Chayula's Gift Ascendancy Node, What Is It Good For?

Absolutely nothing.

My first impression of Darkness has been a struggle bus, but I enjoy the challenge, I enjoy the flavor, and I think it has potential as a defensive layer. I thought OKAY, 6 out of my 8 ascendancy points have to go into this for it to scale into the end game, that's a lot and I'm already giving up a lot, but whatever lets try it. Here is the thought process I had when digesting this ascendancy tree: With deepening shadows I get 1% increased Darkness per 1% chaos res, sweet, if I want to invest even more into that, I can spend 2 more points and get Chayula's gift, that will increase my Max chaos res so I take less damage from chaos and also double my (uncapped) chaos res, with of which I have 198%, to increase my darkness. I invest the 6 points, check my darkness... wait a second... my darkness hardly went up at all. 1658<1743??? Wow... less than a 100 points... it only tracks off my max chaos resist?.. So I spend 25% of my ascendency points to get +10% max to my chaos res and... another 10% increased darkness node? and a discount on chaos res? That is... very bad. I cannot select that.

Lets flesh this out. For 2 ascendancy points I would not select +10% max chaos res and 10% increased darkness. And doubling my chaos res? I have capped chaos res off of two items. If tracking uncapped chaos res is not the intent, that is an extremely useless line of text. I'm hoping darkness scaling with uncapped chaos resistance is the intent and this is a bug, but if it is not, I continue...

In this game you can scale energy shield to high tens of thousands, sorcery ward, so on so forth.. The absolute cap for Darkness is 2508. Crazy thing about that those other things is you don't have to give up all spirit skills and 6 ascendancy points. So why would anyone ever give up all that for darkness? They wouldn't. And very few people are playing it.

So before this game enters full release, let's get some people to play darkness. I think the pieces are here for this to be good they just need to be tweaked.
My suggestions:
1. Chayula's gift should be gifted to deepening shadows and deepening shadows should scale off uncapped chaos resistance. This gives a ton of scalability into end game.
2. Embrace the darkness should convert all spirit to darkness instead. This just makes sense and provides further scalability into end game. Scalable base number + scalable % increase = good POE design.
3. Replacement for chayula's gift. Infinite Void: While you have un-reserved Darkness, you cannot be stunned. OR X% of darkness also applies to stun threshold. Something like that might be cool. And it should FEEL strong.
All of these should FEEL strong and be strong. We're giving up every spirit skill in the game to run this thing.

When sorcery ward exists, I don't see any reason why we can't scale darkness and have it be stronger than sorcery ward, especially when we are giving up so much for it.

Also would be pretty dope if these changes were made when shadow is released. That's hopefully the unknown about why darkness feels so bad, maybe we're waiting for stuff to be added to the game still.

Anyway, thanks for reading
Dolce out.

I use darkness doing the campaign and swap on maps when i get better gears.

I was hoping to keep using it actualy but the loss of spirit is really tweaking the build by a lot.
I wouldnt mind if it was higher but as you said you get 2k+ hardly.

Now it work amazing and when i was using it i was hardly ever seeing my ES starting to deplete. That is since they fixed all the bugs that were related to it.

It's hard to compare with sorcery ward, never used it and i dont know the mechanism, darkness get back to full very fast between hits and that's what make it good imo. If sorcery ward doesnt work that way it would make sens they have more but idk.
They loose 30% EV/AR i think for sorcery ward. Guess i would rather loose EV/ES too instead of my spirit.

Another grip i have is that the whole ascendency is based on chaos damage but most nodes are "gain as" and that doesnt work on DoT. So poison and chaos spells.
The only way i guess is to use uniques that convert elemental damage to fully benefit of it. I would expect ascendancy points working without the need of uniques.

Dodge roll effect work only with a martial weapon, leesh work only on physical damage, volatility doesnt work on DoT. I use chaos spell on this one and i basicly feel like i use my points for decoration other than the chaos res.

Flame of Chayula arent worded with "gain as" but it doesnt affect my DoT either in the tooltip for essence drain, only the first hit.
It does affect my poison damage on my other build tough so idk if it's a bug. I keep it because i still benefit of it in many ways on that build and it's a very nice 4 points investement overall.

Hard to even know what is correct or not, the tooltip arent always working properly.

I'm not too sure what is the solution for Chayula. Maybe make DoT work for thoose nodes to start or introduce skills that have chaos damage that would not be DoT.
If i use elemental damage i kinda keep thinking Invoker is just better. They're suppose to be opposite or something, idk =)

I'm hoping for another rework on that ascendancy as a whole, we'll see i guess.

As someone who like to invest in defense i would defenitly give up ascendancy point for a stronger darkness. Atm it's just not worth it for end game even if it got much better already.