(POE 2) Acolyte of Chayula Suggestions

I really like this ascendancy and so I wanted to pull out the surgical knife on it.

The "2" and "7" point upgrades are functioning like Keystone upgrades in that they have permanent, non-trivial downsides. As these two cost significantly more room on a build as an ascendancy expenditure, I think a targeted buff-hammer is a good idea.

"2: Consuming Questions" has the player spend 4/8 ascendancy points for mana leech with little to be seen from the Ascendancy itself as a baseline. I would have it allow 28% of your "extra" chaos damage to be leeched as mana (not global damage ratio). This makes the mana leech only trigger by "extra" chaos damage sources, and the Ascendancy here has 3 mechanics that can proc this for a mini-game type combo. I think that spices things up a bit without getting too out of hand when paired with Mind Over Matter builds.

"7: Embrace the Darkness"'s spirit "removal" is more damaging than the other ability's energy shield recharge replacement conceptually. If I were to compare the bonus health on the character first and foremost, a level 100 character would get an unscalable 600 Darkness flat value. Whereas flat life, energy shield and mana(mind over matter), can all have percent bonuses magnifying all of those values. Since this effect has a downside of significance and does not scale, I believe that this "buff health bonus" is where the buffs... should be targeted. (Also because it's cool). Now as to how that is done, I have a few suggestions to pick at that from:

A. Just double all of the initial Darkness bonuses on point "7" to
200 base + 10/level Darkness, and lower the reservation duration to 7 seconds.
This is a more reasonable 1200 maximum for a 7 seconds pain timer. A high level character (that was level 100 stat), should have a much higher either life, mana and/or energy shield compared to this and by a fair margin still, and with combat recovery effects like leech/regen/flasks. I would make point "8" give 1% damage per 30 unreserved darkness(up from 20). This is because the damage bonus effect scales down with level naturally- and scales down with any mistakes in the past 7 seconds. It's a high bonus but you'll lose it very badly a lot of the time unlike other damage bonuses. And the duration point "9" is an expensive but high QoL bonus.

B. Make Darkness only able to take 150 damage every 0.5 seconds while still protecting Life and Energy Shield. This gives it window'ed drops that are forgiving and match the long 10 seconds reset timer.

C. 1% Reduced Damage Taken for every 20 reserved Darkness (30% maximum).