Essence Drain

Used it on a character to level and got to level 70 with little problem (aside the horrible lag and resulting frequent deaths from being on an old laptop).
Yes, it's slow, but if I wanted to get done with the game quickly, I'd just quit - it's not like there's a reward for finishing.
So, with a 4L, it's a perfectly adequate skill till low tier maps, at least. It does fall off at that point, with especially the regen effect being completely pointless more often than not, though no reflect is a little bonus.

The damage is way too low...
It needs a buff.(especially for endgame)

My feedback about ED:

+ ED comes without all the visual and acustic polution compared to most other spells
+ combined with contagion it has an aoe capability
+ good range

- relatively high mana cost
- in the end-endgame it has to low damage compared to elementals (even in combination with blight and wither)
- the single projectile is slow, small and doesnt penetrate. That makes the skill unreliable in some situations
- ED requires a second skill (contagion), or a complex combination or multiproj, pierce and exploding enemies for halfway effective killing of regular monsters - so the player has either to loose cast time for two spells or sacrifice important sockets, gear slots and / or skillpoints

Suggestions:

+ a moderate lowering of mana costs wouldnt hurt
+ increase the high end damage of the dot effect by (at least) making flat chaos adds counting to the dot and stuff like stronger chaos passive nodes
+ add a "with at least 40 int in radius ED has an additional projectile" perk to the Spreading Rot jewel. Three projectiles would make hitting a contagioned mob much more reliable.
+ increase the castspeed of ed to balance the fact of having to use contagion before.

better add with at least 40 intelligence, eds dot can be applied twice

I'd actually really like there to be an update to ED's visual effect for when it hits a mob, and the subsequent DoT on the mob. It's not very visual, and other than seeing the health bars go down it's a little lacklustre.
Could there not be more of an enveloping effect at the initial hit and perhaps an orb or something that rotates around the mob that visually shows it's draining essence?

I bought the MTX Arcane version just so it was a little more visual for example, and even then it's lacklustre on the hit/DoT!

I agree that the introduction of a Threshold Jewel that adds pierce or an additional projectile would be welcome.

I think the damage is reasonable considering it's quite a risk-averse skill to use.

Now after 3.3.0 this skill is completely lackluster compared to Fireball. Single, slow, unobvious, lack-of-aoe projectile with high mana cost. The dot portion is hard to magnify compared to burning, and the leech is so constrained. I suggest such improvements on it(maybe one or all of them) -

- Mana cost reduced by at least 30%
- the dot portion is based directly on the damage portion(or vise versa)
- the dot portion is stackable, in some way, maybe a new threshold jewel
- the leech can be modified by other factors

Essence drain is so weak and next league it will be completely crushed if someone want to progress on delves.

It would be nice having some damage scaling from monsters life on it together with the skill dot.

Something like 0.1% of their life taken as damage over time per second(can't be scaled by modifiers). So in the worst cases it would take close to 20 min to kill a high hp mob. Would still be better than never happening.

The skill already takes a lot of positioning and use of multiple skills to deal some real dmg so idk, it just doesn't feel worth playing it and i used to play it a lot before double dipping nerfs.

*Btw i planned an occultist for next league taking into consideration the new scepter and with some hundreds ex spent it wouldn't reach not even 500k shaper dps with everything up which would be some seconds dealing dmg only.

https://pastebin.com/MyJcPWG0

Pretty sure noone will check it but there is that in case someone want to know how far you can get without indigon(which i think is pretty clunky in an ed build).

i hope for a awsome vaal essence drain / vaal conatagion for the next league and eventually treshold juwels.
i love essence drain since its in the game and it always feels awsome if the whole screen and more explodes in purple dust.

Essence drain as a skill is fine, mechanicly. In my humble opinion, it needs a few things to be viable in the new endgame, however.

1. Give it the CA treatment. I.e directly increase the base damage over time of the skill.

2. Give it a faster cast time to compensate for the need to cast Contagion aswell. 0.6 would suffice I think.

3. Do something interesting with the regen. Perhaps letting the regen "spill over" into a damage shield of some kind (either ES or a whole new mechanic?) if you are full on life or ES?

Dont bandaid the skill with a threshold gem, please.

Hello fellow Essence Drainers!

ED did change with Betrayal and did get massive buffs in form of the 'chaos damage over time multiplier'. It is certainly endgame-viable now. I made a Buildguide including a deathless Uberelder featureing Essence Drain a while back.

AFAIK it was the first buildguide who took advantage of the Occultist rework, the new modifier and did UElder deathless:

You can find the buildguide over there: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2274101

I think that has helped move ED out of the 'Red-Zone' quite a bit. There is something though which I dislike about the skill a bit - especially compared to almost all other gems in the game:

Gear/itemesation for it is *SO* narrow. The new modifier helps a bit to break that up - but since it was needed to make the skill viable at all this is a bit of a circular argument.

ED suffers a lot from not being able to benefit from flat damage increses, crit, crit multi, cast speed and no 'skillgem' penetration. Being the last 'element' in the conversion chain certainly doesn't help either -> no 'as extra' modifiers for ED. :(

This got especially apparent with the introduction of abyssal gems, CoC shenanigans, triggered spells, spell-echo and even normal jewels in general. None of them do anything special for ED; making it a tad stagnant and boring to gear.

As it stands +gem-level corruptions on a shavs are still BiS for ED. Or +spelllevel bows/staffs. We now throw the new chaos damage over time multi on everything we can get our hands on as well... but there is no variation. Those modifiers are found at certain points in the skilltree and on certain itempieces.

To have at least two different ways to go about adding damage to the skill (compareable with either going Elemental Overload or going crit...) would be awesome.

I know devs usually freak when they get 'examples' presented like this; but please stay with me and try to view this as exemplarly showcase:

i.e.: It would be great if it would be possible if castspeed would affect the DoT damage as a multiplier:

with 0% castspeed the skill does baseline damage; with 20% castspeed it does 1.2x the damage etc. (This would make the faster casting support a 39% more damage increase - which is in line with other support gems like controlled destruction of efficacy) Maybe with the tradeoff that the duration will be shortend as well.

This would enable an ED build to look in different directions to get damage going - and not just at gemlevels/chaosDotMulti. People could customize their playstyle a bit between such things as:

1. A longer lasting DoT they cast less often/supplement with a lot of Wither-channeling
2. A shorter DoT they cast more often; but enables them to feed this higher casting speed/manacost into an Indigon instead of Wither-Spam.
3. Have to decide between CastSpeed nodes on the tree and pathing towards the other ChaosDoT Multi nodes depending on itemisation, breakpoints etc.
4. Another thing that could be intersting would be to make the EssenceDrain Dot (or degen effects in general) be affected by Perfect Agony. This way going for Crit/Crit Multi would be a viable alternative for the Shadow Class.
This could serve as a potential hallmark point between Witch ED and Shadow ED. Upcoming uniques could play into this and blur the lines or make one thing viable for the other class and vice versa.

In general I would like to see more variety for ED as a skill to get its damage going. It is one of the coolest and funnest skills in the game IMO since it has a lot of cool active, player driven interactions with Contagion etc - which also do feel really cool and not like drawback. (compared to casting IceNova on frostbolt which forces one to stand around)