3.1 New skill gems

4 new spells and 6 new supports, 1 of them melee(2 currently undisclosed).

Congrats casters!

Good chance I won't be playing melee yet again :( Maybe there's still hope with 3.1 patch notes to come, but I doubt it.

Body swap looks to have super strong potential: An AoE move skill that scales based off of life.

And all for necro. D3 made a necro, PoE started with new necro skill, Grim Dawn made a necro and now PoE again, this time it seems it's focused on necro skills only (after channeling wave). Boring :( Still lack of decent ice skills and maybe introducing wind (the simplest: green golem for eva and dodge).

i've never been one to play a caster in any game ever - this is no different.

its quite interesting how they all revolve around corpses though. seems like not a great mechanic to base your entire build around. i'd probably just prefer using vaal DD or something, but anyway, will be interesting to see the types of builds people come up with

The volley support interests me. The only way I can think of that it would be worth implementing as a gem and not be an LMP clone is if it makes projectile gems work like Barrage does.

Spell cascade makes me wonder. If it works like it sounds the extra Flameblasts will have to be spaced super far apart. The More escalation of the channel will eat that 50% less and then some. Triple tapping Flameblasts would become stupid.

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unTop wrote:

Body swap looks to have super strong potential: An AoE move skill that scales based off of life.

And since it's an early gem (lvl 10), I'd really wanna now which class(es) would get it first. Be making some Elementalist and Inquisitor placeholder builds in the meantime.

I figured you could use Bodyswap well with trigger + Desecrate and RF builds. It seems that spell damage does apply to the damage based on your life though, even if not of the corpse's, so perhaps it's more of a DP thing.

One thing that's definitely happening is non-summon focused Necro dps simply because of the Desecrate bonus. If you lack corpses, just get more of them.

Btw, does "modifiers to spell damage" include only spell damage or is it any damage that increases the initial hit (not talking about damage taken or resistances / penetration here)? Seems like a lot of fire damage for those three gems as well. Since they all explode corpses, I imagine they wouldn't be played in a set though (unless three or four 6L shaped / elder items and situation based).

Sounds a lot of fun to play as a totem build though, even if the screen gets f***ed up.

one interesting thing that stood out to me within the trailer is @ 36-37s there is a cycloner with cast on melee kill and volatile dead - and it looks really good.

If I can get enough links together, I could see
Cast while Channelling to shoot my own corpses and then detonate them.
I mean, nearly all those spells make regular corpse explosions obsolete.
I wonder what level the bone archers would have, if it's similar to the map you're in you could create combinations that scale damage with content.

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Vaydra wrote:

4 new spells and 6 new supports, 1 of them melee(2 currently undisclosed).

Congrats casters!

Good chance I won't be playing melee yet again :( Maybe there's still hope with 3.1 patch notes to come, but I doubt it.

Ancestral Call looks like it could be very interesting for melee builds. I've already seen the "It's just a reskinned Multistrike!" junk all over the place, and okay. Yes. It mostly repeats your attack twice against other targets.

Now...consider that much like Multistrike, you can get Splash some way or another to allow those repeated attacks to also hit the main target. Now consider again that nothing is stopping you from slotting Ancestral Call AND Multistrike into the same skill, and turning one single-target click into nine attacks against multiple enemies. Play a Slayer (which is looking pretty stellar with the new, sense-making VP), get the Slayer's innate melee splash Ascendancy option, use a single-target skill you've always liked the look of (and remember, things like Wild Strike, Static Strike, or Lightning Strike are all single-target melee components that trigger secondary AoE effects), and proceed to unleash Sword Hell on your foes.

I'm blocking out a possible Ngamahu's Flame build that, miracle of miracles, doesn't use fuggmuthering Cyclone to trigger MB. Considering the fact that I loathe Cyclone to the deepest depths of my demonic little heart, being able to consider cool ways to use Ngamahu's Flame is a nice change of pace.

It may not be Ultra Optimal (on the other hand, it may end up being pretty badass), but it could be fun. And as stated above, some of the new stuff looks pretty damn fun with CoMK-style builds if you can find a way to make CoMK not suck for you.