Blight

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Iyacthu wrote:

Read that its a terrible leveling skill.
Tried it myself with a fresh Shadow, with no skill point allocated 'till lvl 15.
Fastest act 1 clear i've ever done on a caster, by far (faster than pre nerf spark and such things)

According to numbers, Blight deals high damage later on aswell. With a Wither Totem, it's actually the strongest non crit spell damage wise, numerically, by quite a big margin.

Blight isn't meant to be a screen cleaner (even though you could with high investment in AoE increase). It provides an additionnal single target damage output when needed. And it's super strong at that.
ED/Contagion clears faster against squishy white mobs (general clear speed) but struggles against higher HP mobs (and Decay bows will probably disappear hopefully). That's where Blight shines.

You usually use ED with poison and with enough cast speed you can melt uniques in a few seconds

Leveling Necromancer Blight, planning to go scourge later on. So far, only in terms of looking at leveling, normal was a breeze, at around lvl 20 it startet to melt stuff really fast. General clearspeed got better after getting the inc Aoe gem in a4, well lets see how it will be after cruel/merciless till i can wear my claw.

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Melpheos wrote:

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Iyacthu wrote:

Read that its a terrible leveling skill.
Tried it myself with a fresh Shadow, with no skill point allocated 'till lvl 15.
Fastest act 1 clear i've ever done on a caster, by far (faster than pre nerf spark and such things)

According to numbers, Blight deals high damage later on aswell. With a Wither Totem, it's actually the strongest non crit spell damage wise, numerically, by quite a big margin.

Blight isn't meant to be a screen cleaner (even though you could with high investment in AoE increase). It provides an additionnal single target damage output when needed. And it's super strong at that.
ED/Contagion clears faster against squishy white mobs (general clear speed) but struggles against higher HP mobs (and Decay bows will probably disappear hopefully). That's where Blight shines.

You usually use ED with poison and with enough cast speed you can melt uniques in a few seconds

Poison adds less than 3% ED's base DoT damage per stack on average, which means you need more than 30 casts to double its damage (impossible with a 2 second poison base duration).
With 100% increased cast speed (quite a lot for a ED/Contagion build), you're looking at less than 3 casts per second. With 100% increased skill effect duration (unlikely, once again), that's 12 casts over 4 seconds, being a 36% More modifier, at the very best. On average, that's rather a measly 10/15% modifier.

did some speed runs like i was racing for Act 1 to test the damage as other posters were suggesting the damage was pretty decent for leveling.

normal race route with blight and contagion once unlocked took 26 minutes hitting 11 just before merveil, only good rng was a speed shrine in ledge finished with 2 white wands and a white hat nothing else.

Same route/method with fire trap/freezing pulse took 21 minutes, good RNG on champions but same gear, also finished at 11. Didn't use +1 cold gem recipe for a wand which i would have if running properly which would have saved a minute between warden/merveil but pretty comparable.

Both characters only took damage nodes from their start position, both shadows.

Overall I think it held up pretty well, better than i expected actually so I can see why fellow posters here are having a good time leveling with it, my only real comments are much like my initial statement about the gem its damage is probably fine its the usability that needs a buff. I nearly died about 6 times channeling such a short range spell on my race route and its starting AoE is truly atrocious. Its damage however is pretty comparable to other abilities and if I was making tweaks to it right now i probably wouldn't change.

Also people keep claiming that poison will beat this on scaling which is simply not true, Blight in its current form will be a great supplementary ability to the ED DoT in late-game and fully ramped up with wither you can squeeze a respectable 100kdps+ out of it should you want to 6-link it.

So overall just buff usability please, make the AoE halfway between my 2 screenshots on page 1 and make the slow last a little bit extra and i think it'd be perfect.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

did some speed runs like i was racing for Act 1 to test the damage as other posters were suggesting the damage was pretty decent for leveling.

normal race route with blight and contagion once unlocked took 26 minutes hitting 11 just before merveil, only good rng was a speed shrine in ledge finished with 2 white wands and a white hat nothing else.

Same route/method with fire trap/freezing pulse took 21 minutes, good RNG on champions but same gear, also finished at 11. Didn't use +1 cold gem recipe for a wand which i would have if running properly which would have saved a minute between warden/merveil but pretty comparable.

Both characters only took damage nodes from their start position, both shadows.

Overall I think it held up pretty well, better than i expected actually so I can see why fellow posters here are having a good time leveling with it, my only real comments are much like my initial statement about the gem its damage is probably fine its the usability that needs a buff. I nearly died about 6 times channeling such a short range spell on my race route and its starting AoE is truly atrocious. Its damage however is pretty comparable to other abilities and if I was making tweaks to it right now i probably wouldn't change.

Also people keep claiming that poison will beat this on scaling which is simply not true, Blight in its current form will be a great supplementary ability to the ED DoT in late-game and fully ramped up with wither you can squeeze a respectable 100kdps+ out of it should you want to 6-link it.

So overall just buff usability please, make the AoE halfway between my 2 screenshots on page 1 and make the slow last a little bit extra and i think it'd be perfect.

I completely disagree.

Supposing you're going to play a chaos build.

And supposing that Blight's AOE is improved.

So go ahead and 6-link Blight as you suggest above.

What are your remaining links?

And how is your build at all competitive with Essence Drain + Contagion?

Blight is marginally useful in its current form until level 11 at which time you get Essence Drain. Once there, just vendor your Blight gem. And really... Freezing Pulse or Lightning Tendrils are just as good if not better until level 11.

Essence Drain has far better single target damage and with Contagion is not bad at AOE. Moreover, ED doesn't require that you sit in place to channel. You'll need Wither though, on a totem so that you can move, for good DPS.

So into the above mix (you propose 6-linking Blight for some reason, plus ED - 4-link? plus Contagion plus Wither)... you are nearly out of multi-links and need movement and probably CWDT and auras and utility. Blight simply doesn't fit in - and 6-linking it is a huge mistake since ED is the skill you want to 6-link.

Blight's design is very poor - as an AOE skill, it seems to want to be good at clearing - its extremely short range undoes this potential - ED + Contagion is far better at clearing trash.

Blight applies stacks - as a channeled skill - so it seems to be designed to stack damage - for bosses.

But it's a channeled skill - meaning that you cannot move without hurting your DPS - meaning that it's at a drawback for killing bosses. Coupled with the fact that its range is extremely small, meaning that you'll be in melee range - or nearly so - just to use the skill - means that it's completely unsuitable for boss kills. And since it's channeled - you will definitely need to move frequently to avoid damage - DPS is reduced if not completely crippled. No leech ability means that you'll need to move frequently.

To recap -
1) Unsuitable for clearing trash
2) Unsuitable for primary boss damage
3) Unsuitable for augmenting boss damage as you already need a bunch of links for ED, Contagion,
Wither, movement, auras/curses, utility. There's no room for Blight - and even if there were room, you'd need to stand still within melee range to cast it - boss encounters allow for static stand-still casting at times, yes, but there's simply not enough available sockets to make this skill worthwhile in an already socket-starved chaos build.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

did some speed runs like i was racing for Act 1 to test the damage as other posters were suggesting the damage was pretty decent for leveling.

normal race route with blight and contagion once unlocked took 26 minutes hitting 11 just before merveil, only good rng was a speed shrine in ledge finished with 2 white wands and a white hat nothing else.

Same route/method with fire trap/freezing pulse took 21 minutes, good RNG on champions but same gear, also finished at 11. Didn't use +1 cold gem recipe for a wand which i would have if running properly which would have saved a minute between warden/merveil but pretty comparable.

Both characters only took damage nodes from their start position, both shadows.

Overall I think it held up pretty well, better than i expected actually so I can see why fellow posters here are having a good time leveling with it, my only real comments are much like my initial statement about the gem its damage is probably fine its the usability that needs a buff. I nearly died about 6 times channeling such a short range spell on my race route and its starting AoE is truly atrocious. Its damage however is pretty comparable to other abilities and if I was making tweaks to it right now i probably wouldn't change.

Also people keep claiming that poison will beat this on scaling which is simply not true, Blight in its current form will be a great supplementary ability to the ED DoT in late-game and fully ramped up with wither you can squeeze a respectable 100kdps+ out of it should you want to 6-link it.

So overall just buff usability please, make the AoE halfway between my 2 screenshots on page 1 and make the slow last a little bit extra and i think it'd be perfect.

So Blight performs far worse at DPS while leveling than existing skills (20%+ worse), is extremely risky (you almost died 6 times), but might provide utility in boss encounters where there's opportunity to sit within melee range to stack "layers" provided that you invest in cast speed and sacrifice a 4-link (or more) to equip it at the expense of some other links in a chaos build which already requires ED, Contagion and Wither plus a bunch of other multi-link setups...

No, this skill, in its current form is - unfortunately - useless.

It needs a bunch of changes to make it worthwhile.

My recommendation - rework this skill drastically - it would be really cool if this were made end-game viable for all content, my preference being that it's a primarily single-target skill. Maybe Contagion could be used to spread Blight dots. And maybe a support get could be introduced to allow movement while channeling this skill or to allow leech meaning that you could sit still and take some damage but would still need to dodge one-shot mechanics.

Or, I suppose, leave it as is but rename the skill, "Bleech" - on par with those corrupted jewels that reduce the number of Endurance/Frenzy/Power charges you have.

Waste of time to use. I rate it as 1 out of 1-10. sorry a complete fail.

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Iyacthu wrote:

Poison adds less than 3% ED's base DoT damage per stack on average, which means you need more than 30 casts to double its damage (impossible with a 2 second poison base duration).
With 100% increased cast speed (quite a lot for a ED/Contagion build), you're looking at less than 3 casts per second. With 100% increased skill effect duration (unlikely, once again), that's 12 casts over 4 seconds, being a 36% More modifier, at the very best. On average, that's rather a measly 10/15% modifier.

You are obviously misinformed how poison actually works. Look up what double dipping means. Once the base poison damage is calculated from the initial hit, it will then get boosted by the same modifiers as the source did.

For example, my ED on my low life deals around 9k average direct damage tooltip (I will ignore wither/void beacon etc for simplicity).

Poison is 8% of that per second as chaos damage or 720 base chaos damage per second. My essence drain dot deals 898 base chaos damage per second. That means each poison stack deals 80% of the damage per second the essence drain dot itself is doing, since the base dot and base poison will scale from the same modifiers.

Now if I factor in void beacon and wither, that initial hit will be much higher, to the point where the poison from my essence drain easily out-scales the dot from the skill itself.

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Gravethought wrote:

"

Iyacthu wrote:

Poison adds less than 3% ED's base DoT damage per stack on average, which means you need more than 30 casts to double its damage (impossible with a 2 second poison base duration).
With 100% increased cast speed (quite a lot for a ED/Contagion build), you're looking at less than 3 casts per second. With 100% increased skill effect duration (unlikely, once again), that's 12 casts over 4 seconds, being a 36% More modifier, at the very best. On average, that's rather a measly 10/15% modifier.

You are obviously misinformed how poison actually works. Look up what double dipping means. Once the base poison damage is calculated from the initial hit, it will then get boosted by the same modifiers as the source did.

For example, my ED on my low life deals around 9k average direct damage tooltip (I will ignore wither/void beacon etc for simplicity).

Poison is 8% of that per second as chaos damage or 720 base chaos damage per second. My essence drain dot deals 898 base chaos damage per second. That means each poison stack deals 80% of the damage per second the essence drain dot itself is doing, since the base dot and base poison will scale from the same modifiers.

Now if I factor in void beacon and wither, that initial hit will be much higher, to the point where the poison from my essence drain easily out-scales the dot from the skill itself.

+1

Double dipping makes poison - and ignite for that matter - far, far better than you'd might first think.

On the subject of leveling...

Contagion for AOE until level 8 and then Contagion plus Void Manipulation was amazing for leveling.

For fast leveling as a chaos build, I think that Contagion coupled with Freezing Pulse would be really good until level 12 when you get Essence Drain would be great/best for chaos builds.


For endgame content...

Without a Delirium weapon - ED is going to take a hit in the next league. Maybe it's still really good at end game content - I hope so, for build diversity's sake.

ED + Contagion is a really unique playstyle.

For reasons cited above, I really doubt that Blight can help out an ED/Contagion build and without a major rework cannot replace Contagion for AOE or ED for single target.

Hopefully, something will boost ED in the upcoming league - as I'd want to play that skill - but not at a huge DPS/clearspeed/end-game viability over other skills.