Hexblast

Lvl 89 Occultist hexblast + impending doom, stacking -cold res.
Warning: long post.

I'm using EE, Void beacon, Ele weakness and Frostbite with +5 doom to get the enemies cold res waay down. (This should get Sirius down to somwhere around -79% cold res, if I've done my math correctly, assuming 45 doom on frostbite.

Using Vixens Entrapment, I can trigger 4 additional curses (3 until i get +1 chest mod) besides my self-casted frostbite. The other curses are Ele weakness, Despair (for the added flat chaos), Enfeeble and Temp chains.

Using Doedre's scorn with 20% inc damage with hits and ailments per curse that should give an additional 100% inc damage with the hexblast.
I'm also using skitterbots to get that 36% more dmg with hits and ailments against chilled enemies + free shock. PoB shows an average of ~320k dmg per hit. Since it takes ~1.6 sec to let doom stack up to max we should get something like 200k dps.

Not very impressive but there's a lot of survivability build in with freezes, enfeeble, temporal chains etc, and I'm not going crit or ignite so there's some dmg potential missing there.

Well that was the idea at least, but...

About the skill mechanics:

I'm not sure the skill actually needs the built-in AoE from doom stacks at all since there are so many ways to get good clear by just combining the skill with impending doom, ignite prolif, soulrend or even poison prolif.

Using hexblast as a clearing skill alone is not very useful since it can't clear without a self-cast curse, requiring at least 2 clicks to clear a pack, and the AoE requires you to stack doom, making Impending Doom a much better choice anyway! All in all, hexblast is only really useful for single target dmg, but that is also where it performs the worst.

TL;DR: Hexblast is way cool and one of the most interesting skills in PoE currently. Really good for leveling and early maps in conjunction with Impending Doom, but barely useable above tier 10 maps because dmg fall-off. Can't imagine killing AL8 sirius with hexblast...
The change to make hexblast prioritize hexed enemies is nice, but it should probably also prioritise higher rarity monsters as well.


I suggest the following might be considered in trying to make hexblast a better and more unique skill:

I actually don't think that the base crit chance of the skill should be increased. Crit and low-life has always been the go-to for more dmg in end game, it would be nice to see some other alternatives that caters to other build archetypes. In this case, I think investments into curses should be the way to go for more end-game potential, the skill is called Hexblast after all.

And I gotta say , using Impending Doom with hexblast while clearing is one of the most satisfying things in PoE currently, almost better than the Automaton HoI mtx. Please add a similar mtx to Impending Doom <3

All in all, this has been one of my favourite builds of all my time playing PoE, and the coolest one since Poison-minions in breach. It has really interesting interactions and mechanics, and I especially the resistance and ailment stuff is here to stay.
I would really like to be able to take this skill all the way to Awakener lvl 8 Sirius. Especially since this league might be one of the best in a long time, at least once enough bugs are fixed so that I can actually run heists.

Hexblast is <3, it just needs some fixin'.

Please add a cast/hit sound to the skill, it's very quiet by itself... it's a wind-up nuke skill so something really punchy or fun for consuming a curse would be awesome.

I finally found out how to raise my Max Doom. Answer: raise a level 4 enhance to the maximum. It's level 8 now!

Check image to see how:

https://imgur.com/a/W56v6IY

I did a post earlier but i didn't know anomalous frostbite gave max doom lmao.

This is what I suggest now: Instead of giving 50% More damage per 5 Doom (for the hits), give it 10% More per Doom. My 1 Doom over 20 don't give me 10% damage, am I right? If someone from GGG sees this post, please confirm it with me!

I have now 61 total maximum doom and it's just OK. I got far more DPS for less currency with other builds. I can still push this build further... I'll give you some update later this league I guess.

Hello there GGG,

feedback Hexblast, its a skill with potential, but it is hard to build around it bc the character needs to have a lot of different sockets to make it work, which you doesn't have in early game, even later sometimes, the second problem is that, it doesn't feel good to play until you have the right and very expensive, hard to farm gear that it makes sad to play.

my suggestion is to implement a hex on hit a little bit like "Bane" (Applies Hexes from Curse Skill Gems) removing the need to uses a "hex touch support" gem, for that in the gem tag gotten "Hex" tag.

and the second part to make "Map Clear" feels a little bit better, just remove the lane (in own words) "only apply area of effect damage if Hexes are removed".

kind regards
JeckNoTree

"

JeckNoTree wrote:

my suggestion is to implement a hex on hit a little bit like "Bane" (Applies Hexes from Curse Skill Gems) removing the need to uses a "hex touch support" gem, for that in the gem tag gotten "Hex" tag.

You're using hexblast to apply a curse? I would say more than "don't do that" if I didn't feel like this skill was DOA.

Anyway, my feedback is that Hexblast can be bought from Clarrisa after crematorium, even though it is a level 28 gem.

Hexblast is a skill gem with the hex tag, but it isn't affected by curse gem level modifiers.

The most popular build for Hexblast is to go the Ignite route, which makes sense considering how with an Ignite build you just need to wait for your curse to hit max Doom stacks a single time before Hexblasting the enemy to do damage over several seconds.

In 3.16 the Elemental Overload keystone was changed to only boost the specific spell that crit instead of all your spells. While this change makes sense for most gems, it has left Hexblast in a bad spot since it has a base crit of only 4% and is not a skill you're meant to spam, considering you need to wait for max Doom stacks every time. Hexblast Ignite is also commonly done as an Archmage build, which makes it even more prohibitive to spam the skill hoping for a crit.

With 4% base crit and casting the spell once every second (using Doomsday to hit max Doom stacks) means you will crit once every 25 seconds on average in order to get the 8s buff which is only 24% uptime. In practice you will probably be casting it far less often than that since with Archmage each cast will cost upwards of 900 mana.

Please consider buffing Hexblast's ailment damage to compensate for our inability to maintain EO all the time.

I'm very sad with the current state of this skill. I loved playing Hexblast ignite, but all these curse changes and "improvements" of hexlbast made it very uncomfortable (basically dead) to self-cast.

The 1 sec cast time (and the increased mana cost) feels really bad. The character requires a heavy investment in cast speed in order to start to be "not too bad". Most of the skills that have slow cast speed have 0.8 or 0.85, I really don't understand why you hate hexblast this much.

I suggest to decrease the cast time to 0.8s or something. Currently, self-casting is a no-go, mines and traps ignore cast time anyway, and noone will CoC a 0.8s cooldown skill.

In the second part, I'm not entirely sure because I haven't done the math yet. However, I feel that the numerical changes made the ignite version even worse. With proper doom mechanic investment (which is now removed) the skill previosly had higher % value than the current one. The extra flat damage and slightly higher base damage % might end up giving the same amount of damage, but as I said, haven't done the math yet. Either way, this is not an improvement, but at least not a nerf (?).

Edit:
Additionally, the passive tree does not really help the new cast time of Hexblast. There are some new/moved "Curse skills have x% increased cast speed", but since Hexblast is currently not a curse skill(?), these passives have no effect on hexblast. And as I mentioned above, the character requires heavy investment in cast speed in order to reach a cast time that another skill has with 0 cast speed investment.

please return the skill to what it was before

The excessive power of the skill in conjunction with mines is very disappointing. This is all due to the fact that the possibility of interaction between Hexes and Hexblast has not been thought through.
Hexblast does not have the "Hits with this skill cannot apply Hexes" property like Lightning Conduit's. Based on this, the abuse of mechanics is born, and excessive damage is obtained for a negligible investment. Selfcasting is not encouraged in any way.