Blade Vortex needs a big nerf! (because of double-dip, triple-dip and quadruple-dip)

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caboom wrote:

fast attacking phys source scales very well with both flat and % elemental sources but nerfing the base damage its a bad idea, mostly becouse it kills any build that is not based around stacking those elemental sources.

what about doing what they did with skeletons? that "deals x less elemental damage" would solve the problem without screwing with those who are playing full physical damage or phys/poison.

It is not even that. It is more like Raging Spirits.

Since it can go up to 50 stacks you always have the issue on how many stacks you base your balance decision. With Raging Spirits they simply made them weaker and made it easier to get a lot of them.

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Yes, because we melees need tons of power charges..... oh wait.......

I'm not really speaking about red melees more about the green or green/blue ones. A red melee might even have resolute technique or even without not enough crit chance to even crit PCoC. But even with just about 15% which is often reached by chars going for crit anyway exspecially with a 6% base (thats just 150% increased crit chance) you could proc it quite often.

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what about doing what they did with skeletons? that "deals x less elemental damage" would solve the problem without screwing with those who are playing full physical damage or phys/poison.

Well... the poison builds are the strong ones. They basically utilize every possible multiplier. And yes the poison support technically is a multiplier (poisoning basically gives 20% more damage). And since DoTs based on regular hits forget that they were already modified the poison support gem alone doubles its damage already and turns it into a 40% multiplier. This of course only applies to enemies that actually stand for the 2 seconds it lasts.

Btw: There is no "triple dip" or "quadruple dip" since there is no stat from which a poisonous Blade Vortex benefits more than twice. It benefits twice from Duration due to Poison and Vortex having one, it benefits twice from Chaos Damage because added chaos is one and the DoT is one but thats basically it. If you are just using Poison and Blade Vortex only Duration double dips. Yes you benefit twice from the chaos/phys nodes but thats just because they consist of two stats. Thats the same with Phys/AS nodes of course you benefit twice from them. They are quite strong for what they are but thats the nodes, not so much the skills and the same applies to Viper Strike.

Also nobody complains about Puncture benefitting 3 times from Vulnerability (the Hit is Physical, the DoT is physical and it deals Damage over Time).

My issue actually is the Poison Support gem. It simply is a ridicolous modifier in its own. I use it on my Evangelists since it is simply better than most stuff and allows them to kill bosses a lot faster. I'm also considering it on my Zombies because again it is stronger than Multistrike. Of course it is rather weak against weak targets but those are not an issue, they are blown away instantly and with Vulnerability the DoT is insanely strong for basically no investment. My Evangelists neither have increased Chaos Damage, but it seems as if they double dip anyway because the Minion-Damage I skilled first affects the Spell they use and then modify the DoT again, which causes the insane efficiency of the Poison support. I guess the DoT from poison is not a spell so it is not modified by spell damage if it is (because it is caused by a spell maybe) it might also explain some of the good performances.

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Btw: There is no "triple dip" or "quadruple dip" since there is no stat from which a poisonous Blade Vortex benefits more than twice. It benefits twice from Duration due to Poison and Vortex having one, it benefits twice from Chaos Damage because added chaos is one and the DoT is one but thats basically it. If you are just using Poison and Blade Vortex only Duration double dips. Yes you benefit twice from the chaos/phys nodes but thats just because they consist of two stats. Thats the same with Phys/AS nodes of course you benefit twice from them. They are quite strong for what they are but thats the nodes, not so much the skills and the same applies to Viper Strike.

While I completely agree with your linguistic correctness, "quadruple-dipping" just sounds coller then "three different ways to double-dip" so I'd like to stick with my original terminology.

Maybe we can also call it the

"Poison Vortex Trinity":

1) chaos/phys Shadow nodes
2) duration works both for Vortex and Poison separately, resulting in multiplication
3) Vulnerability boosts Poison damage twice (71% MORE poison damage without curse nodes!)

Hi

What is the feature special this league? (Give you a hint: The title of this forum post)

That's right the feature special ability this league is Blade vortex enjoy:)

Three way double dip sounds fun.

cheers

It's the new gem. Of course it is op, that's the selling point for all the cool new stuff they want you to try.

Give it a few weeks and it will take a small nerf, but still be op until the league ends, for obvious reasons. It will never be the next flame blast though because it simply doesn't work in the same bullshit way that skill worked.

Before I went away on holiday I was having a ball with Blade Vortex on my Max block + Cybil's Paw exile. I feel much safer in Boss fights now as 50 stacks is very achievable with minimal investment in cast speed/duration :)

Maybe GGG wanted something to replace Incinerates void - a skill that does great damage with minimal investment into the tree's offensive nodes. Blade Vortex is not quite as EZ mode as Incinerate was/is because you have to be and remain fairly close to monsters to benefit from leech/LGoH - whereas Incin was just channel, aim and melt faces.

Anyway, will see what happens with this skill. It's great fun though so big + there.

My issue is that it focusses too much on Blade Vortex, when obviously the Poison Support in itself creates issues.

The same things can mostly be applied to other skills like Ethereal Knives or Bladefall, which both show good results with Poison as well. Shockwave Totem does and even Minions do. The Physical Spells work nice because the shadow has Physical&Chaos Damage nodes, which affect DoT and Source of it. The same goes for Shockwave Totem and Minions, which apply their modifiers also twice to the Poison Support, once as a source and once as the DoT. Like I mentioned before Spelldamage might actually do the same and apply twice but I'm not sure here, I haven't played around with it that much.

Exspecially for a Curse Summoner that uses Zombies + Evangelists the Poison Gem is incredible strong, due to the high curse efficiency on Vulnerability. And without the Poison Damage being modified by anything more than the increased Poison Damage on the gem I can't really explain the good performance on the gem even when not actually using Vulnerability. And since all that Minion Damage does is give your Minions increased damage (and actually also the Minions of your Minions) it is very likely that it does affect the DoT, because if you get "increased damage" as a player (Fire Golem) you do get increased poison damage as well.

The simple question also is: "Does Poison benefit twice from Spelldamage?" It shouldn't since it isn't Spell Damage, but as we see with Contagion and Essence Drain it is possibly to apply the modifier, so maybe it just happened and would make the spell stronger as it should be.

Blade Vortex in itself is a nice skill and likely a bit strong, but than again that makes new skills more fun, since otherwise the exitement of using them would be gone, but what shoots the skill over the edge likely is Poison. And not even long time, since the scaling basically ends at this point. Rapid Decay is not a good option since its reduced duration also applies twice and Void Manipulation only increases the Chaos Parts but not the initial part. So after adding poison and collecting those benefits and synergies with Blade Vortex most other supports only work on an average base and are not skyrocketing the skill into oblivion. Also Poison has no interaction with Hatred, Added Fire and Herald of Ash, which are normally the strong points of Physical Spells. Blade Vortex also is too weak to trigger any stat-effects, because it doesn't rely on heavy hits. All this makes it a really fine option early game, but doesn't make it overwhelming in the lategame.

1. You have to invest heavily into defenses, you have neither Freeze nor a solid Range at your disposal. Not sure what happens if you support Blade Vortex with Knockback though, might again be something that is simply... well not sure anybody thought of that.

2. Your Supports fall off after Spell Echo and Poison, which isn't terrible but clearly shifts your power towards the earlier parts of the game. Added Chaos is good, Critical Damage or Controlled Destruction is good, Blind or Knockback might offer some defense, Conc. Effect is as strong as with any AoE but might need a bit of an investment into AoE first. Still none of those supports actually enables otherwise wasted parts in your skill tree. Its basically that you get that chaos damage as a shadow and the poison gem just puts that potential to use.

3. Unless you are super confident and use LW with cwdt you can't move and deal damage and you are also almost at Melee range. So you have to increase your damage again after walking. So you basically have to buffer the spell each time before you enter a pack.


Also if you look at the Phys/Chaos nodes, they actually do exactly the same for Puncture, the thing with Puncture is that it does not stack and one might wonder how 10% damage per second over 5 seconds that is not stackable and multiplied by 5 competes with 10% damage per second over 2 seconds. Allowing almost any "delivery system" to poison is kinda ridicolous. Viper Strike always was a good skill but had issue with delivery and even with the improved Melee Splash it doesn't deal as reliably AoE damage over time as Blade Vortex or Blade Fall do.

My Fear basically is that they nerf Blade Vortex and all that happens is that the next skill in place is incredible strong with Poison. So I would prefer looking at that interaction first, since it seems kinda strong whenever

a) You use Vulnerability with a physical poisoning skill
b) You have wasted or double dipping modifiers for the DoT

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But in this case I think he would if he could.

I dont think he would. Blade Vortex really starts going at the end of Normal, so its not that big of an issue for short races and the Challange leagues are not that competitive, dedication and often a fair bit of luck is more important than using Blade Vortex.

People often argue that strong skills ruin the economy... but then again people playing a lot more than others would do the same. The issue with some of the really strong skills like Flame Totem was that they also influenced racing heavily. Of course everybody could use them but it was a bit odd seing 9 out of 10 people in the Top100 using the same setup.

Also what normally happens is that they have a different view on skills than the community does. Exspecially in PoE everything thats not within the top 1% of efficiency is considered worthless. So having one skill a bit above those other strong choices basically puts all of them down to thrash level. I played a bit with Blade Vortex and a lot of other skills already and its not that terrible. They often mess up the scaling of skills and it is something really hard. Sometimes getting access to a new support like Spell Echo gives one skill more benefits than others, because they lack other good supports, while other skills already have access to the more powerful options.

This also explains what happens to skills like Incinerate. It basically got destroyed and considering how the community reacted on the skill it should have gotten such harsh nerfs, but than again maybe it was not that strong and the community simply overreacted on the actual powerlevel on the skill. And considering some of this posts it seems like having two or three times the performance compared to other skills... and up until now it doesnt seem like that... its strong, but I haven't reached maps yet so its hard to say more about it. I never really felt the Flame Totem nerfs to that degree were required, they could just adjusted some early game numbers but they seemingly did a bit more than just that.

I think they mainly wanted to make those skills accessible so that they are used. Not sure how far above all other skills they are or if it actually just is a good midgame skill but they either overshot the increase in powerlevel to give the skill a bit more focus or they simply didn't expect such strong reactions, because the numbers they have only see it only a little bit stronger.

Any of you whiners think it's still too powerful? Compared to all the chaos/poison bullshit that was delivered in the same patch?

No, it's not that powerful. Good, yes. It's helluva fun, and as the original poster noted, it really shines in Cruel. But by the time you hit maps, the fact that you have to use selfcast to get a good stack of blades and you have to be close to your target, means that it's actually slower to clear and more dangerous than (for example) incinerate, Bladefall, etc.

It does benefit very much from a specific shadow build built around stacking chaos damage, but that's more about DoT than Blade Vortex and as you level up that turns out to be a bit of a trap. Blade vortex is sitting in an unusual place being a kind of spell/melee hybrid:my first Shadow build had crazy fast clear speed, and also chased that yummy physical/Chaos blend, but when I hit merciless, it turned out to be a real glass cannon, and after too many deaths got retired in favour of a Scion Blade Vortex build. Not so flashy, but also not so squashy.

So, good, but not OP.