Energy Blade

It need to be instant cast spell

the way it cast is way too slow and unsatisfied.

Played a flicker strike energy blades character in 3.17. Character name archsith.
Was the first energy blades character to 100 in the league according to poe.ninja.

https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/whyBish/ArchSith?i=4&search=allskill%3DEnergy-Blade

To me the energy blades skill seems to be average power, neither over nor underpowered. It requires heavy investment in energy shield / intelligence so isn't great as a league start character. For levelling I was using minions and was hoping that https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Rallying_Cry would have done a lot more for the minions, but it was next to useless unfortunately.

New 3.19 ephemeral edge obsoletes energy blades completely. It gives exactly the same damage as energy blades without halving your energy shield, and (I assume) can be dual wielded to be twice as good as energy blades gem...

The gem is now completely obsolete...

When this skill came out I was hiped, it was like a light-saber skill concept. Has was said above, this skill was outclased by Ephemeral Edge. It needs more effects to be actually usable. I sugest:

1. Reduce maximum energy shield penalty from 50% -> 35%, if not in normal, maybe add an alternate quality to make this effect possible

2. Increase base attack speed, just to compete with ephemeral blade.

Nowadays it's a very, very hard skill to use, but I look forward in the next patch it would be improved

My biggest problem is the double impact of having your MAX ES reduced.
Sure you have less ES...but you also have less effective sustain on ES. Leach/Regen/Recharge that once scaled on a larger pool now adjust to a much smaller pool. It should be a reserve on ES and not a MAX reduction.

The 'Sword' only type is thematically cool, but as others have pointed out. Nodes that improve sword use are not on the same side of the tree as nodes that improve ES. So it becomes a burden on builds.


I love the concept, but dislike the implementation.

DoA skill that will never be resurrected.

It was deliberately released in the state worse than mediocre.

Years later it's still not worth using.

Neither Ghostwrithe nor Spellblade making it less shitty.

And the skill will always stay at this power level while Rallying Cry and Redblade Banner exist.

I would keep Energy Blade as a sword, and I would keep it mostly empty of modifiers. But I think it does need some more flexibility.

• Energy Blade counts as the weapon type of replaced weapon.
• Energy Blade copies implicit modifier of replaced weapon.
• Increases and reductions to Energy Blade’s physical damage also apply to its lightning damage.

The first two make the Energy Blade a unique weapon that can be built differently from any other (except Varunastra sort of).

The third allows the Energy Blade to benefit from nodes at the bottom of the tree that boost specifically the physical damage of given weapon types. Counting as an axe doesn’t do much good if all the nodes are multiplying your 0 physical damage. Making it deal physical damage that gets 100% converted to lightning damage would also work, but I think that gets wonky with Battlemage/Spellblade.

Speaking of, there needs to be a way for non-Inquisitors to get Battlemage that doesn’t come at the cost of an entire slot’s worth of Energy Shield.

I was playing a Eblade Smite Elementalist to lvl 98 in SSF TotA and Eblade Lightning Strike Chieftain in Blast from the Past and got to really love energy blade, I was also cooking up a chaos convert poison build for the next league.

Looking at the new quality changes really makes me scratch my head what is going on here.

Old: 10% MORE critical strike chance.(increase, but it is local to the energy blades)
New: 10% MORE effective energy shield.(after conversion to damage)

Now that would already be a nerf to a skill that basically nobody uses.
Considering the helmet enchant that also gave 15% MORE attack speed is gone, meanwhile other skills like Tornado Shot just got their useless base quality replaced by +1proj.

Even on a cast on crit build that stacks energy shield extremely high... you still have to compensate the missing crit chance and trigger frequency.

The trans gem might be stricly better than the base version? That would be surprising.
Doesnt motivate me at all to make a build for a playstyle with such many other conceptual downsides.

Edit: the latest compilation post made it more clear, im sure theres some build out there who benefits from that

Very powerful, but maybe not for actually hitting people.
The new quality makes easier to maintain a high energy shield, even with the blade turned on. The skill really benefits from getting linked to an enhance. Currently using an level 4 enhance in +1 gloves for 52% quality energy blade. This turns the 50% less energy shield into 37% less energy shield. With battlemage and spellblade support my energy blade is currently adding 686 to 13694 lightning damage to spells. With inquisitor getting so much crit from the ascendency the old quality was unneeded anyway.

Looking to leaguestart EB for 3.24. I can PoB a 1billion dps build for about 50 divines (as long as the league isn't inflated like affliction).