Blight

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Gravethought wrote:

Because of what I stated above, I don't think the loss of delirium will hurt essence drain that badly. In the end it comes down to losing a lengthy poison that didn't stack anyway. Decay is great when you are undergeared but tapers off at the higher levels of essence drain play. It is also great for speed clearing maps with something like blade vortex to apply it....
Oh and chimera/hydra being immune without decay to lean on would be.....painful.

Either way we can live without decay. I'm more worried about essence drain getting side swiped by further changes to poison and double dipping. That's why I want blight to succeed. But in it's current form it is just a badly designed skill.

It has no benefit to channeling it, unlike searing ray and blade fury. In fact I'm not even sure why it is classified as channeling to begin with. Each dot it applies is completely independent of the others, and has no affect or synergy with other each application.

Having new stacks refresh the duration of all applications would go a LONG way for this skill, but I still think it would be boring.

My solution is simple: Combine Blight with Wither

Wither already is a strange skill that basically doesn't get any notable benefits form leveling the skill up. It also is absolutely abysmal to self-cast.

Giving Blight the chaos damage taken increasing debuff would not only alleviate it's low damage problem as a main skill, it would give an actually benefit to self-casting the skill (damage) while also rewarding players for keeping the stack count high.

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Gravethought wrote:

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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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Iyacthu wrote:

Tl ; dr : Blight isn't THAT weak. Double dipping to insane numbers is too strong.

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hankinsohl wrote:

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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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Iyacthu wrote:

I'm well aware of that. Double dipping is kinda the bane of balancing for more than 1 year but it shouldn't stay forever.
Still, that's on best case scenario (Wither + Void Beacon) a stackable 2500 DoT from ED (+800 from skill itself) where you'll have 6500 from Blight under same conditions. Once insane double dipping disappear, Blight will do what it's supposed to do.

Blight + Controlled Destruction + Void Manipulation + Concentrated Effect (single target) + Empower + Rapid Decay vs Essence Drain + Controlled Destruction + Rapid Decay + Poison + Void Manipulation + Slower Projectiles (i guess ?)
First setup is a 60% More modifier compared to the second one (assuming 30% More damage for Empower)
so numbers would be 2500/stack (+800) for ED compared to 10K or so for Blight.

Tl ; dr : Blight isn't THAT weak. Double dipping to insane numbers is too strong.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

I think you've got the wrong idea about my thoughts on blight personally, firstly I'd never run it in isolation (i mentioned the 6 link as a throwout not as something i'd actually recommend), secondly why are you talking like it replaces ED + Contagion, literally its only use currently is to complement those two because spamming ED is extremely inefficient for added damage.

So you aren't comparing blight to ED + Contagion, your comparing (ED + Contagion) to (ED + Contagion + Blight), the 2nd comes out vastly ahead of the first because ED has a substantial duration anyway but is extremely inefficient to spam even with poison, you just cast blight instead of ED anytime you'd be spamming ED to stack poison previously.

The dps increase is big and you also don't have to run consuming dark which is another gain. In its current form though its so short ranged its basically unusable that is why i've been saying it needs a usability increase not a damage increase - my screenshot on the first page summarises the problem my hierophant there can basically cover the screen with a stormcall but he can only scale blight to cover about a third - the cone is too wide and far too short imo.

Its like i said in the first post it has an identity crisis, it was marketed as a chaos leveling skill but its only real use is for added dps on bosses if they are the kind you can stay close to. I'm hoping for some major changes to it before 2.5 tbh

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Iyacthu wrote:

6K becoming 10K because of the 60% More modifier with Blight setup compared to Essence Drain's one.
Just comparing ratio (800 becoming 2500 for ED base DoT indeed, forgot that, you're right)
Cospri on an Occultist build is really 'meh' imho and i just don't like Consuming Dark because of many wasted stats here. Would save a link though.

Played ED lategame without poison and it lacks damage indeed, but only COMPARED to some stupid combinations (Warchief, Blade Vortex mostly). It is just fine otherwise and the game should be revolved around 100K DPS rather than millions like it is currently. If you compare Blight to top skills, it is obviously SUPER weak. Not because the skill itself is (forgoing its low AoE), but because some others are overtuned. Just like Blade Flurry is for example ...
Blight would be really fine damage wise 2 years ago.