Cast on Melee Kill

Going with the idea that Cast on Melee Kill would be better if there were more buffing spells: I think CoMK would be interesting if they brought phase run back. I would say nearly 0% of people used phase run for the 50% increased melee damage it had, but this would be a buff that helped out the melee attack itself.

now here's a real winner, a true pile of sh


why it's not 'cast on kill' is exactly my problem with it.


to anyone else that isn't meelee this gem is meaningless.

no curse on kill, no random cast on kill, no detonate dead for a ranged, no ranged curses, nothing fun, lack luster, kind of barfy. again another one of those kind of utilities that has you scratching your head on where you're going to use it, since you will pretty much always choose CWDT that plus auras + main link+main hand, you typically never have space, and if you do, your brain is never like, YEAH IM A MEELE WITH SOME SPARE LINKS FOR SOMETHING NEAT...


obv answer here is detonate dead or maybe descerate/detonate dead

aside from that, y?

My suggestion is to make COMK's bonus apply to ALL kinds of damage -

Cast on Melee Kill
Mana Multiplier 130%
20-58% Increased Damage(2% per level)
0.5% Increased Damage per quality

This would make the gem more versatile. e.g. Can be used in a 4-link Molten Strike+Cast on Melee Kill+Melee splash+Summon Raging Spirit. It also gives the gem some "value" as a socket occupier.

I tried to make a COMK build by using AOF to make all my damage elemental and then taking only fire and elemental passives so that both attacks and spells benefit. I picked flame surge as it meant igniting with inital hits grant a damage boost. I needed to use warlords mark in order to get any life/mana leech and save on a gem slot. Here's the gear for that build:

The kill speed is great! But it turns out flame surge was pointless - with the amount of increased fire damage I do, everything is already dead from the corpse explosion of infernal blow. Firestorm also was pretty pointless even with its larger AOE, because it was always targeting the area of the already exploded enemies. Fireball was equally pointless, the fireballs kept flying off at weird angles off screen and never hitting anything.

In the end I switched to a critical strikes gem, meaning the only spell I'm casting on kill is molten shell. Which actually is useful! The increased armour is useful for the next pack, plus if IC or blocking stop enough damage it deals about 8.5K before the 38% penetration bonus. So I guess the only real point of COMK is to cast buffs, as any and all damaging spells are pointless when your target is dead and spells aim at the dead guy.

I also tried switching to molten strike-multistrike-comk-molten shell-flame surge-fire pen. In the end the clear speed was plain worse than the infernal blow version. Next, I'm gonna try static strike-comk-lightning warp-phys to light-light pen-reduced duration on a character that stacks lightning damage. At least then I'd be able to go dual curse due to herald of thunder.

Suggestions for COMK improvements:
Either add a bunch of offensive buff skills like molten shell
OR
Make spells target the nearest enemy that is not your already dead target


edit: comk lightning warp+static strike is beautiful. this is the most ridiculous thing I've made in a while.

I have made a build with CoMK which works rather well, even with the shitty items I have (no 5L). I think it works best with huge AoE Skills. So Discharge is quite obvious. Someone else has done it with Ice Nova, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKcLdoYnSb0 but this only works with insane priced items.

I built it with Oro's Sacrifice (giving you frenzy charges on igniting enemies) and romira's banquet. Then you always have charges for huge Discharges. Here is the link to the build:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1234681

So I don't agree to the general rage in this thread here. But cast on melee kill is not as viable as cast on critical strike, I have to admit. At least it is not as useless as cast on death :D

cast on melee kill bugged my blood rage, it's snap-shotted on my blood rage.
relogging doesn't fix it. i tried to remove the gem, bought a new one.
now apaprantly i still have my old blood rage on my character even tho the gem isn't even on my character anymore.

it may be a lapse of memory here but I am noticing some discrepancies with Cast on Melee, for some reason, the tooltip dps rating is decreasing when a Cast on Melee gem is applied to a skill combination with a spell

is it supposed to function like that, I don't specifically recall, or at least is it supposed to change the dps reading to account for 'cast' time ?

It doesn't show DPS at all when linked.

Like all other trigger gems it simply shows the average damage of a single instance of the spell.

I think this gem should be more spectacular.

In my experience, it really is nothing more than a generic support that you can choose: The problems with gameplay with this game is simply that you need to kill stuff with melee at a sufficient level of efficiency, and then the casts need to still be significant to even achieve the measly effect of: converting mostly single target to small aoe clear boost.

This is even considering the new support gem Elemental Focus which can benefit both melee and the cast parts (build methodology: selecting passives that benefit both the melee and cast portions such as generic elemental damage, not spell or attack damage, or using an aura such as wrath or anger and using fire/lightning casts)

Right now I just find my character doing subpar melee damage and the casts sometimes wiping out big white packs, or being nearly worthless against magic packs and others.

It's even worse in party play of course. Instead i just remove cast on melee kill for weapon elemental damage and the supported spells in question for some other damage support like concentrated effect or added lightning/lightning pen.

Also another annoying thing is that the item Doryani's fist seems so well suited for comk! but then you can't use weapon elemental damage as a single target swap in place of this gem, making unarmed far worse than any other generic high attack speed weapon. Also can't make use of elemental focus as easily due to the base crit chance of unarmed.

Maybe add melee culling would be nice to make it slightly usable in parties (like power siphon, even if your teammates 'kill', the on-kill effects from you can happen maybe :D), or have the increased spell damage become increased damage instead (which would represent current state of comk), or more multipler to spell damage, to make it like a single target -> aoe bomber.

Cast on Melee Kill is just a redundant gem, no matter how you put it.
Just shitty in realistic situations.
It goes against the "1 skill rule em all" concept of the game.
You need a 5 link to be effective,
you need to kill monsters to cast it,
you need to scale both attack and spell damage coz you need to actually do damage and kill monsters to cast it.
-> cast on crit is so much better coz you dont need your attacks to do damage to cast anything. Slap on the attack skill, scale crit to the stratosphere with your passive and gear which affects both attack and spell crit chance most of the time, scale spell, and see the screen explode.
TLDR:
For Gods sake just remove this skill and add it to Doryani's Fist as a unique mod. For not it totally makes no sense for the state of this game.So redundant and unpractical. Discussion is practically dead for this support skill.

Additional info for developers to ponder on:
Even Trigger gems like Cast when Damage Taken or Cast when Stunned is preferred over this Cast on Melee Kill coz of 1 reason: IT IS FUCKING NOT CONSISTENT AND NONFUNCTIONAL IN MANY SITUATION AND ARE HARD TO DEAL WITH OR JUST TOTALLY NOT WORTH THE INVESTMENT.