Chain Hook

I agree that being able to force yourself to remain in one place would improve this skill tremendously. As it is You have to be really accurate to pick out a mob in a pack, and it takes some tricky positioning of your mouse to do so.

I use it as my mainskill, approaching 90 ssf.

Meanwhile I got used to Chain Hook and I have to admit I love that Ferrari of a skill, with all its weirds quirks and features.


Typically I use the skill such that I click on one target and then i keep pressing the mouse button basically 'forever'* and just hovering near where I want to get flickered to.
*:

Keeping button pressed works but it took me a while to figure it out. I tried more clicking as well as shift clicking (with shift-click@character when I want to supress moving(works)) but nothing felt really good, until i stopped clicking and just started to keep the button pressed.

And its fun. I can easily queue other skills in between, mouse button pressed all the time. It feels really engaging, it feels like an active, not braindead playstyle with a ceratin degree of mouse movement and targeting. Basically I play a "dps-rotation" with 4 different skills (chain hook +3 others that queue on a few seconds time scale) plus flasks. It feels fast, it feels good. I love it.



Sometimes when delving I feel I have no control for a moment, but in most other situations I am fine with it. And also encounters where enemies spawn far away from each other feel lackluster with this skill. I then typically just pop a vaal-ancestral-warchief, place some bloodstorms and take a sip of coffee.

Things like increased area and increased area damage seems to be non functional or wrongly communicated within the skillgem text.

Furthermore I have never observed such a thing that I am facetanking something and then suddenly get teleportet away or so, like other people describe here.

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Nizreb915 wrote:

I agree that being able to force yourself to remain in one place would improve this skill tremendously. As it is You have to be really accurate to pick out a mob in a pack, and it takes some tricky positioning of your mouse to do so.

Seems this was addressed a bit in the last patch , not as bad .. However if you want to make this skill great do as this man suggests . When you attack within radius and of where yer cursor is , you need to just deal damage in the direction of the cursor .

Thanks for hearing us out if you're listening .

I haven't tested the skill as main damage source, I assume it would be "too specific" to be enjoyable. But I really like current skill mechanics, the fact it has Arc-like autoaim at short distance, the fact it can pull your character screen across if you used the skill with a proper namelocking even if the target has dashed at the same time, this awesome "snipe and shot yourself at target" "you can't get away from me" feeling based on successful aiming and predicting enemies' actions. It's a better version of flicker strike for this certain purpose. It's slower, it has better range and it's involving you much more into the fight.

I'd suggest to add a feature to the skill (via item, jewel or basic mechanics), it seems pretty suitable:

While Berserking pulling the enemy to you instead

Tried this skill out and when it works, its great, but it has some serious problems otherwise.

The first is that the damage area is noticeably smaller than, say, conc path, and also really hard to figure out what the shape actually is. Testing the shape in the hideout, it looks like a 90 degree cone in front of the player and a shorter 180 degree cone behind the player, with gaps directly to the side. Actually playing the skill makes me feel like this is true because going through a big pack feels like I miss half of them when theyre to my sides.

Which brings me to the second problem, this skill is great when you manage to take down the entire pack, but its hot garbage when youre dealing with isolated mobs. Going through an indoor map where mobs are forced to be in front of your AoE feels awesome because you feel like a mob lawnmower, but it feels awful when you kill the most of the pack in 2 attacks then spend another 3-4 trying to clean up the stragglers. It would feel way better if you extended that frontal cone to be 180 degrees, to at least let players mow down a pack without having to deal with the handful of mobs that dont get hit by the damage cone. Id be fine with losing damage behind me for an expanded frontal cone.

The third problem is targeting. Ive had many occasions where I hold the button towards, say, the left side of the screen, and the skill decides that what I wanted to do is ping-pong left and right between two mobs. I would highly prefer if this followed conc path rules where if the cursor isnt next to an enemy, you dont move. Or at the very least dont make it go opposite of the cursor direction, cmon.

The last problem is that targeting destructibles feels terrible and I hate it. Theres nothing less fun than hooking onto a barrel a mile away from the pack and I cant think of a single instance where you would want to target a destructible.

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Nizreb915 wrote:

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09xx wrote:

2. the chain repeats with multistrike if no monster is hit

I'm not sure why you would put multistrike on this skill?

The skill felt a little clunky at first, but it is beginning to grow on me. you definitely have to be a little more accurate where you click with this skill. I just hit level 65 and it is starting to feel much smoother and faster. It promotes it's own rhythm of attack for sure.

Well I answered my own question, because I just put multistrike support in and it works really well with this skill. It seems to calm the jumping around randomly a little bit, and lands several strikes on whatever you were aiming at.

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Controlvolume wrote:

The last problem is that targeting destructibles feels terrible and I hate it. Theres nothing less fun than hooking onto a barrel a mile away from the pack and I cant think of a single instance where you would want to target a destructible.

Try using it in the lab. You can chain clear across some traps by hooking onto stuff on the other side. I had a lot of fun with this during a few of my lab runs.

As other people have mentioned, targeting needs work. This just happened to me in a colosseum map. I had my cursor a little in front of the boss, not directly on the boss (I was well within hitting range), but my attacks would only go as far as my cursor. If there's only one target, my attacks should hit at max range.

I've tried chain hook while leveling my first character this league (initially dual sword jugger). I think there's a lot of potential for this skill through some threshold jewels, as well as using it as an utility/movement supportive tool rather than a main skill (for example; using it for quickly clearing white/blue packs and jumping between them, while also generating rage without the need of the support gem), but unfortunately chain hook gets easily outperformed by many other melee skills.

Pros:
- Very fun to play with in early stages of the game - when your character's mobility is lackluster.
- Works nicely with close combat support.
- Super fast rage generation.

Cons:
- Often extremely frustrating in later stages of the game due to wacky targeting. This is very noticeable during abyss and legion encounters, as well as many boss fights.
- The latching animation feels slow.
- Totally outperformed by similar "blink+attack" skills like Consecrated Path, Flicker Strike or Shield Charge.

I made a build with this skill with the patch. I started it as a 86 berserker. I'm now level 94 and the overall performance of the skill is a problem.

Wasted character actions with missed chains. Can get you killed. Hall of grandmasters is impossible and highlights how bad the targeting is.

It also makes fights with add phases like uber elder. Not a fight with them but a fight with targeting stuff, missing chains that don't do anything wastes time.

The skill should perform like a melee skill and not a projectile one. Throwing out a chain that doesn't hit anything. Is counterproductive to how hectic the game can be. I don't want missed chain to move me. I just don't want to swing for no reason.