Contagion

I liked this skill at first but I quickly noticed something very lackluster and annoying about the skill.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I tested it in quite a few situations and could not see different.

The 5 second debuff on the skill carries over on infected enemies when it spreads on enemy death. It does not refresh the debuff duration.

So imagine this situation: You cast Contagion on an enemy. 4 seconds pass and the enemy dies. Contagion then infects nearby enemies, but only lasts 1 second on those enemies.

This behavior makes it much less of a "death and decay" skill that a lot of people thought it would be and it becomes very annoying to try and apply Essence Drain to everything via Contagion.

The biggest problem I have with this skill is you need multiple casts of different spells to make it worthwhile.

MULTIPLE CASTS OF DIFFERENT SKILLS???

Does anyone else see the problem with this?

Contagion
Vulnerability
Essence Drain
Wither

Even with Curses as Auras removing Vulnerability as a cast option that's 35% mana reserved for 1 friggin curse!

Where am I going to get my defense and life gain options???

I'm trying... Really am... to Like this and Blasphemy both.

Only at lvl 30 atm in new Softcore League.

Did number crunching and found you can get to 15k dot dmg (not max) with both spells activated on a mob and using Vulnerability. That is without Wither. I guess the trick is getting there and swapping to full decked out Chaos DMG build.

A quick question about essence drains interaction with contagion and item rarity gem.

Say I have linked IIR with contagion: I first fire contagion and then fire off my essence drain, which boosts contagions damage and lets i spread. But... is the only skill in effect still only going to be contagion... or both(?)

And what happens if i fire contagion, then fire a essence drain. Mob dies, contagion spreads. I fire a second essence drain. Will this second essence drain override the skill effect from contagion?

This sound very confused, but it's because it is confusing.

Anyways, it was fun and fast levelling with this setup. The damage seems to drop off in cruel act 2. Still have lots of chaos nodes to take though. I could see it might have problems in higher maps. But we'll see.

Edit: Do have some issues, the speed of essence drain is too slow. Currently in a 4 link i cant spare faster projectiles, but in a 5 link it would go in definately. You need to be very close to mobs to have a chance of hitting them. And thats dangerous since you need to cast alot of stuff

The AOE of contagion should be upped a little bit. A base 5% extra Aoe should do it. Currently ive taken the scion aoe nodes and im running increased area gem

Wither i've put in a spell totem and basically only using it on bosses.

Also im self casting vulnerability more and more in act 2/3 cruel. Which is a pain. Tried blasphemy but the radius was horrible, and couldnt be used on bosses becuase i dont want to become gibbed. Make radius larger and retain the expensive mana reservation

I've been playing a duo in the new league with a friend.

I'm Contagion > Essence Drain > Wither.
He's Bladefall with Poison.

I've specced for some spell damage in the tree, but as much chaos damage and damage over time as I could get my hands on (of which I have most of it already)

Until Gravicius, he had to use Freezing Pulse, which out-performed me like crazy.
I thought, alright then, maybe I'll get more powerful later. As it is, I help melt bosses.

Not so. A level 1 Bladefall was killing enemies faster than my leveled Contagion/Essence Drain/Wither.

I just... I don't see the point of having this really clunky combo.
Contagion and Essence Drain have such a low cast time, the things tend to be dead before I can even get the combo OFF.
Plus it lacks in defences. Health back that can't be used with Chaos Innoc? Health back? On the side of the tree that has to REALLY TRAVEL to get worthwhile amounts of health? So while you're getting a piss poor amount of your already average health back, you're also having to spam the living daylights out of wither because it has next to no duration?

It just doesn't FEEL good.

I'll be copying and pasting this in to each skill, as it's my feelings on all three.

"

This version of the review is discontinued as it started to look more like a build guide than feedback, therefor i have made a build guide in stead.
This can be viewed here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1546602

IGN: Pyr.
Lv. 74
Hardcore Talisman League.
Will update these notes every 5-10 levels or whenever i feel like i've made significant changes.
old notes are therefor prone to disappearance/adjustment.

Tree build:

- - Gear:

- - [Contagion] in my rotation:


Conclusion:

Incredibly fun and viable to level with this chaos combo. Started at level 1 with Contagion and Essence drain and didn't feel the need to switch to other skills just so i could level up.
because i went for damage first (spell damage and the chaos cluster north of the tree) i had no problem with DpS starting out, and right when the damage started to feel lacking i switched some gems and gear around while at the same reaching another damage cluster on the tree.
My experience with this skill is that it isn't as clunky as people tend to say it is.
Good clear speed as well.
Does need some gear dedication, but then again, most things do. (not everything can be firestorm with added lightning and added cold dmg -grade efficiency)
i really dig the new cast mechanic, seeing a nice future for skills that have synergy with each other
but hopefully not as exclusive as this combo.

i mentioned this in the gear section but i think it's relevant to mention again, namely, people say they have "45k dps" or more, depending on their tooltip dps, maybe the added penetration and other factors. but they really dont. Because you pump off maybe 5 seconds of sustained dps and then have to run around, avoiding things, trying not to die.
If you think about it, DoT's have 100% dps uptime, if done correctly. so even if you have a 25k dot, the damage done over lets say, a 5 minute bossfight will be substantially higher than someone not using DoT's, simply because they're running around 2/3rds of the fight and not doing dmg at all.

This is all irrelevant of course if you have such a ridiculous dps that you can obliterate a boss before he can throw anything at you, but for long fights DoT's are the way to go imo. And i found this the most fun combo to do it with so far. also the only one i've tried. but that aside.

Stats:

As far as I'm concerned, builds for contagion are screwed simply because of "allies cannot die" aura from rare monsters.

Contagion should be either a support gem or built in effect of Essence Drain. Between it, ED and Wither + lackluster damage despite all the passives and scaling, it is a waste of time. You just sit and recast combos of spells on every pack instead of just clearing it and moving on. And it's bad for party.

Why make all the chaos changes, introduce new skills and passives only for them to be rather useless?

The other thing that comes to mind is for Contagion to be a Curse and probably removing the DoT from Vulnerability or just reworking Vuln and Contagion into a DoT-focused debuff/warcry/curse.

"

nakieon wrote:

I liked this skill at first but I quickly noticed something very lackluster and annoying about the skill.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I tested it in quite a few situations and could not see different.

The 5 second debuff on the skill carries over on infected enemies when it spreads on enemy death. It does not refresh the debuff duration.

So imagine this situation: You cast Contagion on an enemy. 4 seconds pass and the enemy dies. Contagion then infects nearby enemies, but only lasts 1 second on those enemies.

This behavior makes it much less of a "death and decay" skill that a lot of people thought it would be and it becomes very annoying to try and apply Essence Drain to everything via Contagion.

This is correct, none of the durations of the buffs are extended on spread. This means that this spell and essence drain are really a mess of chance. If things go absolutely perfectly you can get pretty decent aoe dmg (get contagion on good group, essence drain on white mob that dies quickly and spreads, other mobs group up). But having to multiple cast AND get lucky to get decent dmg is pretty weak reward for the downsides.

I feel pretty much the same with all 3 new skills. They look nice, the icons are nice, and in theory they do nice things.

In practice they do extremely low damage and having to cycle through all 3 to even approximate moderate damage is not optimal.

I have, and will continue to use Glacial Cascade and Ice Nova. I do every damage type on GC other than chaos and tri elemental on Ice Nova and it also has life leech. I could swap out Cold to Fire for Iron Will and use Arc, Ball Lightning, Freezing Pulse or any other spell really because I'm specced for spell damage instead of any one element. They all work fine, and none of them need to have 2 other spells active on the same mob to do it.

Essence Drain is a spell I would love to main for its healing effect. It being a single target non piercing projectile with no aoe makes it next to useless for me though. If it were like Arctic Breath or Fireball then I'd like it. If it were like a chaos version of Ball Lightning I'd freaking love it.

The same is true of Contagion. I like everything but the damage on it. The whole cast then wither the mob as it crawls to you is nice in theory. The contagion spreading and NOT resetting the timer on it makes it pretty useless. Having it be the way you spread Essence Drain is its only useful feature currently and even then again it doesn't restart the debuff timer.

Wither is totally worthless. The slow is almost imperceptible, and so is the increased damage debuff. It says it stacks 20 times, but the debuff barely lasts long enough to apply 2.

If I'm going to be standing still and spam casting a spell I want it to actually do something. Any cold spell can chill/freeze mobs far better than this at any level, and any curse can increase damage better. It does have an amusing side effect of making my golem do more damage.

I know that the damage can be upped by a lot with fully leveled gems, and a weird spidery build that takes every chaos and dot node on the tree (basically you play shadow or gtfo if you want to use these effectively).

They could to 50 times more damage and they would still be really annoying to use. Its like they had this idea of a new playstyle and broke it up into 3 different spells.

If it were a ranged (or even centered) aoe that applied a slow/dot effect that healed you and spread to other mobs on death it would rock. It wouldn't even need to refresh the debuff on transfer because it would be useful enough to main on its own.

Or a single target projectile that spreads itself on death instead of needing an intermediary spell.

Hell get rid of wither entirely or make it a curse, oh wait we already have temporal chains and vulnerability. If wither INCREASED THE DURATION OF THE DOTS/DEBUFFS of the mobs you are withering then it would be functional. You'd stack the debuffs and then wither till they die. If contation and essence drain were combined into one skill you'd have an excellent one two combo going.

I'm still leveling them but these skills need to be reworked, not necessarily for more damage but for ease of use. Why use 3 spells when one would do far better?

At the very least they need to let half the support gems we want to use actually work with them.

iron will seem to not working on contagion, pretty sad :C