Purifying Flame

Giventhis is a physical + fire themed spell, it fits the Chieftans story very well. But it is not available as a quest reward for the Chieftan.

I think it would be really cool if this spell was more easily obtainable by marauders. For example as quest reward or sold in A1.
I also thing the spell doesn't fit the fantasy of the shadow. It is way to flashy for a shadow. Therefore being sold to a shadow in A1 is abit odd.

Used this on a chieftain as my main skill (Xen_PF). It was clunky as I leveled, but as cast speed increased (with spell echo) it became alot smoother.

My only issues with this skill were due to its cost. I had to seek alternatives to mana, I invested into increased mana, mana regen, mana cost reduction AND mana on gear, but it was still not enough to sustain a 6 link (it cost around 100 mana per cast with a cast speed of 0.15 or so). A Covenant solved that issue though.

I'm really impressed by this skill's utility in a CWDT setup for spreading consecrated ground. Using a sulfur flask was a little iffy, both because of demand for flask slots and the difficulty of sustaining charges.

Mine is at level 12 (CWDT at level 3) but you could scale it back a few levels and still get exceptional coverage. On a dominating blow build that is gem starved due to running a lot of auras, (DominionatingBlow in Standard) this won out over Bone / Flesh offering because of how well it supported both me and my minions. (Zealot's Oath to allow the regen to apply to my larger ES)

Hello Stacey_GGG from GGG and all of the community,

can "Purifying Flame" move faster by Default and have a bigger area of effect?

And is it possible to not "Shockwave deals 25% less Damage"?
The standard Impact effect is not as pleasing as "Consecrated Path".

Also both of them are hurting my eye sight, they are so nice skills but the flickering screen hurt very much. :(
(can it be a Little darker or not so strong in contrast?)

thank you and take care, you guys are nice People, thanks for reading. :)

kind regards
JeckNoTree

Visual effect is excessive.
While it's combined with high aoe and/or high cast rate you literally can't see shit.
Did the person who made it even know it's meant to be paired with Consecrated ground? This is the same level of depressing visual clutter as old magma orb had.

Do people even read this? I hope so.
At least some input to give to staff would be pretty cool.

I am not/rarely talking about the transfigured gem here, because while it is (obviously) much worse for hit-builds, it seems to have at least some merit in ignite builds (although the damage seems rather low there too on poeninja/pob), which i haven't tested yet.
PF is a Gem i've played for 4 Characters over 3 Leagues now. Depending on the build the damage gets to around 15-60 million with mageblood and decent investment (500-1000 divs ish).

Since the clear ability of the standalone skill is absolute garbage, you are kind of forced to cast it via cwdt as a supportive skill for the consecrated ground or if you want it as your main damage source with cast on crit.
Why is the clear bad? Well, you stand still, risk getting killed, cast the spell and the 90 degrees of the screen you are facing/casting towards get targeted. The Character moves slowly due to having to animate the cast and while enemies dont usually come from all sides, you would need usually more than one PF to clear the current situation, which isnt ideal. It CAN be played but as a very slow build with spell echo, possibly arcane surge and the like. Another problem with casting that way is that you don't create consecrated ground under yourself, while you usually want it both under you and your enemy. This somewhat gets solved by totem builds utilizing this skill but all the ones i've seen (around 10 over the 4 Leagues i've been looking) have had rather bad dps output. (mostly sub-million, which can clear, but with MB investment feels horrible)

Another big issue with Purifying Flame is that it just costs too much mana.

While having to run one of either clarity, non-channeling skills cost less mana, 10% skill cost reduction from mana mastery, the skill cost to life cost conversion of the life mastery, inspiration support or mana leech or two of them is the norm for most builds nowadays (that dont use weird cast/attacking ways like spending ES/only life), Purifying Flame needs four to five!!!!! of these methods.
I found that pre-Mageblood it is best to run the Mana-Mastery, two -7 mana cost rings and a preferably level 20 Clarity aura alongside the inspiration support (thats 4, 5 if you count each ring individually). When you run Arcane Surge, so a non-CoC build, you may need less but as said, the clear suffers a lot.
In endgame, Mageblood is required to sustain PF's cost while mapping because the flask mana cost reduction is really strong and replaces 2 to 3 of the other cost-reductions, which you can replace with damage/defenses. With MB, you suddenly have a free aura because clarity is superfluous and three passive tree points because of the mana mastery for example, which is huge.

All in all the scalings for the skill are rather weak (although the high effectiveness of added damage lets you play around with abyss jewel stack, which is pretty unique) and since it feels much better to play with CoC than by self-casting, taking away two support gems for Cyclone and CoC support (or taking away support gems for a potential totem build even) in my example feels very bad. The highest damage recorded on poeninja was around 55 Million on a 50k EHP elementalist, which for high-end content pops like a bubble (the build was definitely ignoring defences in favor of damage, probably for bossing). (Still impressive damage for a skill this bad). The most scalings seem to come from Gem-levels since the Base-Damage of the skill is okay. I've gotten the skill to level 29/30 myself and it seems to be the best strat for all builds (probably even ignite).

Since literally nobody (except me and like 5 other people on poeninja, so probably me and 20 other people in actuality) plays this gem (theres been a few people playing the new version with ignite but i'm not talking about that one, despite it also being outperformed), i believe changing it/buffing it would make sense.

1: Removing the "that were not already hit"-line seems either broken or decent, i dont know if the waves are coded in a way that they deal damage from the aoe of the PF cast outwards or from the middle of the aoe out. If they deal damage from the very middle - broken. if they deal damage from the outside - barely a buff, but maybe a nice QoL?

2: The other obvious buff choice is of course lowering the cost, which i would recommend. Probably even a 20% cost reduction would make a PF character already a lot less high-end-gear dependant and make them more defensive.

3: Another buff could be even more damage/effect of added damage but while you do hit harder, the issues why nobody is playing/having fun with the gem still exist, similar to 1.

4: adding an additional effect could work. It was sad for me to see that when i swapped my replica dragonfangs for one with +3 to wave of conviction, with no other changes (except swapping the PF gem for the WoC gem of course), the skills DPS skyrocketed. Granted, WoC is a tiny bit lower AoE and can only be active one at a time, it still massively outpeforms PF in damage. Look at the difference between DoT dmg of WoC and PF's alt-gem for example (WoC on-hit seems rare so i wont compare). Similar to the Zealotry modifier on a Watchers eye, PF could have increased Damage/Crit Multi/penetration (on consecrated ground/in general, with on consecrated ground probably being the more timid buff) for a much better experience. Even a non-damage effect, like enemies on consecrated ground hit by PF are blinded (since the skill is a literal wave of divine fire) would be nice, since it would give the player more defences and thus more options. Monsters hit by PF have less accuracy (due to being hit with a massive solar beam) would be another idea that would fit the skill.

To get to the end: No people play this skill, despite it being really cool and promising, because playing it/making it work is incredibly frustrating + tedious and once you've made it work, the currency spent would allow many other builds to double/triple a PF char's DPS or be way more tanky with similar DPS.

Of course i know balancing gems isn't the focus of the game/devs atm but a simple addition of a Line or a change in cost/damage effectiveness would make the skill more popular and more fun to use.
Granted, the skill does not have any MTX, which is why it most likely gets ignored. A recolor to purple as an idea alongside a change to the gem to get people to play it would probably not be a bad business idea, although that is speculation on my part.

I hope somebody at GGG reads this and even if nothing happens, i'd hope to give at least some inspiration/push this rather forgotten skill back into people's mind.