Essence Drain

Shouldn't this work with Trap support gem?

seconding this, why doesn't essence drain work together with mine/ trap?

Disappointed that it doesn't work with trap. It's a 'one big hit' skill in the sense that casting it successively doesn't do more damage, so using traps is the natural conclusion.

Before release the tooltip of this skill showed that it 'Recovered X% of debuff damage as life'. I have since noticed on live that it 'Regenerates X% of debuff damage as life'. Is this a tooltip change or is it really regeneration now instead of recovery?

Really frustrating the recovery portion of this was a key aspect of my build and it got ninja changed.

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Lestat13 wrote:

Disappointed that it doesn't work with trap. It's a 'one big hit' skill in the sense that casting it successively doesn't do more damage, so using traps is the natural conclusion.

Yup. Based my whole build around it. Thought it was fairly innovative. Even took a couple other tweaks into my build (tree and gear-wise) to really make it shine.

I hope they reconsider. Getting this skill on the right mob can prove to be difficult. Just spent 5 minutes kiting around "Enemies cannot die" pack, because I couldn't land the Essence Drain on the Rare.

There's multiple cool things that you can do with this skill and trap/mine.

Don't work with cast on crit too

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Don't work with cast on crit too

None of the new chaos spells seem to work with any trigger gems as far as I can tell.
Same with Life Leech support gem.

I am really struggling to see how this would in any way be viable even for life-based characters (it is completely unviable for CI based characters :C ).

I don't get the thought process behind the new chaos spells at all.

They take a huge amount more effort to effect than any other spells, and do only moderate damage as a reward..

Why would I essence drain > corruption > wither spam, when my friend next door killed the pack with the first ek/bladefall/whatever that he cast?

I don't get it. It is markedly worse in short burst scenarios (which covers the majority of the game) and still slightly worse in sustained damage scenario.

What am I missing? How did they test this skill and come to the conclusion it was good enough? Is it likely to see a buff right now?

I'm trying this skill now. Still learning how best to use it and will comment further later on.

Essence Drain seems OK if you use it with a lot of multipliers, target one or two low-life/white mobs, and then allow it to spread. It actually seems to kill pretty quickly when used this way.