Channeling mechanic?

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Vipermagi wrote:

Prior to 2.4.0, "Channeling" mostly meant "incompatible with Echo and triggers, special cast animation", which does include Wither. Channeled Spells can be totem'd just fine.

e; I never said Totems knew how to use these Skills :P

I always (mis?)understood "channeling" as the behaviour of certain spells (incinerate, flameblast) to ramp up their damage over a certain time. Therefore my confusion that wither is now (back then?) considered a channeling spell.

Given the statement that
"Unlike other skills, which are used once and quickly finish, when you use a channelled skill, it doesn't finish until you release the relevant button/key"
i'm still baffled at how this is supposed to work with wither: I push the button and wither starts doing its thing until i release the button, then the targeted enemy gets a debuff? I guess i just try the skill on friday, then i'll know what happens.

What happens with wither is that it keeps casting the circles over and over, each circle adds another stack to the debuff, and GGG calls this 'channeling' because they don't want wither to be able to be used with trigger gems.

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Bada_Bing wrote:

"Unlike other skills, which are used once and quickly finish, when you use a channelled skill, it doesn't finish until you release the relevant button/key"

My guess is this is more of an internal/nitpicky rule change than anything most players will really notice. Kind of another side of the "effects which trigger on skill use..." point that goes later. Like Web developers coding OnMouseRelease or whatever it's called, the devs probably have some code for OnSkillFinished in there, which makes it the most logical way for game devs to think of 1 channel = 1 skill use?

But I can't really think of any effects that we as players know are OnSkillFinished

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viperesque wrote:

Patch notes got updated:
[li]Effects which trigger when you use a skill will only trigger when you initially start channelling - regardless of how long you maintain a channelled skill, it's still the same use of the skill. You need to stop channelling if you want to use it again.[/li]

[/quote]

I hope I'm not understanding this properly. But does that mean that incinerate + Cybil's paw for life on hit would only trigger once and never again until you start a new channel?

I kind of think this will make Wither more powerful.

Since it doesn't do any damage itself, it was probably used mostly with a spell totem, which meant getting max stack was impossible. As a channeled spell, it might finally make it to the full 140% increased chaos damage taken.

Edit: This assumes Wither dots don't time out as long as you keep channeling.

The main thing this does is make the Trickster's "Weave the Arcane" node pretty much completely and utterly pointless, since the only skills it provided any real benefit on before were pseudo-channels like Incinerate or Flameblast. I tried to start a thread to raise awareness for it back when channeling first came up, but a malicious mod moved it to The Forsaken Graveyard of Lost, Unread Threads Feature Suggestions and it clearly didn't work.

So, Trickster lost some valuable, if niche, utility in the Channeled update, since Weave is pretty much 100% pointless for most any other build type given how unreliable it is. Which blows because I was honestly considering a Flameblast Trickster for a future build. WHELP, back to running absolutely everything ele-spell on Elementalist, even with Conflux getting murdered.