Discharge

This spell really needs to have a cooldown or otherwise not work with CoC...

I reckon that Discharge is in serious need of a rework or some sort of change to the way that it functions.
As it currently stands, Discharge still feels like a skill that needs to be run in a CoC, Mjolner or Cospri's build to even have a hope of being usable, let alone viable or competitive with top to mid tier skills. However, it's clear that the constant use of discharge in these trigger builds was not intended, and that it's something that GGG has tried to rectify with the nerfs targeting the damage when triggered for discharge.

Despite these observations, I'm currently trying to run a Self Cast Discharge build, namely a Juggernaut build focused on endurance charge stacking similar to what was briefly popular in patch 2.5 or so.
As of this post, I've reached level 57, and started using discharge as my main skill at level 51 or 52 (can't remember) and getting the cruel ascendancy (Unrelenting), and I can safely say that, at least for where I am right now, discharge is just simply a bad skill when self cast.
Currently, at maximum endurance charges, 9, in a five link setup with Conc. Effect, Controlled Destruction, Elemental Focus and Fire Penetration in a Realm Ender (effective gem level of 17), my average damage per discharge is sitting at 18,000.
Now, while the single-hit damage may be greater than most skills at that point in the game, in practice the damage is severely lackluster. Against packs it's acceptable, at least if you can kill them in one hit, as warlord's mark gives a decent chance of at least getting some charges back (very rarely do I get all 9 back), but against a strong rare or, god forbid, a unique or a story boss, the skill just becomes completely useless.
Against rares, you simply have to hope that the enemies surrounding it will either refund 9 charges on death through Warlord's Mark, or that they'll survive so you can enduring cry and gain enough to finish the rare. Often though, rares will just tank through 4 or even 5 fully charged discharges, taking far longer to kill than they would if I were to attack them with a normal spell or skill.
Against bosses, especially bosses low on additional mobs, you're up shit creek. Bosses will happily eat up anywhere between 10 and 30 fully charged discharges, depending on their health pools, and the lack of persistently spawning mobs (i.e. shavronne, maligaro, lightning witch lady person, Kitava...) often means that you are left there to rely solely on the charge generation from Enduring Cry, which often grants only a single charge when around these bosses, meaning that you can only use a fully charged discharge every fourth cast of enduring cry (on average).
This means that, against bosses, there is a 16 second wait time (Assuming Unrelenting procs every 4th cast of EC) between each full-power discharge, putting our effective DPS against bosses at around 1100. That's less than 1/5 of what I was doing 6 levels ago using melee gear and no passive investment into melee.

From Path of Building, I got my damage per cast at level 97 with a 6l Realm Ender sitting at around 150,000. If we apply the same delay against bosses to that value, we end up with a total dps of 9375. To put this into perspective, I would be doing about the same amount of damage with an unlinked freezing pulse if it were put in a realm ender.

Now, before someone says "What about Ignite?", I checked out ignite scaling and the like, and I'm only able to get around 50k ignite dps from the skill on full charge. Maybe I'm clueless with scaling ignite, I don't know, but that's all I could get.

So, given that self cast discharge is basically worse than trash tier at the moment, I have a few suggestions as to how it could potentially be fixed.

First is the interaction between discharge and cast on crit. While discharge and cast on crit can be used in tandem, Discharge will never be allowed to do enough damage to justify being self cast. All the nerf to triggered damage did was reduce the number of CoC discharge builds, not increase the diversity of discharge builds.
To fix this, the skill either needs to be unable to be triggered by Cast On Crit at all, similar to how Incinerate does not work with Spell Echo, or the skill needs to gain a damage bonus from being self-cast over triggered.

The second issue is the cost/opportunity gap that discharge has. In order to cast discharge, you need to generate charges. In order to cast a damaging discharge, you need a lot of them. However, charges are either hard to generate (endurance), require crit (power) or require you to be in a really bad area of the tree for spell builds (frenzy). Charges also require that you path to two adjacent areas in the skill tree to increase the charge limit, and also make use of sub-par uniques to boost the limit (kaom's sign/way). Finally, expending the charges removes a whole host of benefits to the player, some of which may be needed to survive such as life regen, evasion, dodge, movement speed etc. Given the cost of casting a discharge, the skill either needs to be extremely powerful like some of the Vaal skills, or it needs to have the cost of casting the skill lowered in some form.
Boosting the skill's damage would be the simplest way, but it would require that the skill perhaps not work with CoC so as to not cause CoC to become OP, and it would still leave discharge feeling clunky and unreliable.
The more difficult, but perhaps better way to go about this, would be to create ways for the player to reliably generate charges or at least limit the random nature of gaining them. An example of how to do this for Endurance Charge focused Discharge Builds would be to revert the Unrelenting nerf for the Juggernaut, but also impose a modifier to the duration of Immortal Call, something like "40% less Immortal Call Duration" or the like, so as to avoid the perma-IC builds of 2.5 returning to the fore.
For Frenzy focused Discharge, there could be more of a focus on gaining charges through dealing damage, like a kind of rampage/bloodlust style method where you gain a charge for each time you deal x% of a target's health in damage with a spell, with the value being different for bosses than for monsters. I.e. for bosses, it's 5%, for regular monsters it's 20% or 40%, and thus you can sustain charges during encounters so long as you do enough damage per hit.
For power charges, there could be an effect where your character slowly builds up charges passively over time, but the effect of each charge is lowered until you reach max, and they then dissipate if not used. I.e. something like "You gain a power charge every 0.5 seconds while not on max charges. 50% less effect of power charges while not on max charges. Upon reaching max charges, all charges will be lost after a 1.5 second delay". With this, it would give the feeling of your character charging up slowly for a big hit, and also force you to keep up a consistent tempo or be punished for it, sort of similar to the Pendulum of Destruction for the witch.
The first of the three would just be a change to Jugger, but the other two could be implemented as parts of ascendancies, uniques or key stones (idk).

Or, there could even be a set of three keystones near the scion, each one being along the lines of:
"Cannot gain Power or Frenzy charges. Gain two endurance charges on hit. 50% less effect of endurance charges. 50% less duration for skills that consume endurance charges"

I don't know if these ideas are any good, or even if they'd fix the problem, but I just had this stuff rattling around in my head while trying to make this build work.
Anyway, those were the issues I found with self cast discharge and some ways it could be fixed, thanks for reading.

Hey!

Buff discharge!


Please ;)

I'm thinking this ability would work well as a support gem in PoE2, where we would have multiple 6links. It would turn any ability into a charge "spender".

Sorry but the new visuals won't do, no one asked for a visual rework of one of the best looking skills in the entire game.

This comment summed it up best


Sell the classic visual style on the micro-transaction store and re-enable the "rainbow nuke" feature.

Finally able to play self-cast discharge. It's pretty nice, but sometimes it does feel that the 2 second cooldown feels too long. Especially when I run into a new pack after discharging.

The changes to Discharge sound great, but once you see the "Endless Misery" you get a feeling that you have been trolled.

Seriously, that changes are a dick move in the face of all the people who loved this skill.

Buff was not enough. Threshold jewel made mjolner versions of discharge non-viable. Only crit CoC is an enjoyable variation now, and even with very high end meta crafted gear it's mediocre at best.

Definitely needs a baseline damage buff if the 250 ms cooldown is to be kept.

I recently started playing self-cast discharge using Farrul's fur / aspect of the cat with 2x timetwist and the new reduced duration cluster on the passive tree along with less duration and awakened swift affliction to generate 20 charges every 1.5 seconds. I use cooldown recovery to drop the cooldown of discharge to 1.5 seconds. I'm currently at level 89 assassin.

It's a lot of fun to play, but it would be really nice if the charges didn't make any noise when they were consumed by discharge. Currently, the sound of the charges dropping off rivals or exceeds the volume of discharge and is really irritating to listen to every 1.5 seconds.

Not sure if anyone reads these, but I have to try.

CoC Discharge was by far the most enjoyable build I've ever played. A great combination of build complexity and stunning visuals. The Flare discharge MTX is my favourite looking skill in the game to date. I love it.

I was so excited to see reworks to discharge, and while the self casting is now very usable, I see no reason why anyone would try to play it with cast on crit.

I've tried mirror tier gear and the damage is not anywhere close to other skills. It's so wrong that Ice Spear can reach 150+million dps but you'd be lucky to get 10% of that on a discharge setup, which has far more mandatory items to even function. Those mandatory items and passives also heavily restrict investing in survivability. Making the build magnitudes weaker as a whole.

The AoE also pales in comparison to something like CoC Frostbolt / Ice Nova. So there is no clear speed niche there anymore either.

I'm not quite sure on the best way to fix this, the Endless Misery threshold jewel was dead on arrival, so probably start there.

Removing the cooldown when triggered, so you're instead limited to the ICD of Cospri / Mjolnir / CoC gem.

Increase the AoE when triggered, it's way too small.

Reduce the less damage multiplier when triggered, the DPS is hamstrung enough by mandatory uniques and passives just to maintain charges. It's nowhere near competitive with the other end game cast on crit builds.

Anyway, if you revive my favourite build, I'll buy more MTX. ;) xxoo