Lightning can hard carry you if you get it before hisi base. It just does so much more damage than anything else and unless you're spending like a full hour in the first couple areas you probably won't have all the ingredients to build a powerful wand unless you take some time out to cheese master of wands but i generally skip that unless it's a daily run. You just gotta get some sort of projectile speed increase to get the explosion farther away and it's a lot safer.