[Feedback] in-depth review of the Witch

Tldr. Version; I like to hear myself talk blabla... give us Tor Gul as Temporary Minion and add a physical damage spell that makes use of bonestorms impale mechanic

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So I have spent some proper time in this league and I really enjoy the game now and think I can safely promise that I will be spending a looot of time playing in the future. So gg, keep at it guys, I for one believe in "the vision" and hope you guys make it work.

Anyways, I've been playing mainly Witch so far and have dipped my toe into Sorc and Huntress as well. I love crafting builds more than anything and have been positively surprised by the infusion mechanic and general spell combos possible in elemental builds. I really wish the gameplay experience would be similar for a Physical or Chaos spellcaster, but I am hopeful that future updates will get them there.

Till then, here are my personal opinions on what I like, dislike and what I personally would demand to be changed if I had any of your designers at gunpoint;


The Witch Class

First of all, awesome thematic all around the class, absolutely LOVE it. Thematically and optical this is a straight 9/10 for me, with the potential for more and easily the coolest class by far.
Here's my main problem though, osteomancy, minions and chaos spells all exist apart from each other, there is an effort to give them synergy but the interplay becomes irrelevant very early on in the campaign. Compared to the sorceress which has a fun interactive gameplay, the witch feels lackluster in comparison.

Osteomancy has 3 whole spells, 1 of which is really a minion skill, that also tries to be a chaos skill and then there is Detonate Dead as a fourth phys-dmg spell, which is such an awesome spell it even gets its very own spirit gem. Now that Unearth targets skeleton corpses as well I should try a Sacrifice - Detonate Dead - Unearth build, but I bet it's far from optimal. Anyways, what I am getting at is that Osteomancy really lacks a purpose. It seems to be there because it’s cool, but there is not much substance to it beyond that.
The mechanics available to osteomancy are impale and pin, I personally am really missing bleed/ incision and cull here, especially since impale is worthless to a spellcaster, but I like the idea of it.
But, worst of all, Osteomancy has no amazing ascendaries synergy and you are pretty much forced to go Lich if you want to use them. After all the bone spells have innate 15% crit chance so you don't wanna go crit blood mage, even though it feels like that should be their ascendancy. The good phys. damage boosting support gems lock you out of dealing anything but physical damage so you lose out on the “gain extra damage” abilities from infernalist and lich. So now you gotta pick between Demon Form Infernalist or Abyssal Lich and both are cool but I'd not call this set-up optimal and it certainly feels bad to be forced into these roles.
Me personally, I’d get rid of Blood Mages being able to bleed via all damage types and the global 15% crit chance nodes (Blood Barbs and Sunder the Flesh), as these nodes really just say “You want to play sorceress, not witch” and makes the witch a better elementalist than the sorceress. The blood mage should be a damage-ailment focused ascendancy for the WITCH (physical and chaos spells) imo., not a superior Sorceress (elemental spell) ascendancy.
Here are some personal opinions what I’d prefer as a thematically fitting alternatives;
Abilities that inflict damaging ailments cannot crit but gain Crit Damage /or just/ X amount increased Magnitude instead (ailment based minion hybrid build enabler)
Crits always inflict bleed (ailment build for witch, lets goooo)
Increase the Bleed Limit by 1 (bleed build for witch, lets gooo)
Deal X more Damage against bleeding enemies (boring but works for me)
Bleeding Enemies killed have a chance to explode (yes this is herald of blood for mages, I’d like it, make it a passive ability with support gem capability)
All damage gets converted to either physical or chaos damage (i can't decide which to pick) and inflicts poison (Lets call it Venomous Blood and enable a chaos / osteomancy ailment build)
Gain more stun threshold from life (Something to make us flinch/ light stun less, call it Pain Immunity, it’d be boring but very useful)



Minion skills do not even count as spells, which is weird and to have them be viable need to be speced into all the way or not at all. Besides the fact that running a proper army already takes up more than half our skill slots and our entire spirit resource, we then also can't even effectively cast any spells so by default minions are designed to have zero synergy outside of pure minion builds. Which imo. seems like a bad design choice.
Sure, we get command abilities instead, but they aren't that great (i don't mean it, i love you poison arrow never leave me!) and half of them feel like they should either be better, or just be auto casted by the minions. Really, only poison arrow feels like it has a right to exist and everything else is just frustrating and not fun to use. Clerics can cast their revives on their own, why can't Storm Skeletons auto lightning strike the dead skellies? Why does it take me forever to have them do it and why do I always get light stunned out of the animation? ALWAYS!!!

Chaos seems by far the best thought out of these 3, but is very boring to use as the whole gameplan comes down to spamming the same 2 abilities all day every day. That is just my personal opinion obviously and others seem to love the playstyle, I don’t. Also how come there is not a single poison skill in here? What the hey hey???

The ascendancy classes are more or less fine and I already ranted about blood mage, so let's do that some more just for the other classes;
Why does the Infernalist also want to be a sorceress, just with a cool demon appearance? Unless you give her a puppy that is, then the demonologist suddenly becomes a necromancer, which again, kinda weird but I dig it.
Personally, I'd love for the infernalist to somehow get a boon for making better use of the infernal legion minion support gem, having an entire army of burning skellies would be so cool and mesh so nicely with the hellhound. Just some adjustment to some Ascendary node to give minions more fire resist or make it worth more speccing into fire res for them.
As for Lich, it’s awesome. 10/10 coolest ascendancy in the game for me. Let’s talk about the Abyssal Lich for a second instead, because while I wanna love it as well, it does have an issue.
Why do I have to lose spirit and skill slots on skeletons for a pretty okayish stat boost but lose all the command abilities in the progress? I feel like I should now get a “me”-variation of the command abilities, like personalized Ice armor, war cry, enrage etc. That’d be cool. Also making the minion damage node now affect me as generic Spell Damage nodes would be neat.
Also, while I love the idea with the offerings, its not worth the ascendancy slot as a) bosses rarely have ads, so no offerings there and b) at that point in the game all the ads get oneshot anyways so there is nothing to cull. C) even if there is, it’s a waste of time to press the button instead of doing anything else.
More on offerings further down the line, for now lets offer an alternative (badum-tsch). While the aforementioned command-skill variation would probably be a good alternative and contender for its own node, we have options.
First, why not add a skill called Bone Spike instead that deals good single target damage, culls and on death creates the socketed Offering. Yes this is the same as what I am trying to get rid off, but at least now the ability would have a use outside of just culling enemies. It would be a cool, if bad, damage spell instead. One that could come with enough damage to actually perform its job against the few boss ads that exist.
Another option would be making power charges have no time limit.
Or creating temporary minions raises a specific abyss monster instead (different monster wether we raise a bone construct, a zombie or summon ragin spirits)
Just to name a few examples of what I think would be better alternatives.


But enough complaining and listing all the bad things I can think off, lets get to the part I personally enjoy the most, talking to much about my own opinions and ideas (I know sarcasm conveys badly via writing, but please don't take me serious on this).


Osteomancy; bad synergy with all other skills

-Unearth; First of all, why does this raise minions? Right now this is just an act 1 ability that gets dropped as fast as possible. This could have been spearfield, it would have been awesome as spearfield. Instead it is a horrible damage spell that creates horrible minions that only exist to spread a kinda awesome DoT. Also the targeting on this ability sucks, give it a nice spread like the one spearfield has, PLEASE. And before any other change, please give Unearth “cull”. It would instantly make this ability 300% more useable and give it a purpose instead of being a cheesy early campaign spell. Also it’d fit the thematic perfectly, I don’t know why I think that to be true, but it sure as heck would.
Additionally, I'd have loved for the "raise temporary minions" aspect of the skill to either be a support gem for curses and like that to even be usable with the blasphemy spirit gem, or to be innately a part of the Withering Presence spirit gem.
Unearth should instead just have a chance to dig up corpses with the amount being dependent on its AoE-size. Also make it have knockback because why not.
This would give Osteomancy a way to spawn the tools to make use of Detonate Dead and Profane Ritual in boss-fights and create more synergies for Bone Storm, also having a corpse spawner would help the Raise Zombie spell.

-Bone Cage; My second favourite skill in the game, have been using it most of the season, I just friking hate that it has this stupid hole in the middle of it that makes it super unreliable to use for mapping. As of now, bone cage is just a worse ice nova imo and I’d actually prefer this just be a Wall/ barricade that we would create in front of our character, to be potentially turned into its current cage version via the fortress support gem? It's not like we ever have the necessary stun threshold to actually use it when surrounded anyways.
Have it be a physical barrier enemies need to run around or destroy, that deals damage when spawning on top of enemies and/or in an AoE when destroyed. While you’re at it, give it a proper duration value as well and thus make it a good pick in all kinds of builds.
Alternatively, be lazy and just double down on it being non-elemental frost nova and just get rid of the empty space. Give the skill a reason to want a bigger AoE and just straight up raise a field of bonespikes instead of a hollow ring.


Also I'd love if the synergy with the Bone Shatter support gem would be better. Right now you wanna use that gem after pinning with bone cage, but there is not really a good tool in the witch spell-list to actually trigger it. Would be fine if Unearth was better or simply had cull, but I could also see making bone shatter work only for skills that apply pin, instead of how it works atm.

-Bone Storm; By far my favourite skill in the game, it's so much stronger now that we can put "chance to create 2 extra projectiles" on a staff and get it to a reliable 100%, makes the spell actually endgame viable. Overall this skill is and looks awesome, but it has an identity crisis. It causes impale and wants to make use of power charges, but it's also mostly a spell used vs big bosses that falls off hard vs smaller ones. So it’s kind of a boss killer, but only sometimes.
To double down on that, against bosses you usually lack corpses, so no power charges, and after act 3 you really want to get rid of minions in the build to enhance your damage, so impale being on there becomes meaningless. As a standalone change I'd suggest maybe replacing impale with incision, which still seems less than optimal. Unless there’d be an actual way to make minions + bonestorm usable in the endgame, which I would love, but if any of my other “visions” were to be in the game, I’d think the current bonestorm iteration would be fine as it is.

- Vulnerable Curse; I’ll just put this here since osteomancy spells are the ones supposed to benefit from the worst curse in the game. Why is vulnerable the worst? Because breaking armor is so ridiculously easy in this game that it’s completely worthless to ignore a few points of armor for the singular button press it takes to break it completely. Why can’t vulnerable be more like elemental weakness or a physical-exposed affliction instead? Or better yet, let’s rephrase properly; add “if armor broken while vulnerable, increase the broken armor effectiveness by X,” to the vulnerable curse. Now that would be an actually viable spell and a good one at that.


To end this section I would like to say that I desperately would love just 1 more bone spell. Something big and flashy like;
Eviscerate; remove all “impale” on a target to have a singular giant bone stake explode out from within an enemy, maiming them and leaving them impaled with it for ~10 seconds. Base damage of the spell should be very low but scaled via the total amount of Impale stacks on the target, as should be the visual size of the bone stake. Also, the stake can be detonated in an AoE that causes bleed. Double down on that mechanic by turning killed enemies into an offering without effect, but which can still be detonated.
Alternatively I could also see this theoretical skill working similar to Living Bomb, but I’d like for there to be an actual interaction with Bone Storm.

Minions; No synergy outside of pure minion builds

- Command Skills; So I already said this, but only poison arrows are fun to use imo. The ice armor + warcry combo is also neat, I guess, but overall what happens when you try and run a skeleton army (that actually uses command abilities and doesn't play itself), is that you just try to maximize button presses and it doesn’t feel like proper tactical decisions are being made. It’s just slamming your face onto the keyboard really, which feels really bad. Also the combos possible here are super limited and feel forced.
Also wthell are storm mages and reavers doing? Storm mages take 2 seconds to cast their suboptimal spell that rarely ever hits anything and reavers commit suicide. Like… why? And don’t get me started on skeleton warriors. Like yeah, they are free and act as offering targets… that’s it. You can also blow em up with arsonists or sacrifice + detonate dead, but why do they not have a command ability??? Allow them to taunt weak enemies please, give them a right to exist and make minions feel better at the same time.

So overall, maybe let's do this;
Give Skeleton Warriors a taunt (maybe make it auto-use like clerics)
Empower Skeletal Reavers as is without the life loss, but make them lose rage after not attacking as normal.
Why can’t Skeletal Frost Mages give ice armor to us as well? Make us be affected by it as well and simply make it so that ice armor disappears if the frost mage casting it dies.
Give Skeletal Storm Mages a shorter cast time and please highlight the skeleton corpses.
Don’t make Skeletal Arsonists able to blow up temporary minions please, it just feels wrong and makes it very hard to see the preferred skeleton warrior targets when you have a horde of explodeable temp minions running around. Or let them blow up my temp minions, sure, but spread the bone constructs contagion when doing so, just for additional skill synergy.
Why don’t Skeletal Clerics get an ability? Everyone else has one, let these boys be the martyrs they deserve to be. Either give them an active that makes the next Offering cast target them while gaining a boost, or let them sacrifice themselves to give an AoE buff to all nearby minions. Something like one big heal burst, invincibility aura or just… something to actually hand us a tool/ trump card against big boss moves..
I am not forgetting the Skeletal Brutes or Skeletal Snipers btw. it's just that these boys are bestboys and I really like them as they are.
Anyways, don’t give multiple command casts based on the amount of individual minions, but just have all command casts be used on one button press. Bringing more of the same skellie should provide an additively escalating profit, like just… +X seconds longer ice armor duration for each additional frost skellie beyond the one, multiple poison arrows landing at once instead of one and creating an innately bigger poison cloud, the entire frontline blowing up because of arsonists being down to party (higher necessary life threshold and +1 model per active arsonist maybe?).
Stuff like that. Just don’t make me mash the same button 5 times, that’s not fun, give me 5 buttons to mash in different circumstances and rotations.
Or alternative, as said before, make half of these command abilities (reavers, storm skellies, ice skellies and arsonists) to activate on their own, like the cleric revive does. Reavers could just enrage after dmg beyond 50% hp, storm skellies cast after 4+ minions have died, ice skellies should cast their ice armor every 10+ seconds around themselves, reduced by like 2 seconds for each additional ice skellie and why do arsonists need to be told to blow up the low life skellies? What am I paying those guys my spirit for if they can’t even work properly??? It’s not like I can ever see the red blimp on-top of my skellies anyways, not with the visual clarity that is going on in the endgame. Have arsonists be bros for once.
We already have enough buttons to press as is, summoning totems, activating curses and potentially casting Unearth or Ember Fussilade as well. There should be a balance for minion builds somewhere in between 0 buttons pressed and 12 button presses per second.

-Offerings; These things are cool, but they suck. Being unable to position my minions properly means these usually get created right in front of a boss and die immediately. Also, why do they have a life bar and a timer? Seems kinda unnecessarily punishing to me, especially since they have a range limit as well and don’t survive longer than 2 seconds in the instance where we’d want to use them anyways. Though as mentioned, I really really love the Abyssal Lich Ascendancy node that makes Offerings a cull skill. I think I’d enjoy that variation of offerings a lot more than the current iteration, maybe just make Offerings do both, cull enemies for half the effect (for minions obv.) as well as target our own minions for the full effect.
I love Soul Offering, but the investment to put that into a build is unreasonable and it's original purpose seems to be to strenghten hybrid builds. Well , I'd love if I could cast Unearth and Bone Cage through/ from a Soul Offerings position. Maybe make it a Support Gem that generally allows spells to trigger from an Offerings position (aka. Frostbolt and Ice Nova interaction).

- Temporary Minions; So I spoke about it in the Unearth section and I’ll talk more about it here, while trying not to repeat myself.
First, why can’t Cast on Minion Death trigger Raise Zombie or Unearth??? It really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, every other trigger skill can, except for this one and it just feels very unnecessarily limiting.
Temp Minions are by far the worst of the Witches' skills and need some love, SRS isn’t even a witch spell which is also weird. Raise Zombie is completely unusable as is and why did you kill trigger activated SRS in league 1? That was fun! Bring it back please.
On the topic of Summon Ragin Spirits, I admit, using it with Ember Fussilade is way cooler than via Flame Wall, but could you PLEASE raise the minimum summon limit per spell cast to 3? The current quality enhancement is really bad, 1 more SRS is worthless, but reaching the 10 (12 with the passive node, 13 with +1 to limit) summon cap quicker would be HUGE. One of the main reasons I drop SRS at the end of act 3 is because 5-6 casts of ember fusillade is just too much to be worth it, if 3 casts would be all to get to 9/ 4 casts for 12 SRS then this would just be waaay better and not as disruptive to include in more builds.



-Passive Tree; Would you guys be so kind as to replace the Temporary Minion cluster with the Gigantic Minion one? Would be nice for Bonestorm builds trying to include Temporary minions. Also, could you please just generally add more “increase Minion and Spell Damage” nodes. Sorceress gets this exact treatment aplenty, with lots of generic “elemental damage” nodes in the skill tree. This is direly needed for build diversity imo. and I could also see adding the counterpart to Sorceress generic elemental nodes in the form of "Non-Elemental Damage"-Nodes.
Blackflame Covenant is awesome btw., now make a Node to turn Cold into physical damage, call it Crimson Ice or Frozen Blood or smth.
On that note, there is not a lot to be done to give Minions more synergy outside of pure minion builds, not with how their damage and survivability is singularly tied into their Skill Level. The best way I see is to be drastic and make all the skeleton-skills have the spell keyword, but without having spell-damage modifiers apply to minions. This is what is needed to enable minion hybrid builds to exist and I am sure this won’t break the balancing.
Also I'd really like new spell support gems that just straight up said smth. like "gain X more damage per X amount of spirit reserved by reviving minions” or "gain X more damage for each different type of reviving minion in your presence". Wouldn't even matter if you gave it the downside of making the skill unable to crit. Maybe go even harder and make a gem that would have an ordinary spell just scale from minion modifiers entirely. I dunno, just give us some way to play a minion - spellcaster hybrid build, please.

To end this section, here as well I am missing just one more awesome ability and I know exactly what I’d want. Remember Tor Gul the Defiler and our Witch voiceline after beating him? Well I do, ever since I first heard her say “One day I will bring you back to serve me” I wanted the ability to do just that. Tor Gul is easily my fav boss design in the game and I would love an active ability to destroy all reviving minions to summon a temporary and stationary mini-tor gul super minion. It would just attack stuff around itself, have a strict max 1 limit and a command ability to either blow itself up in a huge explosion or do one of Tor Guls awesome moves. I’m thinking of either the Fireball Barrage, Fire Breath or Head Slam move.


Chaos; This is pretty much just well designed overall

As said, chaos spells seem overall solid, I just wish there was a poison spell in there. My only complaint overall is with Profane Ritual. There is no reason to level this skill up beyond lvl 7 and it’s only reason to exist is for power charges, which seems boring. On that note, is there a reason why Charges have a time limit nowadays? It’s not like they give buffs like they did in poe1, so maybe let me just enter a boss room with max charges and have me make use of Raise Zombie, Bonestorm or the Lich Ascendary Passive to actually use this mechanic. At least then I don’t feel bad about the wasted skill slot when I don’t feel like casting Profane Ritual after every spell cast during mapping.

Now outside of complaints though, I see Chaos as the big synergy provider to create interactivity with both the Minion and the Osteomancy spells. Sadly, I have to admit that a chaos witch is the one I have spend the least time playing, so I only have two ideas as of now;
Is there a reason why Contagion can not be transmitted to our own minions? The Unearth interaction is cool, but why limit it? Give it the innate ability to spread to minions or give it a support gem to make that possible. This would also make us actually care about minion resistances (in this case chaos resistance) and give Chaos Witches a reason to want to bring skellies along.
Then next, why can’t Profane Ritual give us a “gain X chaos damage to spells and attacks” while standing on top of it, to make it worthwhile to level the gem and provide more synergy to be used with Osteomancy and minions, also why not enable Hexblast to also work on Profane Rituals?.


-Weapon Skills;
The four Witch specific wand/ staff skills I can name are Power Siphon, Reap, Skeleton Warrior and Bone Blast. I already gave feedback on Skeleton Warrior, but would love a Staff with the ability as well to create another osteomancy + minion build synergy.
I personally feel like Reap should be an attack as well as a spell, we are actively swinging our staff here and I’d really like to get access to those attack support gems.
Power Siphon is awesome and perfect just the way it is.
Bone Blast is weird, but I like it. No clue what to add here.



If you read till here then I am sorry for you and thanks I guess. Feel free to leave feedback or add ideas.