit and Chaos’s Chasm — do not increase the Scorch applied at all. It is a fixed-rate DoT wearing a Cast boon’s clothes.
Two classification quirks that cost real damage
Anvil Ring is not a Blast. Its animation looks exactly like the Blast from Volcanic Strike, Volcanic Flourish and Smithy Rush, and its notes go out of their way to say it is not classified as one and does not benefit from Blast-related boons. If you built Hephaestus around Blast scaling and dropped Anvil Ring into the Cast slot expecting it to join in, it does not.
Arctic Ring is not Olympian Damage. Every other damage ring in the table counts its damage as Olympian Damage, which is the tag most damage multipliers check for. Arctic Ring deals flat damage and is sourced from an Olympian boon, and its notes still state it is not considered Olympian Damage. So it does not receive Olympian Damage bonuses that the rest of the ring family does.
The only 500-damage Cast in the game
A number that gets repeated a lot is that Cast builds can slot a 500 damage blast from a boon called Seismic Hammer. There is no boon by that name. The Hephaestus/Poseidon Duo is Seismic Servo, and it does something completely different: +35% recharge speed for any boon effects that recharge over time, with no damage component at all.
The one genuine 500 in the Cast slot belongs to Icarus — Hazard Boom: your Casts blast the area after 4 seconds for 500 damage to foes and 20 to you. That delay is the whole design. You have to have left the circle before it fires, which is exactly the behaviour a Cast build is bad at, because Cast builds want to stand in their own circle.
The 14 boons that modify your Cast without taking the slot
The Cast slot is only half the story. Fourteen boons change how Casts behave from other slots — this is where a Cast build actually gets its multipliers.
| Boon | God | Slot | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Super Nova | Apollo | Passive | Casts expand in size until they expire — +40% to +70% max size |
| Prominence Flare | Apollo | Passive | After your Ω Cast expires, damage the area for 2 sec — 10 to 16 every 0.13 sec |
| Lucid Gain | Apollo | Magick | Stand in your Casts when they expire to restore 40 to 100 Magick |
| Rousing Reception | Hera | Passive | Casts damage foes as they join the Encounter — 60 to 120 |
| Arctic Gale | Demeter | Passive | Casts also create a Gust — 4 to 16 every 0.25 sec |
| Meat Grinder | Ares | Passive | Your Ω Cast also creates a Blade Rift — 30 to 60 per sec |
| Lethal Snare | Artemis | Passive | Foes in your Casts may take Critical damage from Attacks — +10% to +19% |
| Easy Shot | Artemis | Passive | A piercing arrow fires at any foe damaged by your Ω Cast — 50 to 87 |
| Nimble Limbs | Hermes | Passive | Attack, Special and Cast all faster — +10% to +25% |
| Fire Away | Hestia | Passive (Legendary) | Casts destroy foes’ ranged shots and Scorch the attacker — 400 every 3 sec |
| Hazard Boom | Icarus | Passive | 500 damage blast after 4 sec — 20 to you |
| Fuchsia Dress | Arachne | Outfit | +20 Armor, Casts deal +100% damage |
| Hostile Environment | Ares + Demeter | Duo | Ω Cast stronger and follows you — +100% |
| Glorious Disaster | Apollo + Zeus | Duo | Channel +30 Magick into Ω Cast for 20 bolt damage every 0.13 sec |
Hostile Environment is the card most Cast builds are missing. Every other option in this list makes the circle better where it already is. Hostile Environment makes the circle travel with you, which is the only thing that fixes the Cast’s core problem: it is a stationary effect in a game about moving.
Fuchsia Dress is the largest single Cast multiplier in the data at +100%, and it arrives with +20 Armor rather than a penalty. Note the naming: it is Fuchsia Dress in the current game; guides that call it Scarlet Dress are using the 2024 Early Access name, which the wiki still echoes in some cross-references.
How to actually choose
- Decide whether you need circle placement at all. Melee aspect: no. Ranged aspect: yes, and that locks you into one of the first four boons in this page.
- Then look at tick rate, not the headline number. Storm Ring at 25 looks weaker than Sword Ring at 240; per second against one target it is not close.
- Check whether your payoff is a tick or a burst. Ticks ignore Winner’s Circle. Bursts love it. This single fact decides whether Hermes belongs in the build.
- Add one universal multiplier from outside the slot — Fuchsia Dress, Hostile Environment, or Local Climate if you did not take a placement boon.
- Do not stack Scorch with Cast-damage multipliers. They do not interact.
Related guides
- Full boons database — all 327 boons with real effect text and per-rarity values
- Best boons tier list — why damage bonuses add instead of multiplying
- Best builds and synergies — which god pairs actually pay
- Gods overview — the 22 boon sources and why nine Olympians each have 14
- Legendary boons — the eleven capstones and what they cost
- Weapons guide — which aspects reward a ranged Cast
- Stats explained — what Power, Magick and Olympian Damage actually do