What We're Working On

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Kalm wrote:

Void Sphere Feedback

Thank you for offering a chance for the community to give some feedback. I think it is part of why so many of us keep coming back to you league after league. I’d like to take the chance to talk about Void Sphere.

The black hole archetype of skill is one that draws in many players. They find the very concept of it alluring - inescapable even. And who can blame them? These skills are often objectively very attractive; it is very hard to move away from these skills after trying them. But I digress, all this being said, it kind of sucks that a skill as amazing as Void Sphere has gone almost completely dark, and it has done this for two key reasons: the cooldown and the 1 sphere limit. While, in my opinion, the former is more warping to the function of the skill than the latter, it is the combination of these two that is crushing (last one, I promise) the life from this beautiful skill.

First, the cooldown. A 10 second cooldown is one of the longest, if not the longest, cooldowns for any non-Vaal skill in the game (and even then Vaal skills do not technically have cooldowns for the most part). It is longer than Warcries which have significant access to cooldown recovery speed, it is longer than guard skills even after considering the cooldown does not begin until after the skill effect has ended. In a game like Path of Exile, 10 seconds is a very, very long time. The way PoE is designed at the moment is antithetical to the whole idea of cooldowns longer than a couple of seconds; in a game where you are rewarded more the more content you can clear in a given amount of time, cooldowns become exponentially more punishing the longer that cooldown lasts. A 5 second cooldown, for example, feels a whole lot worse than a 3 second cooldown in PoE, despite the difference of only 2 seconds. In the matter of 10 seconds, however, most people will have killed a pack, moved on to the next pack, killed that pack, and be well on their way to a third or fourth pack all while they wait for Void Sphere to recover from being used on that first pack.

The second restriction to this skill, the 1-sphere limit, just seems to be piling on. Ignoring the fact one would have to invest in both skill duration and cooldown recovery speed for there to be more than a superficial interaction between having two Void Spheres active at a time, there is little to no reason to have a 10 second cooldown and a 1-sphere limit on any skill. Either one of these is enough to prevent what I think you are trying to do, while having both confines the skill in a way that prevents it being used in a meaningful way in Path of Exile. The cooldown prevents it from being used as either a main skill or a support skill, both for the same reason - it cannot be used reliably when needed. The 1-sphere limit limits any niche builds which might emerge if a player were to work around the cooldown.

This puts Void Sphere in a place where no skill wants to be: uncompetitive in any niche. It is not competitive with any clear skill, as it cannot be used on command. It is not competitive as a support skill doing such jobs as slowing, curse on hit, elemental equilibrium, elemental overload as the cooldown is often longer than the effects themselves. It is inefficient (and ineffective) at corpse destruction compared to the myriad other tools available. The damage is too low to be a “DPS steroid”.

The solution? People have suggested this and that, from shortening or removing the cooldown, to consuming power charges to bypass the cooldown (my favorite option as it synergises well with the ascendency most thematically connected to the skill - Occultist), to allowing more than one sphere, to giving the ability innate cooldown reduction as it levels and/or baseline charges. However, clearly something needs to change with this skill. Otherwise, it will just leave people mystified as to the nature of its very existence.