Chayula Physical Chaos Needs Help

Trying to find any way to make my Darkness monk with physical attacks and added chaos damage work. It is near unplayable giving up spirit buffs. Everything every good monk build is doing as Invoker is far superior to anything the Acolyte of Chayula can do without ignoring monk skills and going into Caster or maybe Bow instead.

I'm level 84 and tried several combinations of gems on 5 link Staggering Palm and Wind Blast and adding Withering Touch to the Windblast. It "almost" works, but without spirit buffs it is too sub-par.

I feel like i need Herald of Frost so I could use ice strikes instead of Staggering Palm. These physical skills the Acolyte of Chayula is supposed to be able to use to produce Chaos damage are garbage in current state without spirit.

it would be really cool to have an ability with the moveset of ice strike but you can socket essence drain and contagion into its support gem slots. then enemies you hit with the melee attack get the statuses of the two abilities put onto them. you could even have it so that when you hit the bell with this ability it would deal a chaos AOE and put the status of the slotted gems onto enemies around you. it would help with the feel and viability of a melee chaos character. maybe go a step further and have the slotted spells scale with physical damage, or critical damage so the dots dont rely on spell damage with a melee focussed character

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MINIFIEMAN19#2958 wrote:

it would be really cool to have an ability with the moveset of ice strike but you can socket essence drain and contagion into its support gem slots. then enemies you hit with the melee attack get the statuses of the two abilities put onto them. you could even have it so that when you hit the bell with this ability it would deal a chaos AOE and put the status of the slotted gems onto enemies around you. it would help with the feel and viability of a melee chaos character. maybe go a step further and have the slotted spells scale with physical damage, or critical damage so the dots dont rely on spell damage with a melee focussed character

You realize there is a spell damage cluster that gives pretty big chunks of spell damage while wielding a melee weapon, right?

I'm going with flickerstrike, but generating charges with profane or siphoning strike is incredibly tedious compared to frenzy conversion route with spirit.