Contagion

maybe completely remove contagions damage and increase its spreading effects.
essence drain, poison, withered, and curses.

and again, remove contagion, and add the spreading effect to bane.

Contagion and essence drain in group play...

I'm sad to find out that if I'm in a group of 6 people using contagion, if we all cast it on a single group of enemies, only the last cast from the last person casting will do damage.

I know its rare to support party play because this game is generally just solo and party for the elites only but, I would like to use this skill more often and that would help, the thought of being useless because I cast contagion faster than somebody else in the group discourages me from using this skill.

Just saw the Development Manifesto on changes for Blight(3.8.0) and one part has me worried.

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Other Spells
Contagion no longer gains radius as the gem levels. The skill provided too much clearing capacity over a large area at high levels.

Level 1 Contagion has such a small AoE that it really can only clear singular packs when combined with Essence Drain. Having to use both skills to clear singular packs makes this clunky and slow.

In low-level play, contagion is capable of clearing packs on it's own in a respectable amount of time which makes up for the slow speed of using both. (as you don't need to use both) This isn't really an option at higher levels. Casting both and clearing a few packs is functional and doesn't feel horrid.

Contagion/Essence Drain has always been toted as a slow but safe build, I feel that this is going to make it too slow to be playable. (Playable from a feels position, not mechanically.)

I can think of a few possible suggestions than might work.

1. Increase Contagion's damage so that it can clear packs on its own.
2. Increase it's base AoE to a reasonable size to meet the spreading size necessary to clear a few packs but not whole sections of map and leave it there.
3. Increase the cast speed's of ED and Contagion (It's not like casting them multiple times has much of an effect on targets as they are non-stacking DoT's.)
4. Fuse Contagion and Bane into one skill. (Ok, Ok, I know this is a terrible idea but it sounded cool.)
5. Make Contagion Instant.

Just a side note about low-level contagion: It can't spread to a whole pack if half of them are running at you because the pack spreads out too much. It tends to take multiple castings to affect the whole pack. This is super-feels-bad and could propagate into late-game with the planned changes.

If I could make a request, it would be for y'all to keep an extra close eye on Contagion/ED's performance this league.

I suggest making contagion a support gem instead of a skill gem, and maybe allowing it to spread all non poison dot debuffs instead of how it currently functions alone.

So I'm currently playing ED + Contagion for the first time since nerf in 3.8.0 Currently leveling end of act 5, SSF, no uniques. I've played this build a few times prior. Basically, Contagion feels kinda "bad" as is right now in 3.10.0 .

Contagion with is boring as is, where nothing exciting happens anymore like gaining base radius per level threshold. I think I've practically hit its peak in act 5 with intensify + AoE supports and a bit of passive AoE. I feel like there's no more reasonable progression (again, no uniques, SSF, no whacky gear). What I see at act 5 is what I'll see approximately in a T10 map, which is not very encouraging.

Contagion needs more AoE, with a caveat: ED+C has no ceiling, so it is not reasonable to just simply ask for more AoE. ED+C is the only skill I can think of that can literally kill infinite amounts of enemies, within a single, actual time instant, given infinite ED damage, AoE, and enemies in an area.

Suggestion: Add a ceiling to contagion, which will allow you to bring back the "+x base radius" Contagion used to have, to some capacity. Preferably, I'd like a soft ceiling, something like "spreads 85% of its damage", which should exponentially attenuate ED's damage enough to "balance" out any AoE buff to contagion. In the case of multiple damage contagion overlaps, take the highest damage.

This also has a bonus knockoff effect of encouraging buffs to ED to better deal with single target damage, as the first "spread" will not be 100% of ED's damage.

And of course, I'd love it if contagion worked at all with blight and friends at some point in time. Would help leveling experience of blight Soooooooo much: deal massive blight damage in a tiny area, then cast Contagion just in time before a kill. Then see it spread destruction, if briefly.

Design Space : Currently only Essence Drain interacts with contagion and its actually essence drain that provides that interaction.
Currently the only dot builds purely focus on one type of damage (fire, cold, chaos, physical) with rare exception.
Currently the only two hybrid dot build enabling items are https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Blackflame and Volkuur's guidance, and Volkuur's guidance isn't really for dots its to enable some sort of self poison shenanigans as the 50% less poison duration makes it a DPS loss over just using even the most basic phys bow to poison.


Conclusions : Other dots piggybacking on Contagion is an external effect.
A hybrid dot could be interesting, and if themeatically appropriate making it be spread by contagion as well would be nice.
Volkuur's Guidance needs some tweaks to make it usable. Even a 20% less poison duration is still a huge dps loss for poison and if the item wasn't made to enable using elemental damage to apply poison to be competitive then it seems like its more of a technicality to even be including it in the discussion.