The weakest (and least used) gem in the game.

My COD Sweep wander scion with punishment curse on bloodlines can afk on uber atziri, uploading vids now

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Perq wrote:

Smoke mine seems very clunky to me, even tho it seems nice on the paper.

Smoke Mine has to be a little clunky to balance its power.

I think Smoke Mine is underrated as a tool for melee characters. Not so much for mobility - there's leap slam for that - but in that you can drop it at your feet, detonate and inflict a 100% guaranteed blind on everyone in the AoE. Blind isn't as potent as it used to be, but it still makes a big difference against dangerous melee/archer opponents.

Does anyone ever use it?

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Kussler88 wrote:

Does anyone ever use it?

No haven't used it for 2 years. Don't know why. It does pretty good elemental damage and 80% increased crit chance with 20 quality.

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Vipermagi wrote:

Why would you use it.

Yup, every single target skill with decent damage effectiveness will trump it in endgame when you got tons of flat damage from other sources.

But why use it... dunno, if I had a soul taker sitting somewhere elehit would probably be the best skill to use it on. Very few skills have mana costs that would require soul and dominating blow has an easier time with mana because of its typically physical setup. I like having builds that use a trick that makes a huge amount of sense and could be very nice if PoE was just a bit different and it wasn't much better and cheaper to make the same thing the usual way. You know, look at it and say 'in some parallel universe this would be a really good idea'.

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Vipermagi wrote:

Elemental Hit is Power Siphon sans Culling and Power Charges, Ice Shot with no AoE component, Dual Strike with only one weapon... Why would you use it.

Pretty much.

I would say Elehit is the worst skill in the game right now.
I remember it being relatively strong in the way past.
It's a great canary for how much power creep we've gotten in 2 years.

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

It's a great canary for how much power creep we've gotten in 2 years.

And exactly two years ago, PoE was still in closed beta with no act 3. A lot of things have changed from PoE since then, for the better and for the worst, content/balance-wise.

Bolded the part relevant to power creep.

GGG has added a lot of really cool content over the years.
Neutering old skills is not one of their finer moments.

If Elemental Hit was removed tomorrow, what percentage of people would that affect?
What percentage would even notice or care?

It should be less effort for them to go back and re-imagine and re-buff older skills instead of adding yet more broken new skills. At least that way people that have Microtransactions for old skills get to see them again, too.

Maybe a crit elemental build based on elemental hit + melee splash or lmp for a ranged build could work?
You can still use auras and heralds and you get nice elemental damage on top.

Elemental hit is one of the rarer gems in the game. Can only be acquired from the fixture of fate quest.