Contagion

I am a lvl 93 Champion Ess Drain/Contagion Tank.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1766555

I am extremely disappointed in the recent aoe nerfs to Contagion. This spell needs a huge boost to aoe to be effective with Essence Drain.

I would really like to see Contagion get some love by getting a special jewel/gem made that increases the amount of aoe it gives your character. I use Contagion on a caster tank character I created, and it's a really neat concept, I would love to flesh it out a bit and make Contagion into a true caster gem, but to do that, it would require a unique jewel/gem that synergizes with Wither, Contagion, and Essence Drain.

I'm beginning to feel that Contagion really needs to count as hitting. As it stands, builds utilizing chaos damage are required to use both this skill and wither. This necessitates a totem for wither and manually casting contagion. This means that a curse on hit setup is too difficult to pull off given it would now take 3 or 4 different castings every encounter depending if wither totem was needed. This forces the builds into having to use curses with blasphemy as auras with no other reasonable build options.

Ideally, contagion would cease to exist and just become part of essence drain so a better skill could be used with curse on hit like orb of storms, ball lightning, or blade vortex, but alternatively it could be made to 'hit' and thus would be able to apply curses.

One of the two really needs to happen, combination into essence drain or ability to hit; essence drain builds really need some improvements.

Contagion sometimes fails to spread when enemies are also affected by Profane Bloom (the Occultist node that makes them explode on death).

I'm guessing that when an an enemy dies while affected by both Contagion and Profane Bloom, the explosion from Profane Bloom is performed before Contagion spreads. This means that any enemies killed by the explosion do not receive Contagion before they die, and therefore cannot spread Contagion themselves.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or an intended anti-synergy between these two effects. Can anyone clarify?

EDIT:

As discussed in this other thread maybe the explosion's damage could be delayed by a few milliseconds. This would also help the frame rate drop that happens when a bunch of Profane Bloom explosions go off at once.

It would be neat if some other chaos DoTs were spread as well, like the one from Decay Support or Blight.

Any sort of interaction of this skill with another skill would be welcome. For now, it's just the second half to a two-gem combo and only serves that purpose. Support gems that spread supported ailments or curses on enemies would be a nice start.

make contagion able to destroy barrels and stuff. blight can do it, so why not contagion? im sure i missed tons of exalts because of this fact.

To compliment an earlier post about general reworks for Chaos damage, I'm replying to the individual skills I wanted to talk about. First post here:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2155774

A skill with a built-in one-two punch sounds cool. By placing Contagion on enemies, you can spread the high damage of Essence Drain to a pack of weakened enemies, and watch them topple one after another. Contagion is intended to be a utility effect for other (higher damage) Chaos spells, and hasn't lived up to that, as the skill set expands.

For once, I think we missed the mark; Spreading Rot (the jewel for Blight) turns an active skill into a single-hit general support skill, and leaves Contagion in the dust as far as supporting skills for Chaos spells goes. Contagion should have the support Jewel and increase Chaos Damage taken, and Blight's jewel should be more active - perhaps giving a chance to add an extra damage layer, or extra max-stacks, or re-hinder an enemy while channeling (or at max stacks).

Alternatively, let Contagion the skill die, and let Contagion the Support be born! Allowing other debuffs to spread to nearby enemies when an enemy dies is a neat way of adding utility to relevant skills, and is worth using a link to support those skills.

Could be fun to have a support gem version of contagion that was a support gem, similar to withering touch.

Otherwise something similar to could be neat. It would have to be very available if put on an item though, I think. So maybe as a crafting option on elder items? Or with something similar to fossils, essences, or corrupts. Also, if it could be put as on hit effect for spells, attacks, spells and attacks, or global is question a of balance and implementation etc I guess. Im currently just having fun with CoC and an indigon with poets pens, and it was years since I actually played ED, so I can probably not answer how it would be best implemented. I just think contagion on hit would be neat.