Fire Nova Mine

FNM (and mines in general) should work off trigger gems.

grateful for the changes but it still needs more.

Two mine bugs, and (quite a lot of)feedback on Fire Nova Mine and mines.

BUG 1: When mines are placed on top of each other in a stack you must press the detonate button multiple times for them all to activate. All placed mines should detonate when you press the button once. What's interesting is after one mine has detonated, the one that didn't goes away. There is some kind of overlap problem when you stack them on top of each other. The game ignores some. Unless you spam the detonate button before the first mine wave has gone off.

You can see the separately timed mine detonation from the fire nova when you spam the detonate button.

BUG 2: Sometimes mines placed separately from each other (not on top of each other) fail to detonate when the detonate mine button is pressed. This occurs when moving and placing mines and quickly detonating them.


Both BUGS (problems really, but it's such a major problem I will call them bugs) stem from the arming time of the mines. Why this exists, I don't know. It's EXTREMELY frustrating to use mines.

Placed mines should IMMEDIATELY be able to be detonated. There is no need for such a delay. It makes me want to punch a wall. When the mechanic of a skill is this frustrating, something is wrong.

It also makes it extremely dangerous of a play style in hardcore.

Mines already have balance, you have to run into melee range to place them around targets! And *then* cast your detonate. That's the point of risk and reward already in the mine mechanics. The arming delay? Seriously? After I've run up to a pack of mobs or a boss, having no effective way but life pots to sustain my life, and then look like an idiot having the character stuttering around as I desperately try to make that mine detonate?

Why?

Melee can run up to mobs and instantly damage them (while LGOH spin to win cyclone gaining life.) Archers can sit back and pew pew pew. Casters can drop fireballs from the sky and deploy totems, in almost no danger. Mine users? Yeah, fuck mine users!

Fire Nova Mine doesn't even have crazy high damage. It's already a risk/reward play style. A different way of getting the job done. Mines must be heavily invested into, to get anything from them, which is fine. Personally I relish in skills like this. They are rewarding to play, for the small number of people who enjoy a challenge. Running up to things, deploying mines, then blowing them up while trying to not get fucked up by the big bad. It's very unique.

PLEASE, remove the arming time delay. It's unnecessary and highly aggravating. It makes mines feel broken.

This is a fast paced ARPG, not a cloak 'n daggers stealth single player strategy rpg from a first person perspective. There is no tactical mine deployment then careful detonation on lured in enemies, that does not work in PoE.

Mines must reward the player willing to run up to a pack of death mobs, kiting them at melee range while dropping mines then detonating them. To do that requires fluidity, which the mine arming time does not allow.

Currently every time I'm fighting a group of scary things, I have to wonder, "will my mines detonate right now when I need them to, or will my character stutter in place on screen almost getting me killed while my mines aren't detonating" This feels like an eternity, when PoE is balanced around log out mechanics.

In particular as in example, the boss fight in the Kaoms area is very challenging as a mine user when the summon raging spirits start flooding the screen, and a mine user it trying to kite the boss and the SRS while trying to drop mines and detonate them, while stuttering around the screen because the mine has not activated yet.

Mines don't life leech. So some boss fights, like the kaom one. Are particularly challenging. Only flasks keep my life up. It's a very busy and scary fight.

For Fire Nova Mine, I like where the damage is at right now and the rate for each nova going off.

Fix the arming of mines, before we look at damage buffs. Crits are strong with this skill.

Mines by their nature of the idea and mechanics are a high risk-high reward thing, but there is no need to cripple the use of mines to this degree to where a mine user is frustrated to use them.

One other thing, about FNM, while increased fire damage is nice, maybe there are better quality bonuses to consider.?????

ALSO: I feel the damage effectiveness of this skill is appropriate and it gives FNM a pure feel, of a fire mine thing. I would lose interest in this skill if you gave it lots of damage effectiveness and made it another generic "buff with added ABC shit".

If I wanted a skill where you just throw up all the Heralds and toss in added ele shit damage gems, I'd play something else. I'm enjoying this "purity". Hell, you could make it have 0% damage effectiveness and it would be excellent the way I'm using it. If you take the cheap way out to continue working on this skill gem, by just giving it lots of damage effectiveness, I'll be sad and immediately shelf this character and roll another more interesting challenge skill build.

Thank-you for your considerations.

Some feedback from using Fire Nova:

a) Without any kind of mine placement speed reductions and Trap & Mine Damage support gem linked, the mine is basically unusable, it just takes so much time to place it.
Base placement speed should really be increased, substantially.

b) Aside from the Tremour Rod there aren't any uniques which would solve the problem of extremely low mine placement speed. So it is either heavily investing in mine nodes, using Tremour Rod, or the mine is unusable. Almost no characters can use this mine efficiently as an additional source of damage, only if they specifically create a mine-focused build.

c) To improve gameplay, mines could have an automatic delayed detonation time implemented, which would remove the necessity to detonate them each time manually.
Delay time could be configured in the game options menu.
This could make mines more attractive for players, since currently no one uses them.

Mine placement speed is not a problem since you can just build this up using jewel slots. Placement speed has never been a problem for my builds. Auto detonation is done with spell totem + detonate mines.
This brings up a different issue of prep-time. Something that just about every skill doesn't suffer from.

For me the sweet spot was getting all the +1 additional mine nodes and stacking just the right amount of mine placement jewels so that as soon as I reached the max amount of mines out at once the first one was finished. This means I could just spam mines in a single place and actually pump out a lot of damage.

The problem I found is that this leaves you completely and utterly vulnerable and the solutions to this required a lot of prep time and still are not entirely viable. Tremor Rod really seems like a massive waste and a poorly designed unique with sacrificing 30% damage. Sure it gives double detonation but it still leaves the serious issue of once you reach your placement cap you must wait for the mines to completely finish pulsing otherwise you overwrite them and loose massive amounts of damage. This also means you have a periods of time where you are doing NO damage.

Perfectly balancing placement speed to match the placement cap was by far the most successful attempt but still the gem is lacking. The way it feels now is that the best way to go is crit but with only 5% base crit the skill just will always be behind everything else.

In its current state it just requires to many gimmicks to make it to a subpar level.

I'd really like to see this skill buffed. Mines are awkward to use mechanically, and as a result should do more damage. You have to run through packs to place them and then detonating makes you stop in your tracks again to set them off. A huge defensive cost which should be offset by some offensive advantage.

To make a mine build work, several different passives seem necessary:

1. Clever construction wheel near shadow (otherwise mines are totally unreliable)

2. Increased AOE near witch and templar (base AOE is tiny and mobs run out of it)

3. increased crit chance to take advantage of the base crit (damage effectiveness is low, hard to scale damage otherwise)

4. Faster mine laying and ideally instant detonation to make them more usable.

Given the practical limits of a passive tree while still getting enough defenses, one would be lucky to get 3/4 of these, and more realistically ends up with 2/4.

Meanwhile, I can go Fire Trap and skip #4 and have an objectively better character in basically all relevant ways. (Or, I can play Incinerate and not have to worry about any of this and just deal ridiculous damage while dumping points in defense)

Mines are such a cool mechanic I'd love to be able to make a character around them without feeling like I've hobbled myself from the start. :/

Hi,
in hope someone still followes these posts:

1. Bug: If I use one of the common keybindings for my skills as the Mine Trigger, Volatile Mines does not work. I have to use the inbuild Trigger keybinding.

2. Suggestion: Currently min/maxing my fnm-Build because it turned out to be way better than expected but here is one big issue with it: http://imgur.com/l0VUeXe.

5L (Fire Penetration, Trap and Mine Damage, Controlled Destruction, Inc AoE)
6L (Same with Empower)

As you can see from my calculations, FNM has a ridiculous manacost. Other spells do not have that high manacosts but can make use of mana leech or other mana regaining sources (Especially surgeon flasks).
So currently I am forced to run clarity and a mana potion with 50% unreserved mana to be able to stack
3-4 mines.

In my oppinion 24 base mana at lvl 20 (=79 mana in a 5l = same base mana cost as fire trap) could be sustainable but I think mines need another creative touch, maybe in the new expansion :).

tyvm for reading.

Did you guys change something with mines? I have noticed with Fire Nova Mine that if I have one detonating and actively casting and something "hits" the FNM it basically stops detonating. I tested mines in the last expansion and was clearing maps with them with no problems and never noticed this issue. So either I was really lucky clearing maps and leveling a trap/miner to around lvl 80 or something changed. If this was something that changed I would like some confirmation so I can pretty much scrap this miner I am making for Saboteur ascendancy class. With the prep and double casting required for mines in general this is just atrocious.

I really like this skill specially with the addition of the minefield support gem.The only problem is that using 9+ mines at a time freezes my screen and I have a pretty good pc.Can you please tone the effect down a bit or provide a different skin in the shop that solves this.

What's the base Radius on Fire Nova Mine?