Essence Drain

The cast time of .75 is just way too slow. Add on top of that the painfully slow projectile speed and it's like you're in the matrix bullet time, except you're not the one moving fast it's the enemies.

Even if you pick every single cast time node it's still too slow and you just lost of a ton of DPS. I feel like if the intention was not to spam this skill ever, then add a cooldown but make it cast fast. And up the projectile speed too.

a unique jewel, like the new one for burning arrow would be nice. dot dmg from essence drain can stack 2 times.

and more cast speed and projectile speed.

since it was released it is my favorite skill, the art and design is awsome. just to slow

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

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

I would really like to see Essence Drain get some love by getting a special jewel/gem made that increases the amount of regeneration it gives your character based on damage. I use Essence Drain 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 Essence Drain into a true tank oriented caster gem, sort of like an in your face caster, but to do that, it would require unique a jewel/gem that synergizes with Wither, Contagion, and Essence Drain.

I feel like essence drain needs some help. As it stands currently it's suffering on multiple fronts:

-slow base cast speed
-slow projectile
-small projectile hitbox
-pierce is mandatory
-poison only affects initial hit damage even though no builds even focus on that
-effect only spreads through a secondary skill, contagion
-gameplay further slowed because wither is required on totem, so contagion must be manually cast and placed on CWDT
-occultist explosion passive stops spread of DoT, more contagion slowing you down
-too many green gems needed?
-regeneration effect functionally near useless due to design

The slow casting I can sort of live with, but the projectile speed is just plain unfair because there's no reasonable way to make it go faster without reducing the damage of the DoT in favor of projectile stuff via support gems or massive detours in the skilltree. This spell cannot even hit a skeleton slowly moving a different direction and it makes it very slow compared to most abilities to clear stray monsters. This is made exponentially worse by the fact that the projectile itself is tiny and has multihit capability only if you also invest into pierce, either with gems, massive detours in skill tree, or giving up your boot slots. Adding in that you need to use a totem to cast wither, while also casting contagion, in a build that generally discourages casting speed, all adds up to a slow motion experience a lot of times.

I think this spell needs major help, and probably a unique jewel on top of that. Please give this skill some attention.

This skill is an absolute joke now

The single target damage is so poor that even with heavy damage investment it barely does anything.

I've taken every single chaos/dot etc node on the tree

I had a 6link setup

Still barely handles low tier bosses.

Now that boss life has been drastically increased and poison double dipping is nerfed into the ground this skill is just useless...

I've had insanely better performance on many many other builds with much less dmg investment..

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/3wfmt8/bug_essence_drain_trap/cxvtpye/
Any update on Essence Drain with Trap?
I made an Ancestral Bond Dark Pact character and wanted to use some other chaos spell to add some damage, and ... well, Essence Drain Trap was a good idea at the moment...

Some threshold jewel ideas:

- Essence Drain's projectile homes in to the enemy closest to your cursor. Extra projectiles will try to seek out different enemies like the projectiles from Frost Blades.
- X extra projectiles.

or

- When Essence Drain hits an enemy, it sends a projectile back to you that restores health equal to X% of Essence Drain's projectile damage when it touches you.

or

- When Essence Drain hits, it applies its debuff to all nearby enemies. The radius is affected by area size increases/decreases like Increased Area Support and passive area increases.

Absolutely garbage skill. Usable (with huge investment to damage in skill tree and expensive items) to T7 maps, but is inefficient and boring.

The visual effect of Essence Drain is so unobvious that it looks like a very trivial spell instead of a very potent one... especially enemy casts are always overlooked until the player takes some huge "unknown" damage. I suggest at least increase its visual effect to WOW's shadow bolt degree to manifest its power(both for enemies and players).

"

vindoq wrote:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/3wfmt8/bug_essence_drain_trap/cxvtpye/
Any update on Essence Drain with Trap?
I made an Ancestral Bond Dark Pact character and wanted to use some other chaos spell to add some damage, and ... well, Essence Drain Trap was a good idea at the moment...

Same character and I use Wither...