Storm Rain

Hey,

The helm enchant and anomalous skill gem quality for increasing beam frequency also decrease the duration (despite the fact the gem doesn't have a duration tag)

This skill gem doesn't scale particularly well (its effective and added damage is quite low) so i am already heavily invested into Crit Chance/Crit Multi/Elemental damage/Elemental pen & Attack Speed just to get sufficient numbers from it.

When you put into the mix the Increased Beam Frequency and lower the duration of the gem you are doing the same damage you did previously but over a shorter time span BUT WAIT YOUR NOT because suddenly your arrows are lasting so much shorter and so you then need an exponentially higher attack speed in order to reap any benefit from the increased beam frequency.

I currently have:
Base 1 arrow
GMP + 5 arrows
Bow + 1 arrows
Quiver + 1 arrows
For a total of 8 arrows, that means i need to attack 12.5 times to cap out 100 arrows.
My Beam frequency is now at 0.27seconds and the arrows fire 4 beams before disappearing.
I have 1.08 seconds to fire 12.5 times just to hit arrow cap (0.08 shots a second) I think i fire 0.3 times a second right now.

If the gem had a fixed duration of 2 seconds then reducing the beam frequency would make sense.
Or if the gem gained extra beams while leveling it could also make sense (like +2-3 beams by lvl 20/21)

the mechanics for the beam portion of storm rain are not clear.

It doesn't look like increased aoe scales the beam radius (in order to get more overlaps).

also on hit effects do not seem to work with the beam portion (life gained on hit nor mana gained on hit).

however you still get corrupted blood stacks which is on hit. so does the beam hit or doesn't it?

Simply put the skill is only nice on paper. That fancy note aside, it's garbage.

Maybe it was conceptualized prior to all the nerfs and it handled itself well, but even with 30+ex worth of gear it just doesn't cut it. Forget about dealing consistent damage to mobile targets like Medved. It generally tickles high-end content - even with double setup using both self-cast and focused ballistae.

Generally very disappointed. But that seems to be the trend with new skills.

EDIT: tried to make it work really, really hard. All it's good at is applying on-hit effects on stationary bosses. I have no idea how GGG even thought reaching 100 arrows was plausible. Mines, I guess?

It absolutely sucks compared to any other bow skill that has proper AOE. Even Rain of Arrows has better clear and more balanced/guaranteed damage than the RNG the beams are. Unless major changes - buffs - are introduced, I see it as another DoA skill.

Hitting 100 arrows is not the problem.

The damage/spread is the problem. (also visuals but that is getting fixed)

Even if you should manage to push the boss into a corner and aim at your feet the projectiles will spread through half the room and 80% of the projectiles will miss the boss.

The damage potential is super low. It doesn't scale much with gem levels and has among the worst base %/effectiveness of added damage of all bow gems. Even a fairly bad single target skill like Lightning Arrow does 10x the damage to bosses than Storm Rain even with the same support gems as Storm Rain (which is highly suboptimal for LA).

I have tried this on standard with lots of legacy items. Sofar I have had most success with a Raider using MOM and mana scaling with sigil of power/arcane cloak + Mind of the council + flat added damage (Karvarousky's brew). Not until I smacked in a true Legacy reach of the council + legacy inpulsa, awakened gems and legcy flasks I felt I did ok damage to clear high tier maps. The map bosses were a nightmare though. 5+ minutes to kill a map boss with that kind of gear is laughable at best.

I hope you will buff the damage and REALLY test the skill along with the changes coming to the visual part next patch

Here is a visual representation. Note this character has had some of the items removed for other build projects so the mana pool is not representative. It is only inteded to show off the arrow spread.



As you can see I intentionally went into a crammed area in my hideout to pretend I got a boss into an ideal spot. Shooting at my feet still covers almost the enire screen from top to bottom. Who designed this? Did no alarm clock ring? HOW can this pass QA?

The beam damage type is unclear and cost me a lot of wasted time. The gem says the beam deals AoE damage. So, a reasonable person would interpret the arrow to do projectile hit damage, but then the beam does only AoE damage like said on the gem. However, Mark says something different here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/ooedlq/questions_thread_july_21_2021/h66rnh3/?context=10

So, beams count as projectile damage AND AoE damage. This isn't clear at all. Not to mention a beam of lightning isn't a projectile in real life, just like Arc isn't considered a projectile in game. Arc is the closest analog, so again, a reasonable person would conclude they behave similarly (except for the fact that it is clearly NOT a chaining beam since it lacks the 'chaining' tag, so that is all good).

Toxic Rain has the line:

"

Modifiers to Projectile Damage apply to this Skill's Damage Over Time effect

I would suggest adding similar text to this gem, like:

"

Modifiers to Projectile Damage apply to this Skill's Beam effect

Another update: Even with a build that is nearing a mirror worth of investment (sc expedition), the only thing this can do well is kill bosses.

Clear is absolutely abysmal. Blue packs never take a single attack to die, not to mention rares. LA just does everything better; hell, even Galvanic Arrow (HELLO, GGG? CAN YOU RENAME THE THREAD ALREADY FROM SHRAPNEL SHOT?) is better.

There needs to be scaling to aoe radius of beams and the beams amount to make this a skill worth considering, not just the pulse frequency.

And another portion of feedback, probably the last one.

What kind of PC did you test this skill on and did you even attempt to run it with good gear, high attack speed and in semi-juiced/juiced up maps?

It's a lag hellhole. When I normally have stable 60 FPS, I just drop them to 3-5 in certain situations. Like, when I reach max arrow cap the game becomes unplayable outside of arenas with a single boss.

It's an absolute joke. The skill cries for an overhaul and effect culling.

I tried this skill with a cast-on-crit setup. I noticed that nova skills are cast around the caster, while non-nova skills are cast where the arrow had landed. For non-nova skills, however, after becoming a certain distance from the landed arrow, all spells become cast around the character. I don't understand why the cast location of the triggered spell would have to change, can't it just be one or the other?

I sort of wish this had some interaction with Spark.