General Gem Discussion

Storm Rain feedback

I did some testing on standard with a raider setup. I decided not to go trap or mines since I figured I would get 100 arrows out soon enough anyway.

Well I did (I think? because I tried looking for an indication but there were none). This isn't the main issue though.

The damage for it doesn't even remotely scale well enough. Only until I slammed in a 6L legacy reach of the council + triple legacy Taste of hate/Atz Promise/Wise oak and awakened gems+old jewels I could do ok vs fully watchstoned T16 mobs with 0 delirious. Vs the bosses though I ended up fighting for like 5 minutes LUL.

So I thought. Hmm this is strange. I am running flat added lightning damage through arcane cloak/sigil and I am getting the whole screen filled with blue lightning(I kid you not, this skill fills up the screen with some blue lightning that needs to come with an epilepsy warning tag). I even squeezed in point blank and stood on top of the bosses for the full 5 minutes and did my combos. I felt something was wrong and did a swap to ligthning arrow with exact same links(even if that is very suboptimal for lightning arrow). Guess what? The mobs melted. The bosses even went down at a half decent rate.

Issues for storm rain:

1. zdps vs bosses with EO flat damage+mana scaling (I mean actual zdps). Even LA does 10x more damage with suboptimal gem links.

2. projectiles spread out too much even if I try luring the boss/bosses into a corner while aiming at my feet, so even if you get out 100 arrows you end up missing with most.

3. I asked around on standard and noone had figured out how to scale it to a useful level. So the question becomes: Is this intended to be a clear skill supplementing other means of damage? If so, currently the skill is also strictly worse than most if not all bow skills at that job.

4. Did whoever designed this skill stare at the screen for longer than a couple minutes at a time with 100 projectiles (400 beams) in the ground? I dare them to try it without getting a splitting headache :)

5. Survivability wise the mana/mom approach makes you almost invurnerable. With so many attack hits you can spec vaal pact and top it off with some life on hit and face tank just about anything in the game. So that left me thinking. This skill must have been tested end game with an aura bot to boost the damage.

I appreciate the effort in making a different kind of skill but we didn't need another vaal spark (both visually and non-aurastacker damage). I suggest a redesign(max 10% of current projectiles) and a 10x damage increase (from current 100 projectile damage staus) :)

Thanks for reading

Explosive Concoction Feedback in regards to flask sustain.

I have been PoBing since league start, and I was concered about flask charge sustain since the release of the Explosive Concoction gem (EC from now on). Here is what i found out, if you want to sustain flask charges with it:

The gem states that each attack consumes 3 charges from each flask as a base.

Let's look at the singular topaz/sapphire flask you would wanna run with the build and see how you can sustain it. Lets also assume you have somewhere between 3 and 4 attacks per second, as attackspeed is one of the only ways to efficiently scale the technically good base dmg of the skill. Base attack speed of unarmed attacks is 1.2 attacks per second btw.

With 3 attacks per second you need 9 charges per second!

You can try reducing the charges that you consume by getting as much "reduced flask charges used as possible. That is a very rare stat and can be mainly found in the passive tree (15% in total), the belt slot(20%) and the helmet enchantment for EC (12%) and obviously the chemist prefix (maximum 20%) on a flask.

IF you get everything mentioned above you end up with 67% reduced charges consumed with basically makes it so you "only" need to generate 3 charges per second.

How can you regain these charges when fighting bosses?

The obvious choise is pathfinder's natures boon. That notable gives you 1 charge per second. So we are quite far away from the 3.

"Charge recovery" and "increased flask charges gained" is multiplicate, so you can use that system to try to generate 3 times the charges from nature's boon.

You can get up to 60% increased charged recovery with the new enkindling orb on both your saphire and topaz flask.

With that 60% multiplier you "only" need "90% increased flask charges gained". There are several ways of getting that, some more painful than others. Pathfinder gives you 10% or 20% if you pick up the small node towards the terrible master alchemist. Replica pure talent gives 20%. The normal tree has 40% on the ranger mana nodes. 10% on the acrobatics small nodes and 20% if you crit recently. The is another 30% on the 3 mana flask nodes at the templar witch area.

You can get to "90% increased flask charges gained" in more and less painful ways. 1.6*1.9 = 3.04, which is exactly what you need to generate the 3 charges per second.

If you look at how much we just invested to be able to sustain a topaz and a sapphire flask with only 3 attacks per second (my current PoB has 3.35 with aspeed only 24% attackspeed on gear) you can come to the conclusion that this is not a reasonable investment. You realize that you actually can't use the sapphire and topaz flask at all as a pathfinder and insane investment. You take so many flask nodes and don't even get benefits from the flask... nvm you get the damage from the flasks. The damage that is soo low, that you can't even reach trinity with EC unless you invest more than just a Wrath aura on top. It's horrible.

TLDR/Conclusion: You cannot sustain the topaz/sapphire flask even as a pathfinder with reasonable investment. You need perfectly rolled gear and have to invest into at least 9 passives to sustain EC flasks at a measly 3 attacks per second. BTW, if you don't get the 2 perfect flasks, you have to run the traitor legion keystone and if you have to use the traitor on a build, you know it's bad. PoB for the curious: https://pastebin.com/dRBkweYd

Good luck and stay safe exiles!

Does anybody else find the new Summon Reaper to be incredibly unwieldy?
I find her AI to be very difficult to work with. She has the tenancy to wander off attacking creatures off screen, often things that simply are not a threat to you at the time, while your in the middle of getting disemboweled.

Frequently I've summoned her back to my side or commanded her to attack nearby enemies, only for the immediately bugger off, ignoring everything that is attacking me.

Also there is her consumption of other minions, which I don't dislike the idea of if she did it when she has taken some damage rather then start of a battle when shes at full health, then running off to get herself killed since this ability feels like it's on a 2 minute recharge timer.

Basically, she fights like a dumbass, Leeroy Jenkinings into every encounter. I love the idea of a single powerful minion, but reliability is key, and atm she doesn't appear to me to be anywhere near that.

Summon Reaper thoughts and feedback:

While I am not accustomed to laying out my thoughts, I decided I'd give it a shot here. Regardless though, I noticed some weird interactions with the Reaper that made me feel like it was really just a half-baked minion whose development was somewhat cut halfway through. Let me flesh that out, before you think it's unduly harsh criticism.

For starters, I feel like the Reaper was designed in such a way, based off of its "reduces the effectiveness of other minions", to be a minion that's stand-alone. In my minion builds, this would definitely qualify as a "Pure" minion. By my definition, "Pure" builds are builds that use one skill to deal damage. In the case of builds I've done before as minions, this would be like my "Pure Zombies" build. Even though I use Carrion Golems, Skitterbots, Animated Guardian and Spectres all for support and buffing my Zombies in the build, the Zombies themselves deal at least a total of 90% or more of the damage output; "Pure"ly built for the Zombies to be the most effective minion on the board.

I cannot proclaim that, in any capacity, I can see the Reaper being built as a "Pure" in my eyes. It lacks consistency in all of the right ways, and while its damage is stellar at some points, it lacks area of effect clear, speed and most notably survivability.

What I've noticed of the Reaper more than anything is that this minion just EATS damage. It's really the most uncanny thing. I've taken nodes on the passive tree while leveling so far, and I have to say... They're mostly all defensive nodes. With that said, no other minion of mine is taking anywhere close to the amount of damage that the Reaper is, leaving me to think that the Reaper is just missing all accounts of defenses whatsoever. Here's something I noticed:

While leveling, I did Daresso of course. Deathless, so that was a "Phew" I suppose. Regardless, I noticed something... Odd. My Reaper took enough damage to nearly die 3 or 4 times, and the remainder of my minions' green health bars didn't even dip below the 90th percentile, give or take. All the while, my minion survived off of eating another minion.

My Reaper in that boss fight technically took damage in the amount of 3-400% of its health during the battle, while other minions took no more than perhaps 20-30% in total (counting regen recovering their health.)

That is quite a frightening, and alarming, revelation on even a simple boss fight such as Daresso. But it's not just Daresso either... It's... Practically everything. The Reaper is made of thinner material than a wet paper bag. It hardly survives most encounters, especially boss encounters.

Moving forward though, I noticed other weird inconsistencies and interactions. I thought half of the gimmick of the Reaper was to eat other minions, already weakened by its overwhelming presence, to "grow more powerful and heal it self"? The healing function appears to be in tact, it's the only way my Reaper survives 3/4s of the encounters it goes in to that it doesn't die in. That said, the "empowering" part of this functionality... I don't notice it whatsoever. What is being empowered? Because I really cannot notice a single thing... Damage isn't increasing at all... Health pool isn't boosted at all... Bleed damage is nonexistent... It doesn't move faster... Skills don't combo faster...

While we're on the subject of empowering... I've noticed that most skill gems just... Won't work with the Reaper. Which is quite sad, honestly. I've noticed that a majority of its abilities incorporate an AoE effect, so to help it clear I was thinking of using the Increased Area of Effect support gem. Only it didn't alter the AoE radius of even a single skill. I was going to use Multistrike from the offset, since an ability of the Reaper's does a spin attack in to a sort of blood-puncture ability, or something... So I thought it might be similar to the Cyclone of the Ice Golem to a degree. Only it doesn't benefit that skill whatsoever, and the only skill that the Multistrike support does benefit is the Reaper's toggle-casted active ability to dash to a location and sweep it with its scythes (And the only bonus is it swipes twice. It doesn't get the attack speed bonus, nor the boosted damage for the second and third swipe, though it WILL retarget for the second and third so long as an enemy is in CLOSE proximity to the Reaper.)

It's quite disheartening to think that, if these two support gems don't work, or only work half-assedly, then really the only support gems that are going to work with the Reaper are going to be to affect its base stats and nothing more; Health, damage, resistances. That doesn't leave me in a good mindset moving forward as somebody that loves to make Minion builds and push them to their limits, try to find interesting ways to use the Minions you create.

Adding to that, there's really nothing that I can think of to fit the Reaper in to any playstyle. It's a total lone-wolf. It's meant to be a solo act, but it requires the presence of other minions. It's a contradiction, really, and a weird one. I was thinking on playstyles that I could work around for the Reaper, but honestly the best thing I've thought of to try later when I am able to is a Cyclone-CWC-Desecrate-Zombie-Reaper-Carrion Golem setup, and elsewhere have support auras, and additionally have Reaper in another 6L somewhere be it a minion helmet or a 6L weapon.

The entire playstyle of that would be to Cyclone everywhere, trigger the Reaper dash skill through the CWC as well as bounce between the skill gems inside of the CWC to keep minions alive for the Reaper to potentially eat to heal it self (because the empowering isn't a thing), and basically buff the Reaper with things like Pride aura and Aspect of the Spider's spider webs debuff on enemies.

All of this said, it's a real shame that the Reaper's gimmick is enhanced Bleed damage, since it's arguably the worst possible thing you can attempt to scale on a minion. Impale, Elemental Damage, purely Physical damage, hell even critical damage are all by far easier to scale than something like Bleed damage. The Bleed scaling on the Reaper would have to be something like 4,000% boosted to matter, because I am seeing it take huge chunks of health out of enemies with an attack, and I'm not noticing any really significant Bleed damage coming out of it... I'm hardly noticing any at all, and if I didn't hear that an enemy was affected by Bleed, I'd honestly think it was another broken interaction of the Reaper.

Honestly, the sort of interactive playstyle I would have loved to see is something like a one-minion Golem build. If the Reaper had access to the Primordial jewels' passive boosts, this problem would be solved 1,000% I am sure (And yes, this includes the Anima Stone for up to 2 more Reapers.) But, sadly, it doesn't.

Ah, anyways, let me stop with this here: It's really just a shame that a minion such as the Reaper is ending up in such a sub-par, sub-optimal, extremely niche position as it is.

Explosive Concoction Feedback:

PoB: https://pastebin.com/ZSV4uF4U
Level 91 in ESC.

I love the skill, it's honestly one of the most fun mapping skills in PoE, and I've played since closed beta.

I only use Topaz + Sapphire, I never manually use the flask, just have them rolled with +max charges.

I started off as Trinity based - as Raider, with Shroud of the Lightless. Was alright but Trinity wasn't always up, needed some more Abyss Jewels to balance the damage. Was fine but I wanted to swap to Frostferno & Avatar of Fire. That worked out great.

Map bosses die in a reasonable amount of time (for this patch + time in league). The issue comes when you fight sustained long boss fights. Because you run out of flask charges and lose half your damage.

I have 50% reduced flask charges used, so that the skill consumes 2 charges instead of 3. So against a boss I have 35 uses of the skill with my current flasks. I could progress all the way up to Awakener level 4, but pushing past that doing 4 watchstone zones, the conquerors are too hard to progress.

I quickly run out of charges to use the added cold/light and the damage drops down to the base fire damage, which is around half dps. With no way to gain more charges. One obvious fix would be to play Pathfinder instead of Raider - using the "flasks gain 3 charges every 3 seconds". But I use 6 charges every one second, so the Pathfinder node wouldn't provide much unless you run in circles for a bit.

-Veritania & Baran are fine, just a long fight (4-5 minutes).
-Al-Hezmin is very hard, I could get more chaos res to make it the same as above.
-Drox however is impossible. The second phase, I kill his banners, but barely get to touch his shield again before he lays more banners. I really tried but had to call in a friend.
-Sirus I haven't reached yet, 2 fights off, it would be possible but a 20+ minute fight I think.

Any boss past that is not really viable with this skill, purely because of the charge consumption. Whilst that mechanic is super cool, I think it just prevents the skill from ever being viable as something to progress your watchstones or kill higher tier bosses.

I'd prefer it if you only got the damage bonus whilst using the flask manually. So you still need to spec in to flask nodes, but it allow you to sustain the bonus damage in long fights. Although this would completely lock the skill to Pathfinder only. So I don't know an easy fix honestly.

I theorycrafted with some gear upgrades, level 21 gem and a +8 corrupted Frostferno I could double my dps, but it still would not be enough to kill Drox at A4+.

Everything else, fantastic skill, very interesting, lots of fun ways to scale it. It just hits a wall at A4. I'll hopefully return to the skill once my atlas is set up and blast some maps, and use another character for bossing.

Character name is OosGulper but I'm respeccing tomorrow so use the PoB.

Cheers.

Spectral Helix Feedback:

To whom ever it may concern. The skill is lacking in the "skill gem" section along with a bunch of the newer ones.

Also

Is it by design, that the claw spawns behind your character(or on top of you), so that you almost have to have the monster behind you to hit it at the start of the spinning movement? (From my experience you have to be almost on top of the monster to hit it as the spinning starts)

Was just wondering if that was the intended drawback of this nice skill?

Regards

Storm

PS. Appreciate the hard work you are doing and fully understand if this post gets no answer.

Weapon type restriction of rage vortex


Why don't you allow us to use it with staves?

Explosive Concoction feedback, since noone bothered to push few buttons to create relevant topic.

1. Flask-draining skill - in already flask-taxing update - is a joke.
Necessity to keep only two usable flasks and forfeit three slots for the skill instead of more traditional means of damage boosting is not worth the effort. Regardless of boosts, damage per [mana + resist] flask charge spent for this skill shall be worse than damage per [mana and/or utility] flask charge of any other skill at the moment.

We're losing flask charges already to cast this skill at its peak power. Make it cost 0 mana please.

2. Usability is grueling. Hitting something that is not charging SLOWLY at your character is... well, not alright since projectile itself does not connect with enemy - only with the ground. Doing 'where should I throw it' guessing games or resorting to weird supports like Volley and STILL missing the target is... weird at best.

It's like using extremely defunct copy of Magma Orb but without built-in bounce, less area of effect and more taxing usage cost. Make original bottle 'projectile' explode upon collision with enemy, please.

3. No convenient way to scale damage.
Yes, it's a projectile. Majority of projectile damage boosting gems don't affect it if it have no physical damage as base... Oh, and since it doesn't hit monsters (only ground) and have no Magma Orb alike bounce - forget about pierce/chain/fork.
Yes, it's not a melee skill. Barrage Support won't work with it anyway. Volley... might... for now.
Yes, it's unarmed damage. No, no Facebreakers/Doryanis for you. No combo with Dancing Dervish/Duo either (doable but too damn expensive).
Yes, it's elemental damage. Pure elemental damage boosts are working with spells mostly. Or REDUCE damage by removing crits/ignite/whatever.
Yes, it hits. On-hit/on-crit stuff drains your mana even further now. And quite a plenty of on-hit stuff is melee only...

I do love weird skills but this one is beyond redemption...

4. Use cases for this skill are completely unclear.

4.1. It may deal three different elemental damage types but has only single built-in aliment boost - Ignite. It looks like it was intended to be used with Avatar of Fire (+ Ignite cluster nearby) - but we're lacking accessible means for converting Lightning to Fire (or making Lightning apply Ignite) and Cold to Fire gem gimps expected damage further (because less impactful More modifier). Mere Fireball is preferrable for this scenario.

4.2. Maybe it has to do something with Trinity support? Nope, since skill's innate elemental damage is uneven it'll be not worth the effort balancing elemental damage output by type with gear. It'll be even more gimmicky than using Trinity + Elemental Hit + Barrage Support. Well, at least it frees single flask slot up...

4.3. Since self-casting is physically painful to aim (see 2.) and punishing (1.) - maybe it was intended to be not self-casted?
NO AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Due to extremely dubious choices of wordings and tags all over the place, we can't have non-self-cast EC.
It's not a spell so no Spell Totem.
It's not a bow/wand skill so no Ballista Totem either (although it could be fun).
Same goes for Trap for no apparent reason.
Mines? Pffffffff. Yes, it's a ranged attack. Like, true ranged attack. No, your bare fist is not bow nor wand.

I'm really trying to love this skill - and to, maybe, play it as intended without 200ex broken Uniques - but I can't.

Summon Reaper Feedback & Suggestion:

I would like to start off with saying that I love the skill... Finally, a minion that can make use of all my other already super weak smaller minions to use!

However, the minion does seem rather unwieldy? When Chris said in his video to be careful since it might take your Animated Guardian I thought there would be a way to influence what minions it would consume for it's purposes. So far with me playing with the minion, there is no way to influence which minion gets gobbled up - which means there is no way to be careful.

I'm hoping for this behavior to be controlled - for example, perhaps it prioritizes minions that have timed life instead of permanent ones? You'd still have to actively cast minions or set them up in your build to keep the Reaper satisfied.

Priority would look like: Timed Minions (Sentinels, Skeletons, Animated Weapons, Heralds, etc) > Golems/Holy Relic > Zombies > Spectres > Animated Guardian

Also please check out the interactions with The Dancing Duo/Dervish and the Reaper. I've encountered bugs where the Reaper is unresponsive for the rest of the session to the game flat out closing when it chose to "consume" one of the blades. For now I'm using the Reaper skill gem on the Dancing Dervish swords themselves so I can use one or the other.

I'd like to check out it's performance if it gets some extra changes to it's behavior and some touch ups that Bretherezen has mentioned.

*Eats Vanilla Wafers till the end of the night*

Explosive Concoction

I started the league with that skill and when I understood it wasn't up to par with other skills, I changed my build completely to use Shield abilities instead of Unarmed, because Spectral Shield Throw is much better.

Here are my notes on the skill during leveling and early mapping:

- The skill is thematically made for Pathfinder, let's get flask charges gained and reduced flask charges used and keep permanent uptime on these Topaz/Sapphire flasks
- The skill does great damage! I can kill act bosses quickly
- I love the sound design and visuals, it feels very cool to throw potions and shatter enemies!
- It's hard to play since I need to target specific pixels on the screen
- The skill is Unarmed but I don't see an upside to this, except thematically (and maybe the damage)
- (Now in maps) The skill clears very bad. I feel like I am wasting my time on each monster group.
- I should maybe try to go Ignite with proliferation
- Ruby flask is made for ignite, but the two other flasks would be wasted (damage types that can't ignite by default), the skill makes more sense for Elementalist at this point. But why use this skill when you can use Divine Ire that does the whole screen in a vertical line.
- Forget it, I can easily re-use the same tree for Spectral Shield throw (converted to elemental) and deal lower damage but actually clear enemy packs.

My main concern was clearing. The AoE of the skill is very small, and it only shoots an horizontal line where you targeted (Multiple Proj. or Volley), making many encounters very annoying (difficult to take down big groups of enemies or enemies that are moving). It is much harder to play than a regular projectile build, because instead of aiming a "general direction", you are aiming a specific pixel on the screen. I see no advantage for being much harder to play.

Rolling magma chains, which adds additional ways to build that skill and the necessary clearing, and removes the need to aim your cursor with high precision.

EDIT: I imagined the skill would have been better if additional projectiles were randomly spread in an AoE instead of the regular horizontal line. Like Firestorm / Rain of Arrow.