Essence Drain

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Saegys wrote:

a nerf in damage(both the initial hit and damage over time)

You wot m8? :o I highly doubt it needs a nerf. I do agree about the projectile and cast speed, though - it should indeed be faster.

My biggest issues with it:

On kill to spread will always be bad the larger the party.
No trap support to counter the bad projectile mechanics. (its slow, it doesnt pierce, it will always stop on the first target hit)

A trap you would just throw into the middle of the pack, if you could make this work until theres a fix for it to work with traps, that would be great.

I got really frustrated in merc docks with a large pack and one rare having allies cant die, not fun.


ABOUT TRAPS: Rory on reddit:

This is intentional, because the spreading and other functionality can't work with traps. Long term, we're hoping to improve this.

Using:

with low life - pain attunement and all chaos and damage over time nodes with plenty of spell damage, here:

and it only does a terrible 13k dps. any other spell would be doing at least 25k, probably more at that level with those supports. using contagion as well only increases the damage by another 1000. needs a buff severely.

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DropDeadPro wrote:

Using:

with low life - pain attunement and all chaos and damage over time nodes with plenty of spell damage, here:

Spoiler

Passive skill tree build

and it only does a terrible 13k dps. any other spell would be doing at least 25k, probably more at that level with those supports. using contagion as well only increases the damage by another 1000. needs a buff severely.

youre trolling right? whats the damage over time and do you even spread essence drain? and spell echo ....

How long term? Will traps and mines work before Ascendency? I came back to PoE after a long break, specifically to replicate my Poison Arrow remote mine + Freeze Mine build with the new chaos skills, so I was obviously pretty disappointed that this isn't working. I wish I had read through this thread before I spent several hours leveling.

For what it's worth, I've been having fun with the Contagion + Essence Drain combo in early normal difficulty. It's too bad people are so resistant to the idea of skill synergy.

LVL 58 now.

Using

So far GMP has been a Godsend. I use to 1shot pretty much any white mob pack within 1-2 seconds, blues in 2-3, yellows in 2-4, and uniques in 3-4.

Been using

As backup damage. But rarely do I need it.

Using

As extra poison dmg since all of my skills are based around chaos dmg. More Dots, More Chaos = Dead enemies.

Using

As auras. This way I never need to cast my debuffs.

Rarely do I ever notice that my Aura range is "Not Long Enough".

Can't wait to get Bino's Kitchen Knife to test better regen options.

Playing in softcore atm, but only after I got
do I notice the real power of this build.

Definitely needs a projectile speed buff. It's painfully slow and I miss a good 50% of the time unless the monster is running at me. And that's awful when all the DPS of these skills comes from getting Essence Drain on an enemy and spreading it. With the damage as low as it is, I am not about to give up Controlled Destruction or Void Manipulation to get Faster Projectiles.

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OnmyojiOmn wrote:

It's too bad people are so resistant to the idea of skill synergy.

Indeed. I sure hope GGG doesn't listen to them. Those 3 are my favorite right now.

I'm liking this skill so far. I've also learned to use the slow projectile to my advantage (in some situations) - shoot, cast contagion (by the time the proj reaches, you've already finished the Contagion cast), and whirl away as everything dies. I'm even using Slower Proj and not finding myself any worse for it, preferring over faster proj. I've taken down Atziri twice, reaching ~16k dps with a level 18 gem and 6.2k eHP, not even level 80 yet.

Downsides: the extremely slow cast animation speeds of both ED (or even just ED) and Contagion means you can sometimes leave yourself vulnerable, which is frustrating considering that one of the benefits of DoT builds is traditionally a very high kiting ability (see: Caustic Arrow, Searing Bond). For example, you take longer to cast a single ED than Atziri's split phase takes to throw a spear, making it impossible to manually evade it without slowing down the split phase mob (which I have been doing with temp chains and AA's chilled ground).

Gear: