Stormcaller Arrow anti-synergy with pierce

Hello,

The way Stormcaller Arrow works right now is it attaches to a target and then deals an AoE hit after a short period, sort of how Earthquake works. The damage is largely back loaded in the secondary hit. However, if you have pierce, the secondary effect only triggers on the last target. Considering pierce is available from the skill tree, picking these nodes effectively bricks the ability because it will only do the pitiful initial hit damage to the first target. Please consider a change to make this skill not self sabotage by getting innate pierce;

- Make it not pierce at all. This can constrain future room for growth but currently pierce makes this skill completely useless.
- Make the effect proc on the first hit. Could be unintuitive but would at least allow the skill to function.
- Add a support that has cannot pierce modifier. I hope it doesn't come to this but something like this could also work.

Thanks for reading. Best regards.

Tentative bump to hopefully bring visibility. Normally wouldn't do this but things are moving very fast in the feedback forum.

Agreeing with this, incredibly frustrating. While the interaction might make literal sense in how the tooltip is worded - it makes no sense game design-wise.

Having pierce in your passive tree should not brick this ability - I'd suggest either having pierce do nothing for the ability (probably the safe/balanced choice) or have it pierce but trigger a bolt on any/first enemy it passes through as well as where it embeds.

Agreed. I think having it trigger on the first target it hits is the simplest solution.

I've come to the forum specifically to write about this.

I'm torn between changing my lightning build to be able to play with some of those nice piercing passives, or stick with lightning and avoid all the passives.
Since Stormcaller Arrow is one of the best (if not THE best) single target damage skill, having it sabotaged by pierce would destroy an entire build.

The best solution in my opinion is to just make the skill not pierce ever.

Going to say, working as intended, though it is a bit of a noob trap, since how early pierce is present in the ranger tree

There's only 1 skill in lightning ranger builds that wants pierce and doesn't already have it. and there's a support gem to give it force pierce.

pierce is just not designed to be a universal good trait. It also bricks detonating arrow and gas arrow. With the trade off of being great for lightning arrow, poisonburst and ice shot

The really bad pierce node (clean shot at the beginning of the ranger tree) can and should be avoided, every ranger build we currently have is better served by vile wounds next to it.
All the other pierce in the tree is dedicated pierce with nothing else. You make the decision if you're spamming stormcaller/gas/detonating enough to want those or not.

There are a limited number of circumstances in which stormcaller arrow can work despite pierce:

1) a pack thick enough to embed in a target behind the first
2) if a target is short, the shot may embed in the ground close behind it
3) chance to chain from terrain - the shot won't pierce after chaining from terrain

Nevertheless, piercing is a substantial debuff to this skill, which would otherwise be a straightforward and reliable shock primer. I had been hoping to use it as a weapon swap to support shockburst ammo, but the negative influence of piercing has suppressed me.