Wave of Conviction

Exposure duration could be longer than frost bomb exposure considering frost bomb pulses for additional ~1.5 (base) seconds which refresh the 5s duration. But it is 4 seconds instead. At least it gets some free inc duration from gem level.

Skill is a decent support skill but needs some aoe investment to be consistent for general clear just to have the wave move fast enough.

One thing I felt is a bit unfair:
I feel at if you want to consistently apply lightning exposure you will need phy-light gem or use a low level wave (means you don't get the skill duration) + some sources of flat lightning damage. Comparatively using fire exposure you typically running herald of ash which grants much more fire damage compared to wrath's lightning if not using phy-light unless your tree/gear only scales lightning and not much physical/spell. Considering fire also gets combustion as another support.

I can see this being a non problem on much higher invested characters with say, gain phys as lightning wrath watcher's eyes/have lots of other sources of lightning pen and not fire pen or just characters that intend to scale physical spells (taking templar Divine Wrath nodes for example), but for classic lightning/spell damage builds it is requires just a bit more (typically 1 link) than everyone else to get that lightning exposure.

I like this spell a lot and it's easily one of my favorite new spells, however I would like to know if the elemental resistance reduction on it stacks with curses like Elemental Weakness and Conductivity...

I've been using it as a damage dealing spell mostly, but I wanted to try to add Conductivity + Curse on Hit to it, while using Smite on my Templar, but I'm not sure the curse will stack with the resistance reduction of the spell itself.

While the spell in general is fairly clunky to use it has one significant mechanical flaw that makes it far more annoying to use than neccessary. It seems the spell originates slightly in front of the character as the tip of a cone, which means any enemy standing just in front of you but ever so slightly to the side will fail to get hit by the spell, despite them graphically clearly standing in the wave.
Compare to a spell like Freezing Pulse which is wide at it's point of origin or Fireball which has a hitbox that would make it explode, Wave of conviction needs it actual damage area to be wider where it emanates from the character, or to have the cone moved backwards a bit so that enemies standing on your toes don't just stand there looking at the fireworks without taking any damage.

I didn't realize there were separate threads for feedback on each skill, or maybe i did and had forgotten. Here is my post i made in the other feedback forum.

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Hey GGG, been playing wave of conviction self cast this league, and i love both it and the fact that you tried to build a spell build around slow casting, instead of the constant just build as much speed as possible of almost every build ever.

Firstly, there is a gap in front of the player when casting where enemies simply avoid all damage. Making the spell dangerous to use, as well as annoying, as it makes the spell less satisfying. Please fix this soon.


As for the skill itself. I'd suggest two changes. Firstly, implement a reason to cast the spell at a slower pace, by having the spell do more damage the further it travels. Sort of an opposite to the way ground slam works currently.

Second, the spell moves to slowly to cast it at a slow pace, plus it would be nice to be able to use it with cast when channeling, without it having its duration reduced by the faster casting. So maybe have the wave speed increased by increasing duration. Fast enough that cwc wont cast a second copy until the first is gone (with some more increased duration than the gems own increases, so as to need investment), but not fast enough to make high cast speeds worth it.

Thank you for the new skills and storm burst rework by the way, they are quite fun.

Then there was a post about not increasing the damage of the skill, but also agreeing about the skill missing mobs randomly. Then i replied again.

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I didn't mean an increase in damage, but rather a redistribution. I've been thinking about it more, and im starting to think maybe the enemies that are not being hit by the skill have some spell block/spell dodge, and given the nature of the spell, thats pretty dangerous. However i think i came up with an idea on how to fix my concerns with the skill, and the added danger of missing enemies.

It's a wave of conviction, so what if the spell left behind burning ground similar to that of flame dash, that dissipated at the same duration as the wave. IE, once the wave hits the end of its travel time, the wave decays from its start point as the same speed the wave created it.

This not only would look fantastic i think, but would alleviate every issue ive had self casting the spell.

Originally i would have said consecrated ground, but not only would that clash with purifying flame and consecrated path, it wouldn't help the issue of missing enemies with a slow casting spell.

As for my build; I'm using chieftain with the leach and phys taken as fire damage nodes. Am almost level 90, almost 100% phys to fire conversion. Nothing special item wise, just meginords vise for the strength and regen, and doon cueb for strength stacking. Builds pretty basic, but pretty solid also.

After more play with the skill, it's apparent now that it is definitely just missing enemies sometimes. Not even melee range only. I've now seen it completely miss worms and rats of all kinds, as well as regular and on occasion rare enemies.

I think it's safe to assume rats and worms dont have spell block?

I played a self-cast Wave of Conviction Elementalist and here are some of my thoughts.

Some pros:
+Extremely high base damage and damage effectiveness.
+Wave mechanic downplays the need for area, I saw no real AoE difference when using a Concentrated Effect support.
+A one-tap playstyle for spells which thematically fits Harvest's slam rework.

Some cons (and how I dealt with them):
-Damage split between lightning and fire (Elementalist herald penetration).
-Only 1 wave allowed (I got into a flow of casting this then leap slamming with the traveling wave)
-You need to spam for single target, you only have 1 wave, you have to be pretty close (proper positioning for bosses as well as Elementalist's defensive golem buffs like phys reduction and life regen)
-Weird blind spot very close to you (as a few mentioned in this thread I did notice there was a weird blind spot near you, no real fix there except a GGG fix)

Overall, you play this if you want a different playstyle from other spell skills. You have to get into a one-tap mind set while building and playing this. Clear actually isn't bad and since you stack a lot of generic elemental damage you benefit heavily from Inpulsa or explodey chests.

I've tried this as both a witch and templar (usually level 30ish, since you acquire it in Act 3), and I almost always drop it because it's not viable as an offensive skill.

- Not all the physical damage is converted to fire and lightning, which means you're splitting damage three ways.

- It also means you have to traverse the passive skill tree for nodes which convert phys to elemental for optimal numbers.

This isn't that inconvenient for the witch's local passive tree, but for the templar it's a hassle.

- You can only apply one exposure with each hit, just because.

Opinion: You can squeeze more damage out of other skills with less investment and without the hardwired exposure limitation, so there's little reason to use WoC except aesthetics.


Recommendations

1. Maybe increase the physical damage conversion to 50% for fire and lightning.

2. Scrap the exposure limit.

3. Scrap limit on number of WoCs

4. Adjusting casting time and mana cost to whatever GGG feels is appropriate to scale with the other changes.