Exploit Weakness + Pile on Help

I am not sure where else to put this but I need help... I see titan builds with exploit weakness on hammer of the gods and pile on in their passive tree. exploit weakness consumes the broken armor when used correct? So you get the 50% damage boost but the enemy gets their armor back before the damage hits right? Where I am confused is if you consume the broken armor when you use hammer of the gods does that mean the pile on passive no longer applies? So you should not use exploit weakness with pile on?

That is an excellent question. Since HotG does not natively have a payoff condition and would only have it with Exploit weakness consumes Fully Broken Armour to deal 50% MORE damage and Pile on does not Consume the fully broken armour for the INCREASED.

Exploit Weakness being a support gem removed the armour at time of initiating the skill, so if the monster does not have fully broken armour when the hammer lands, now I am questioning if either of them work together at all.

I suspect your intuition is correct, and they do not work together.

I tried testing it in PoB but it did not clear up the question as the 'is armour broken' is a flagged condition.

I fear that the armour gets consumed when the skill starts, and unless you can re-break the armour in the 2 seconds or so until the hammer falls that it will not apply at all.

I do imagine this was meant to work the way we want it to, but I bet you are correct and it does not work at all, and is a wasted point.

My suspicion after trying to test in it in PoB and failing is that Pile On and Exploit weakness will not work together. I also have a inkling that Exploit Weakness will not work with skills that have time delays between initiation and when it actually hits, but I could be wrong.

I will try and do some testing on my end as well! I could not find an answer anywhere and I noticed youtubers and other content creators also had both active so I thought maybe I was wrong. I will test and see what I can find! Thank you for responding!