Blight

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Taudlitz wrote:

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Marikhen wrote:

Is it intentional that this skill doesn't receive a damage bonus from AoE damage nodes? I ask because it seems kind of strange that a skill tagged with "AoE" has does 22.8 DPS both before and after getting Blast Radius and its 20% increased area damage.

yeah its intentional, this change was introduced in 3.0. Before that modifiers to area damage did apply. To compensate for this Blight received 25% more damage at level 20

edit: now that I have played story line with blight I can tell that you can buff Blight by another 25% more damage and it would still not be competitive skill

+1

It's pretty crazy what the developers are doing with this skill.

For some reason they decided that Blight just needed a bit more hinder and it would be great - hence the jewel/gloves this league.

With the jewel/gloves Blight now hinders movement a bit more. Great.

Blight still does meh damage - still hits far too few targets - and doesn't synergize with some sort of AOE ability to offer good clear speed.

In other words, Blight was totally awful before the AOE nerf - and now, is even in worse shape.
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I really wanted to play Blight this league - so, even knowing better, I leveled with it and stuck with the skill up until act 8 or 9 or so. Blight just got worse and worse and worse as time went on - didn't hit enough mobs and didn't kill mobs fast enough.

I then switched to ED/Contagion - wow! About 4 times better at least.

Unless you just love the Blight play style, you'd be crazy not to drop Blight for ED/Contagion (and ED/Contagion has huge issues due to the AOE nerf and the fact that ED no longer benefits from projectile damage).

I think the jewel helps blight aoe clear a bit faster. At a glance, if you have no other duration modifiers, having two of the jewels will allow a blight to do:

1.6/2.5*1.5 + 0.9/2.5*1 = 1.32x the damage. However the reality is only the first stack of blight will get this damage, the subsequent stack will have a lower hinder duration ratio as it takes cast period time to apply an additional stack. So the jewel is extremely efficient if an encounter ends in 1.6 seconds, or in general case [hinder period].

But i would not count it for being a factor at all against any boss.

I guess you can sort of use it as a support skill if you play perfectly, you can have the hinder up about 2/3rd of the time (0.8 base duration out of 2.5 seconds blight) since skill duration modifiers apply to both secondary and primary duration, and hinder cannot be applied to blighted enemies. Once the damage debuff wears off then hinder can be re-applied.

I guess on the math side of things if you have sources of reduced duration, then you can increase the hinder/blight uptime ratio quite significantly.

10% reduced from 20quality less duration
12% reduced from warped timepiece
15% reduced from swift afflication

163%*0.8shinder duration/63%*2.5s blight duration and you get like a possible approximately 83% uptime hinder for blight!

Though noting using less duration means the human error is going to be significantly higher, but you can use temporal chains to help remedy this.

Secondly with wither if you're already getting maybe 5 stacks reliably on a boss on average (totem dies a lot, need cast speed and skill duration to get higher stacks) they are already taking 35% increased damage so taking another 50% increased is slightly diminished.

On the opposite side, a popular item, breath of the council, gonna increase duration and in fact reduce the possible ratio of hinder vs damage debuff duration then fact that efficacy is also a gem and getting skill duration such as from passive or necromancer ascendency is usually a nice quality of life or straight up good damage investment for these type of duration based builds.

On top of the amount of multitasking you'd have to do on top of perfect play and dodging, the new jewels do very little against bosses regardless if you use decay, blight, essence drain, death's oath even, etc.

Against a boss where you are really dodging like 90% of the time though and have almost no time to dps, then the hinder uptime is going to be pretty high.

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Vipermagi wrote:

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hankinsohl wrote:

With the jewel/gloves Blight now hinders movement a bit more. Great.

Let's just ignore "enemies take 50% Increased Chaos Damage" from the Jewel entirely, why don't we. 50% More Damage against enemies unaffected by Wither, and 21% More against enemies under max Wither stacks (for all your Chaos Damage, ED/Cont included). That's like nothing at all right.

My previous post was a bit salty - so I'll forgive your push back here, it's a bit warranted.

But... look at the jewel in question.

It's 50% increased hinder duration and up to 38% increased chaos damage.

I'm going to give you the benefit of doubt and assume that you know the difference between "more" and "increased."

Blight has a wonderful play style that I really enjoy.

But it's completely uncompetitive against just about any other skill in the game:
1) Blight doesn't synergize well with other skills - so you can't effectively combine Blight for single target with something else for AOE - Abysal Cry comes the closest to this.
2) Blight is an AOE skill and in 3.0 AOE took a huge hit. As a result Blight does not hit nearly enough targets and so cannot be used effectively as a mapping skill. Moreover because increases to AOE simply increase area coverage as opposed to the increased radius prior to 3.0 (increased radius squares the coverage and is intuitive with the way that you would think that increased AOE would work whereas currently increased AOE is the square root of what is was previously), you cannot fix Blight's AOE problems by taking AOE nodes/equipment. Blight's AOE coverage is unfixably small.
3) Blight is a damage over time skill - mobs will take a bit of time to die - meanwhile you're taking damage which, had you been using a non DOT skill, you would not be taking. Moreover you cannot compensate for the increased damage via leech because chaos skills cannot leech.
4) Back to the AOE nerf - a useful defense prior to the AOE nerf was Blasphemy combined with Enfeeble and TC. Post the AOE nerf - Blasphemy will counter melee attackers but you'll be wrecked by ranged attackers.
5) Even with the increased damage offered by the jewel - note "increased" not "more" - Blight's single target damage even with Blight stacks as well as Wither stacks is poor.

Use ED/Contagion for comparison - for me, mobs die between 3 and 5 times faster with ED/Contagion? - guessing here, but this seems to be the case.
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You probably won't believe the above so here's the challenge:

Play Blight. Either level with it or use it once you start mapping. Follow whatever guide you want out there (good luck finding one b/c almost no one is crazy enough to persist with this skill - Phox did it last league and got to 100 - more power to him for enduring with a horrible skill (which got much worse in 3.0) - take the best equipment for Blight possible.

If after you do this you think that Blight is OK, then post once more in this thread.

I assure you that should you take the above challenge you'll quickly realize how terrible Blight is.
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The one thing that Blight has going for it - is that many PvP players have no chaos resist. So, equip Blight and PvP - that's probably the best use of the gem currently.

More salt :-)

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Taudlitz wrote:

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Marikhen wrote:

Is it intentional that this skill doesn't receive a damage bonus from AoE damage nodes? I ask because it seems kind of strange that a skill tagged with "AoE" has does 22.8 DPS both before and after getting Blast Radius and its 20% increased area damage.

yeah its intentional, this change was introduced in 3.0. Before that modifiers to area damage did apply. To compensate for this Blight received 25% more damage at level 20

I have to honestly wonder why they even bothered leaving the AoE tag in there in the first place. Just give it an AoE increase scaled to level if not a flat, overall boost and have done with it. This kind of half-assing just works to confuse players and begs folks like me to make "joke" bug reports about it.

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hankinsohl wrote:

Unless you just love the Blight play style, you'd be crazy not to drop Blight for ED/Contagion (and ED/Contagion has huge issues due to the AOE nerf and the fact that ED no longer benefits from projectile damage).

I actually kinda like Blight for Cast While Channelling chains. Hell, after leveling one of my characters to 50'ish if not 60'ish with pure Blight I had oodles and oodles of fun mixing a CWC Blight with Molten Orb, a pair of Molten Orb's +1 projectile jewels, and a pair of Consuming Dark daggers. I've since dropped Blight for Wither simply because Wither is effective at long ranges, but I may get into the habit of swapping gems depending on circumstances, especially if I get enough socket unlocks to use the Blight jewels as well.

Still, one good thing I'll say about Blight is that the hindering effect, however meager it may be, is enough to move your character or your cursor so that you can walk Molten Orb across enemies more easily. Not saying just how good that is, but that little hitch in incoming trash does make them die a little more quickly and easily.

I'm running a full Chaos Char atm and it feels good.
(Schaki_Chaos lev 86 Occultist)

But even with the new Gloves I can't see Blight in the position of a main skill.
Not enough AoE even with both AoE-nodes and additional increase AoE items (glove, weapon as you can see) to be usefull as trash-cleaner. I have a Carcas Jack ... but it wouldn't change anything.
And the damage is just to low either with Gloves (level 22 Blight) + 4 supports or as 6-linked in my body to be used as boss-killer.
And as you can see, I got nearly all posible chaos/aoe/channel items and 2 jewels.

In it's current version it just a "use with CwC + ED + Contagion" SUPPORT skill.

I really dont get the hate towards blight here.

Sure the AoE is really small and you have to be rather close (more dangerous in HC), but the damage is so much better than ED.

a full 20 stack blight has almost 4 times!!! more base damage than ED, blight does apply 50% MORE dmg debuff and hinder is nice too.

The new gloves also make blight the best league starter skill by far.
Buy the gloves and you have pretty much a 6L with lvl 20 gem and lvl 3 empower for less than 10c atm^^

on top of that:
- 30% chaos dmg
- 30% hinder duration

=> imho the gloves are BiS for most chaos builds.

In SC I'd respecc into a full blight boss killer build right away. In HC though I kinda like having the ED range vs some bosses even though ED single target is utter crap compared to blight...