Wither does not work with direct chaos damage

Wither does not work properly or not at all with direct chaos damage. I do not know if that is intended or not. The wording of the skill description clearly implies that it should work for direct chaos damage.

Some feedback from GGG would be appreciated.

Background: I have tried using Wither totem and empirically found it to be less useful than expected.

So I did some systematic tests. First some informal tests vs some of the undead in act 2 Fellshrine ruins. In Fellshrine I used Rain of Arrows with "Added Chaos Damage".
Then against the lion statues in Merciless "The Grand Arena". In Grand Arena I used Ethereal Knives spell lvl 1 with lvl 19 "Added Chaos Damage" (+controlled destruction and faster projectiles). Close to 100% of the damage is from the chaos damage. I verified that by removing the "Added Chaos Damage".

I tested with Wither totem and without Wither totem. I let a full stack count build up before casting EK of course. My totem produces approximately 20 stacks.
The number of casts required to kill a lion statue:
No Wither: 18, 18, 18, 18, 18
Wither Totem: 17, 17, 15, 17

This is consistent with the informal RoA tests. It clearly shows that Wither does not work as expected for direct chaos damage. Basically it is useless for direct chaos damage.

Side note: Also did some informal tests with poison and Wither works with that. The results were not as good as I expected from my calculations though so I may be looking into that in more detail yet.

Posted this first in https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1498009/page/4 which is probably not the correct place so I made a thread here after finding this forum.

Not sure what part you say doesn't work. Clearly the monsters took less EK hits to kill when you had wither on them than when you didn't. Without actual numbers, I can't say for sure your hits did 7% more damage or not, but it would appear it worked correctly.

"

mark1030 wrote:

Not sure what part you say doesn't work. Clearly the monsters took less EK hits to kill when you had wither on them than when you didn't. Without actual numbers, I can't say for sure your hits did 7% more damage or not, but it would appear it worked correctly.

The monsters had ~20 stacks of Wither on them. So the damage taken should be approximately 20 * 7% = 140% MORE. You are right in that it looks like only one stack "counts". But this is not how it is supposed to work. It is supposed to stack. The stacking can also be seen on the monsters.

Edit: The number of tests done is insufficient to conclude that one stack "counts". The testing is enough to be sure it does not work as expected (2.4 times the damage) though.

i didn't think that's how the gem worked. I thought the 7% was constant and the hinder effect that slows them is the only thing that stacks. But I haven't used it so I'm probably wrong.

"

mark1030 wrote:

i didn't think that's how the gem worked. I thought the 7% was constant and the hinder effect that slows them is the only thing that stacks. But I haven't used it so I'm probably wrong.

The stacking does work for Chaos DoT damage (at least from poison) leading to a massive increase of Chaos DoT damage (not just the 7%). The description also says "stacking". The problem here is that it does not work like that for direct Chaos damage which (according to the description) it should.

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

Thanks for the report. Increased Chaos Damage Taken is indeed not working correctly for hits. This will be fixed in a future patch.

Ok. Thanks for the feedback.

It will make the already strong random_skill + direct_Chaos (unique or gem) + poison + void (double dip) + wither (double dip then) + trap/mine/conc/more_trap/xyz (double dipping too) way too strong compared with anything else one can do with low investment in damage passives. It is also universally applicable == immune to map mods and big boss mods. Hope this will be balanced better in the future.

I was wondering why it felt completely useless with self-cast chaos incinerate.

Want to make it castable by trigger gems and useable with Spell Echo while you're at it?

"

RickyDMMontoya wrote:

Want to make it castable by trigger gems and useable with Spell Echo while you're at it?

It's a channeled spell so it won't work with triggers. With spell echo it would be way too OP, you could get to 40 stacks in 2 seconds pretty easily, which is 280% more damage.