2.5 Blade vortex. Did we break it?

So anyway for the inpatient readers here is a video/s of what i stumbled upon together with a friend.
Sorry for the quality/lack of edditing. I have no experience in such regards.

Sarn arena. Thanks Alterlvian for the video and also helping me to figure out most of this ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR9zv8-_kHg

lvl 11 BV gem(s) killing a lvl 79 with 4k hp and spell dodge in seconds. Thanks Oiroke for help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkZ-aGYKZ8g

Another longer more extensive video
https://youtu.be/mJtfY4ffPQo

Here is the character killing cruel malachai. You have to keep in mind several things. I have only the starter shadow nodes for dmg. No ascendancy. My weapon in the vid is a reverbation rod. There is no added/inc damage of any kind on any of my items.Malachai




In case people know about this interaction and/or we are blatantly wrong about something disregard the rest of this post.

So for anyone who made it this far get ready for some walls of text and theory craft.
Continue in the sploiler tag ;)


Let me know if i am wrong about this and if people know about this interaction. From what i can tell BV just got hardly and probably unintentionally buffed?

Also i personally never make it much into late game. Like to theory craft and make different builds (and/or i suck) So if anyone with a proper late game blade Vortex character can test running around with 4 blade vortex gems let us know in this thread please.

Thoughts?

Damage seems to increase per gem used.

Did some more testing with Oiroke which confirms this works as described. 25 Hits per second (or at least a lot more then 5 we cant count em ;)

Also Here is a nice plot: (green is essence purple is breach X-axis is # of BV stacks Y-axis is base dps for a lvl 8 gem)

For anyone interested in how the functions themselves look:
here

This has nothing to do with the "using 4 gems at the same time" deal.

Please discuss this topic. Cheers people ;)

This has already been reported as a bug and supposedly will be fixed in next patch tomorrow.

Added a 3rd more extensive video. Using 4x lvl 1 gems to show the hitrate they do. Its clearly more then 5hits/s. You can read the PMs. Maybe they can clear any misconceptions there might be about the mechanics (or you know ... create more ;)

Anyway this is clearly broken and needs to be fixed. However i dont think its a "bug" per se. Its technically working as all the mechanics would suggest. The problem is mostly in the fact the BV isntances read the number of stacks of the character rather then the seperate gems.

Also the fix for this isnt straight forward.

My ideas:

1. Make it so every gem creates its separate stack pile. Therefore only getting the 30%more/10 inc hit rate buff from casts of that actual particular gem. (inb4 someone swaps spell echo and faster casting out by hand to cast the last stack with more dmg) This would eliminate this problem to a point as low stack BV gem instances would not do any significant damage and still be useful for utility (curse on hit , PCoC etc)

However its still possible for someone with the right build to stack more then one instance of a damage oriented BV link setup. I would be afraid for something like that to become mandatory. Everyone wants more damage.

2. Make it so if at any point a particular gem has active stacks you are completly unable to cast any other BV gem socketed in your gear (as in they are grayed out) this would kill the use of any utility BV gems which is a bummer.


I personally like option 2 more as its more definitive "fix". However i think both those options have big problems associated with them.

Also i still am not sure what will stop anyone even after any fix we may get to for example cast 19 stacks then swap spell echo out (10 % less dmg) and putting in another gem to get full/more dmg. That can never truly be "fixed" and at the same time it is a very tideous gameplay feature.

Its save to say what in the beggining looked like an elegant way of refactoring BV is creating more and more mess at least in my head ;)

What would some of you suggest should happen to blade vortex to fix this multi gem abuse?

I am not sure what GGG ment with shared support gems but its not the thing i am talking about here.

Malachai

Here is the character killing cruel malachai. You have to keep in mind several things. I have only the starter shadow nodes for dmg. No ascendancy. My weapon in the vid is a reverbation rod. There is no added/inc damage of any kind on any of my items.

This is not blade vortex being blade vortex. This is simply this setup having triple damage compared to someone using just one blade vortex gem.

It is worth mentioning i now linked my "main" blade vortex (the one you cast to keep stacks up) to spell echo and inc duration gem. This keeps the stacks on for 10 seconds + which makes everything much esier even when running general non boss content. I also got a new wand with maximum cast speed i could get so now even the damage oriented BV gems are casted rather fast. This makes the validity of the argument "But its not practical" rather small.Very likely this is esier to keep up then the "traditional" setups.

I also have a video testing after the "fix" in pvp and you can clearly see the damage difference. (Lazy to upload this one)

Remember i am not trying to brag here or say BV is now the best skill ever. There might be builds there that do more damage then this triple vortex thing. I am just trying to bring attention to a skill mechanic that seems broken in my eyes.

That said since i am playing it right now so i am ok with it. I just ... thought people may want to know? ;)

So unless i am wrong about this in a very major way, i am rather suprised there isnt more interest about this whole thing ...