Skill Gem Reveal: Blight

Daaaaaaaaaaaam looks nice :)

Blight totem + Wither totem...

All i have to say to this...

The last really interesting skill gem "leaked" (gamefiles) was Righteous Lightning. The design was really cool, niche and it was something i had never seen in other RPG's before. It would have required specifically building around it (didn't fit that well in any existing build out there) and it would have given scaling mana and mana regen a meaning.

Unfortunatly the skill got cancelled in early development stages.

Since the ajustment/nerf/gutting of Arctic Armour GGG missed a huge opportunity regarding mana dependend mechanics.



Besides Scourching Ray all other new skill gems look and feel like strictly better, reskinned versions of Lightning Tendrils/Incinerate. None of them offers a new playstyle or new build pathing - you can just swap out one or two gems on your existing generic fire/chaos/physical spell build and be done with it.

It is really sad to see where skill design has been going recently...



Remember:
Old patch 0.9 Freezing Pulse has been more interesting than any of the new skills presented here, regarding scaling, graphics and mechanics to build around it.






PS:
i also really "like" the new lazy design approach for new skills:
- they can't hit (eliminates all problems with added damage and DoT effects applied on hit, no "flask charge regain on crit" possible)
- they can't leech (eliminates facetanking possibility with instant leech effects)
- they apply some kind of DoT but are hardcapped (to eliminate the need of extended balance testing)


In short: really lazy design. Instead of finally fixing and spending time on the issues GGG just "works around" them.

Channeling skills have no place in PoE, when you die on one hit, unless you copy&paste passive from D3, which gives a lot of buffs while stationary.

to be honest i don't like it , so flat... seems old... :)

This skill looks very nice.

Some questions:

Are there an icon in the upper left of the screen that shows how many layers are currently applied like incinerate for example?
Maybe thats not possible as different monsters can have different numbers of layers applied to them.

It would be neat if there was some kind of indication when a monster has reached the maximum number of layers on them.
But if it goes very quick to apply all the 20 layers to a monster this is not so important.

This skill can be combined with Essence Drain, Contagion and Wither if i have understand it correctly.
So for hard bosses one could cast a wither totem, contaigion and then a Essence Drain shot.
While boss life is reducing one can then spam Blight to see the boss life go down very fast.

I think i will like this skill.
Plz dont nerf it directly and give it some time so we see how good it will actually be.

For chaos builds like ED chars there already is a huge problem with to few gemslots.
If one want a 6-link ED, 4-link contagion, 3-link wither and now also a Blight with many gemslots it will be very hard.
One also need links for auras, movement skill and preferably a CWDT setup.
Simple math tells there isnt enough gemslots for all this so one have to prioritize some skills and sadly dont use the others.

It will be so fun to try these things out.

visuals 2/10

sorry, it looks cheap


mechanics tendrils/10

rehash with very little creativity put into it. and it looks exactly as the skill that was in the game since 2.3 (Blight from Plaguemaw Prophecy boss) so it is interesting why it took so long


melee factor coefficient - 100/10

why the slow has been given to CASTERS and not to melee for f.. once? dear GGG - man up and REMOVE melee from the game. it is pathetic at this point that you pretend that this stuff is 'ok'.

Can we have a MTX where the character is giving the middle finger instead of just holding up his hands while casting?

And they said blade flurry was like lightning tendrils x'D this is way more like it :')

ahwell maybe next big update we'll see new and unique skills :P