Skill Gem Reveal: Blight

well... the music in the video was nice...

I'm going to echo some others. For the amount of delays, this one is pretty lackluster. Scorching ray seems okay but lacking in unique set up potential. Blade Flurry will be a CoC machine.

I suppose this puts the number of chaos skills on the level with wand skills, but frankly I would have rather seen a wand channeled skill over Blight which looks like an animation in cartoons when someone has bad breath.

You guys really ought to revamp existing skills before releasing any new ones. Blight just looks like a better version of Lightning Tendrils.

You know a skill is bad and forgotten when the closest comparison most people can think of is Incinerate.

Standing still is a good idea.

Gotta agree. Scorching ray is cool, but this and Blade Flurry seem pretty bad.

For this skill, again, it's just not innovative or really inspired. It's basically recycling a whole bunch of mechanics to create a new spell. Chaos lightning tendrils... overuses dot damage type present in all chaos spells... stacks like blade vortex. Not exciting at all.

I can easily make like 5 different variations of this skill that are more interesting off the top of my head right now. Rather than hit a 'whole area' at once like lightning tendrils:

1.) Shoot out 'surges' of chaos damage in arcs toward where you're aiming. The surges would look like your typical chaotic energy wave and arc left or right at curved angles to reach the target.

2.) Click and hold to fire surges of energy away from your body, kind of like vaal spark. However, this time you're controlling how long the cast lasts because you're channeling. The surges of energy won't home and fire out randomly in the full 360 degrees around caster. And, hell, you could even tag the projectile tag on it and have it function like barrage where additional projectiles fires more waves faster, which would also scale with cast speed as well.

3.) Perhaps less inspired, because of caustic arrow, I think a 'poison cloud' effect would just have been a better spell overall. As you channel the spell, the concentration of the poison cloud would increase and it would spread to a larger area. The damage would be greater in the center and lower on the outside, and as time passes, the poison cloud dissipates and all of its damage lowers. But, this would be a 'chaos cloud', not poison cloud.

Well, I'll stop at 3 since you get the point.

Sure, the mechanics can be compared to other skills. Like, my first example can be compared to glacial cascade. But, the amount of difference between the two is substantially greater than that of lightning tendrils and blight. And, if my first example is really 'too similar' to glacial cascade or some other skill, you could just easily add something like a 'chaos trail' to it that persists once the 'blight passes' (thematically makes sense). The trail would damage monsters in the area and after a short time the blight trail will fade away from the tail end to the front.

But, like, idk. Blight is just disappointing. Still going to try it, but it just feels completely uninspired. *shrug*

disappointed.

This used to be a fun sandbox game and we all know the most fun and creative skills in this game are projectiles or massive aoe for most part of the ppl yet GGG decided to introduce this new "channeled" system that honestly sux.

we need more projectiles and aoe skills GGG, no channeled.



Make PoE great again.

This patch been taking awhile :D

why are all the new skills all AOE in nature.. what has happened to this game over the years. I mean I see great progress, but these skills are not exactly new.. in many ways. How about some work on melee, how about a revision of the skill tree, how about a lot of things like better trade system. I'm not gonna be fooled into anything with revamped skills with different colors. I'm hating and I know it.. The next league will make or break me with this game. I haven't even been back to playing it that long. I saw progress, but I s also see staleness with this everything AOE approach that seems to be the constant normal now.

Extremely underwhelming.

Looks like Chaos tendrils, as already mentioned, requires you to be in melee range while not being able to leech and is furthermore capped to 20 stacks giving it a probably fairly easy to reach stack ceiling from where on out you can only scale from bland damage increases.

How is this supposed to compete with skills like BV or really any ignite? If at least it was a chaos spell that HITS for chaosdamage for once - no, just another dot...

And here i imagined something epic like a pulsing Poison-nova that increases in aoe as its channeled, only to go BOOM into a huge poison cloud once released. Or a channeled shower of chaos meteors hitting random targets in radius just like herald of thunder. Endless possiblities and we get... this!?

"

Sarno wrote:

That animation looks extremely... flat. Would it be possible to maybe vary the height of the waves, adjust the pitch of some of them or... well, something? It looks kind of weird in the video tbh.

I would image that they make the original skill looks bad, then have some cool looking mtx.

I want to like this skill, but...

1) Can't leech.
2) Doesn't hit (so no Poison, added damage, or other on-hit effects).
3) Can't crit.
4) Low range.
5) Standing still.
6) It's a chaos skill, so the base damage is probably dogshit.

But at least you can scale the AOE size? But probably not the AoE damage, because GGG logic.

Sorry guys, but these new skills are falling flat really hard. The damage on these things needs to be absurdly high to justify all the downsides, even just the downside of being a channeled skill.

INB4 the next skill is a bow skill that breaks the game completely.