Arcanist Brand

The thing that gets me with arcanist brand is that this is inconsistent with how regular brands work. Its as if spells linked to spell totem support would require constant mana use, and its all because of a technical detail in the wording of the support. Furthermore, arcanist brand was basically never used for anything other than utility, because ggg definitely feared that it would be insanely broken as a main dps support unless they put some hefty penalties into it (which im certain they were right about).

As a result AB is completely dead as a main skill support, and it being inconsistent mechanically with regular brands is extremely unsatisfying and unintuitive. Im not against the trigger changes per se, as it often just gave you a bunch of shit for free, or trivialized the entire mana mechanic, but AB should definitely be reworded to not be a trigger anymore

Activation time should probably stop being 1s and be equal to whatever the linked active skills are probably... if possible.

I actually don't mind the mana cost, but the slow activation speed on top of needing to attach first on top of the 3s duration (lol, like a third of time is spent before 1 trigger even goes off)...

Hi,

Just tried to do Arcanist Brand + Voltaxic Burst and I was dismayed to discover it costs mana every time the brand triggers :( I couldn't walk 5 metres out on the aqueduct in act IV without being out of mana. The sheer number of downsides now associated with the brand make it undesirable to use, which is a shame as I was looking forward to exploring this combo.

Edit: Arcanist brand refuses to poison, I've had to go self-cast :(

If you don't severely buff this skill in a hotfix in the same league, you may as well remove it.

Hey Rob! I play as a witch, an occultist. There are no special mechanics in my build. I use arcanist brand and soulrend. And in the latest changes - damage reduction from arcanist brand - also works for damage over time, in fact it is the effect of soulrend, why does the damage reduction from arcanist brand also work for the effect of soulrend? Is there a mistake in this? Shouldn't brandy's arcanist only reduce damage on hit?

I am not sure if this feedback is valuable as I am under the impression that you guys do not want arcanist Brand to be the main damage skill under any circumstances. Why self cast when you can just slap it on a brand and dodge while it casts.


About my Build. I am playing arguably the best damage skills for Arcanist Brand with a combo of volatile dead and desecrate. Sadly corpse skills keep getting hit every patch due to the popularity of detonate dead. On a side note I think it could be a good fix if corpse skills couldn't inflict ignite that would reduce the clear of especially detonate dead drasticly without hurting the others that much.

The big advantage of VD with Brands is that it casts the skill pecisely under the target not just once but twice (desecrate and VD). With that we get a much higher hit rate on the corpse explosion part then any compareable VD Version.

There used to be an amazing guide on it https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2911667/page/1 but sadly the creator gave up on it because it just got hit too many times.

The general idea besides the brand VD synergy is corpse pact notable and how easy VD caps it out. The cast speed feels amazing when up everything is faster and Arcanist brands activation frequency scales with cast speed aswell.




Base Duration:

With a miserable 3 Seconds Attachment Duration it feels horrible and you definetly need duration on it. If you want to keep up 4 brands with a cast time of 0.8 for each Brand you need 3.2 Seconds just to get your Brands out there. Even if you get an amazing 89% increased cast Speed which is way more then most build will ever reach you only get it down to 0.42 Seconds per Brand. Without any duration investment you are standing are still standing still for half the time. Four Brands still take you 1.68 Seconds to get out. Using more then four almost makes you a channeling build.

As Necro you get 50% increased duration from the Ascendancy but everyone else needs heavy investment in duration which feels quite bad unless your damage skill somehow scales with that aswell.

Cast Time:

The first cast takes ages it feels like the increased cast speed only applys after the first cast (Not sure that this is the case just what it feels like). This makes for a big saftey issue. Even if you spot the monster and get your brand on them they quite often get an oportunity to hit you even if they are killed in one shot.

I am not sure if everything is alright with the slow first cast but if there is not fix on that side it would feel A LOT better if the first trigger would happen immedeatly when the brand attaches.

The base cast time of one Second feels too long. With my setup the cast speed feels good as corpse pact builds up, but while leveling without any cast speed Investment it is horrible.

Brand Recall:

While Brand Recall feels amazing since it triggers the brand when you pull them over it also makes it necessary to run into melee range which most builds do not like.


To many Downsides:

This is why I think it is not intended as a main damage skill. The Downsides are too many.

-Less Area of Effect
-Reduced Chaining Range
-Limited Projectile Range

These do not affect every Build equally but already exclude a lot of skills from using Arcanist Brand.

-1/3 damage to everything without a brand
-Cast speed investment is necessary
-Increased Duration for the Brands is necessary
-Good defenses are necessary since you usually get hit when you first summon the brands on a target
-Need to fix the mana since you pay for the brand and every trigger

With these on top it is very hard to find any single skill that synergises with all of these investments and actually benefits from beeing triggered over beeing self cast.

Conclusion:

You get punished in many different ways for using arcanist Brand and most of these are BIG hits. It would probably feel more viable if all of these values were reduced a bit.

For the QOL it needs a solution to the delay of the first trigger and a higher attachment duration. It makes no sense to take all of these penalties if you end up having not time to dodge anyways.

A reduction to the time it takes to cast the brand itself and the cast time of the brand would open it up to builds that do not heavily invest into cast speed. Maybe give it increased Cast speed instead of reducing the base. This way the super cast speed builds profit less from even more cast speed but the No cast speed Builds get enabled.

Arcanist brand is either bugged or simply just doesn't work vs moving enemy because of where the spell 'spawns' when attached to a target. I could run in circles all day and never be able to hit a fast moving enemy with arcanist brand.

please see video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDQO_HiIyQU&ab_channel=flyingcow

Aside from that, to bring back arcanist brand outside of utility use, I think its damage penalties need to be reduced. Brand Recall would also work better / be a cool combination, if the brands actually targeted an enemy when recalled, instead of firing in random directions.

Been playing it again for fun. Does the penalty for using it have to be so harsh? I know it was never revised since inception but I also suppose there is a reason most people don't want to use it. Arcanist Brand feels like it was balanced to be on par with totems.

However there are more ways to scale maximum totems, which works effectively for both general mapping and single-target. With brands you can only effectively scale it for single target using Runebinder, and even then it is not really an option but rather is mandatory because without Runebinder brands do worse damage than self-casting.

Hence it sometimes feels like I just spend more passive points and used an additional skill gem slot to begin with a two-link skill at base that has the same damage potential as a spell gem on its own. I get that the upside is supposed to be that brands provide some level of safety through quality of life because you do damage while walking around but I still think the penalty imposed on the damage and other aspects are far too harsh to justify this benefit.

Trappers do more damage with skills that last longer and can stack on a target beyond an arbitrary limit. With some investment totems can actually be made tanky enough to last its entire natural duration, making them basically even longer lasting brands with a higher stacking limit and lower damage penalty.

I think it is perfectly safe to buff arcanist brand support by maybe 10% or even up to 20% by lowering the penalties it applies to the supported skills from an average of 40% to maybe 30% or 25% and the damage penalty from nearly 70% to closer to 50%. Even then it would be far from OP because of the base cast time override of 1 second, which is a massive 40% or greater cast speed penalty depending on the skill supported, and the inability to stack more than 2 brands on a single target.

Alternatively, can we get ways to invest in brand attachment limits on a single target? If generic power is a worry, this can be made brand specific. For example something like crusader-influenced helmets can roll +1 to maximum storm brands attached to enemies or +1 to maximum arcanist brands attached to enemies, etc.