Cast on Melee Kill

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Commando125 wrote:

I feel like culling strike is necessary to use this support gem viably in a party, but it is difficult to place culling strike in and do good damage without a 5L. I recommend adding an effect of "if enemy dies soon after being hit" like on infernal blow to the gem, so it has a better chance to activate in parties.

Yup. Once it changes to "if enemy dies soon after being hit", it will be much better.

I'm re-posting an issue I posted in the bug forums here in the hope that it'll get resolved sooner.

The 'Cast on Melee Kill' support gem includes the target you just killed in the list of potential enemies to cast the linked spell at. As you can imagine, this greatly reduces the effectiveness of directional spells (such as Ethereal Knives or Glacial Cascade) linked to CoMK.

You can end up in situations where you're surrounded by enemies and have all your triggered spells hit nothing because they're fired at the enemy you just killed. The only way to get around it is to solely use non-directional spells like Ice Nova, which really cuts down on build diversity.

I haven't checked to see if 'Cast on Crit' has the same issue, but I expect it does.

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Vipermagi wrote:

It's not an 'issue': trigger Gems always go for whatever it was that triggered it. Cast on Crit targets where the Crit landed, Cast on Melee Kill aims for the titular Melee kill. Cast when Damage Taken goes for the source of the Damage taken (very visible with Curses).

The issue is that this makes CoMK a lot worse than it would be otherwise. Why would I want to cast a spell at a monster that I just killed instead of all the other ones around me?

It seems this gem is just utter trash. If you have high enough Single Target DPS but no AoE, you can just use a melee splash, which uses up 2 sockets.
It's useless against bosses, even with the skill spam they do nowadays.
Like, let's analyse this thing.
If you use it hoping to nuke packs of enemies with your powerful AoE skill, why not selfcast it in the first place? You just risk getting eaten by said packs of enemies while you try hitting them through the desync, and even if you actually hit them, you will only chip away the health of one enemy.
If you have powerful STdps, the damage you will deal using triggered spells will be very low, only chipping away their health.
it's a lose-lose situation, especially considering that the at least two sockets used for CoMK + spell could be used for much better support gems.
I don't think any buffs to this gem (except ridiculous ones) will actually make it usable. The whole idea behind this gem, to have to kill before something happens, and to have the support gem linked to the used killing skill, is extremely flawed.
Until you, GGG, can name an actual use for this gem without cherry picking an extremely specific situation (which any decent build can handle in some way), I'll call this gem a case for the trash can.

Question about CoMK and its links.

Do all gems benefit from quality bonuses when linked together?

For example - Static Strike + CoMK + Ice Nova
Does Static strike get +20% aoe from a 20q Ice Nova and vice versa?
Or Static Strike + CoMK + Shock Nova
Does Static Strike get +shock%/+shock duration from Shock Nova?

Will Both the melee skill and any spells linked to CoMK get the +damage% bonus from CoMK quality?

Thanks in advance!

Ah I see, good explanation thank you.

While its fun and all to use this with Static Strike along with linked AOE spells and watching things explode, Cast on Melee Kill is the kind of gem that would better be used with Supportive Spells that gave buffs or healed rather than dealing damage.

This game just doesn't have the right kind of skills that can greatly benefit to be cast when something has been killed as there are very few active skills that grant a benefit to the user, such as Enduring Cry. Damage skills aren't really desirable when your main ability is what's doing the killing anyway, you'd just want to boost your killing ability. If this wasn't such a damper on your main attacks DPS, it wouldn't be so bad, but if you end up putting a "+Melee Damage" bonus on it, people might just use it for that bonus and not link any spells to it, missing the point overall.

This gem just needs more skills in the game that could really make good use of it being cast repeatedly, such as self support spells of a stacking nature (a heal or a stacking buff of some sort), spells that grant Power and Frenzy Charges (similar to the nature of Enduring Cry) or spells with normally high cooldowns which would be mitigated by being autocast and therefore have some greater power by being cast rapidly.

Even better though would probably be to remove this gem and replace it with a "Perform X on Melee Kill" gems that have specific characteristics that aren't associated with the current spell selection in the game (since Cast on Melee Kill has very little use with what's available). Doing this would also be easier to manage the effects of each gem individually, as well as only require 1 gem slot.