Storm and Armageddon brand need revisited

Don’t get me wrong these gems are strong especially in the campaign.

However, there has been a lot of monster and other skill damage creep at the high end of the game and these brands have not kept up. If you look at ninja there are less than a dozen high level players using Armageddon brand and less than 50 using storm brand. Even despite the formers popularity in leveling builds.

There have been changes lately to increase caster power such as the archmage rework and the addition of more caster speed as a stat as well as more options for gaining action speed. But none of these affect brands. Strangely archmage which used to support brands now does not.

So what do I think can be done? Looking at the damage these skills typically do they could get a 3-4x increase in damage and still not perform near the current meta skills. So I think some suggestions could be:

* allow more brands attached, maybe scale this with gem level.
* re-enable archmage for brands
* change the gem behavior so more cast speed and action speed changes affect them.
* adjust the more and added damage stats on the gem

the problem these bands have has a name: Penance Brand (of Dissipation)

Penance brand has it all and most importantly - it is phys-converted skill, opening a vector of scaling Storm Brand doesnt have thus cannot compete

damage conversion is one of the few pinnacle design flops of POE that holds entire game by the balls. make penance brand pure lightning (like Storm Brand) and usage numbers will suddenly change. the mechanic of PB is still better than simple zap-zap of Storm Brand, but most of the INSANE scaling potential comes from it being converted damage benefiting from every-fu..-thing at every step

so maybe SB and AB are so-so - but in fact they are allright and the problem is they are eclipsed by their flashier and outright better in every way cousin