Question about blight and chaos builds in general

Experimented a bit with Blight and I'm not a fan of combining it with the other chaos skills. It's just too clunky - you want to spam Blight, but also do the 2 spell Essence Drain combo, place Wither totems for the damage multiplier and maybe Abyssal Cry for group explosions. However, Blight by itself is intriguing - it has exceptionally low mana/sec costs (so you can easily reserve most of your mana for auras/curses), decent (if not exceptional) dps plus some crowd control.

I think there's a lot of potential with using Blight in a summoner build. The Witch's Necromancer class has a lot of synergy with the spell (Increased Duration, Chaos damage, Damage/Cast Speed) and besides just getting some extra damage with Blight, the movement speed drop is great for slowing enemies down so that 1) your minions can swarm them & 2) enemies don't reach you.

Heh...interesting that your brain went there, because I was wondering myself if perhaps using Blight as a delivery mechanism for a non-Chaos skill might work out better, as well.

The CC aspect of Blight doesn't do much because you have to get square in the enemy's facial regions to use Blight in the first place, so unless you have it CWC-ing something that hits and can knockback critters, they've already done all the moving they need to do.

The concept of combining Blight with Lightning Tendrils amuses me greatly, especially since LT's weird pseudo-duration actually sorta lines up with the cast timing requirements on CWC, but heck if I can figure out how stacking Bad Skill A with Bad Skill B works out to much of anything but a Crap Stack.

Beyond that, though? I'm not sure what you could CWC with Blight that wouldn't be better off as its own 5L/6L, unless you're dead-set on doing the low-cast-cost thing. At which point the Reduced Mana gem is an (extremely unattractive) option that only costs one socket instead of two. Hnn...suppose we'll have to see how CWC actually works.

Well, keep in mind that the skill has a really fast cast time (and low mana cost) so you can start casting before the enemies reach you and it'll hit them right at max range. The radius isn't THAT bad so you just need to grab a few radius nodes to get it up to a decent mid-range distance. Does make Concentrated Effect a bad choice though if you want to take advantage of the CC. I'd go with Blight + Void Manipulation + Rapid Decay + Controlled Destruction + Increased AoE + Increased Duration for the best mix of dps & CC in a 6-slot.

This is now slightly off topic, but I've been wondering - does Void Manipulation actually link up with Blight? If so, they should probably revise their stated support gem link up rules and/or let Rapid Decay work with non-Totem RF.

A Support gem is only supposed to be able to link up if the gem link up allows the active skill gem to suffer from the drawback. It is literally impossible, as far as I can tell, for Blight to ever deal Elemental Damage. This means that the latest Rule of GGG about Supportability dictates Blight can't be supported by VM.

Has anyone tried it? Does VM boost Blight? If so, they really should enable RD RF without Totems.

I guess if it does link up, the logic is that having reduced elemental damage applied to 0 damage is still a drawback, which is really weird.

That's not quite right - support gems can only support appropriate types of abilities. For example, Void Manipulation can support all abilities that deal damage. It has nothing to do with whether or not the drawback has any effect - for example, you can attach Controlled Destruction to an offensive spell with no crit chance. Rapid Decay can only work on duration-based abilities. That's why it won't work on self-cast Righteous Fire, but it will work on a totem.

Back on topic, Blight + Cast while Channeling + Icestorm might be interesting (7-link, both abilities are duration-based AoE spells that slow enemies).

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rdespair wrote:

That's not quite right - support gems can only support appropriate types of abilities.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1685072

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Because we fixed it. Gem supportability in cases like this is determined by the ability to apply the penalty, not the bonus.

So, I suppose you're saying that Void Manipulation is not a "case... like this"?

EDIT: I guess it's probably just my second interpretation, which is that applying a penalty to 0 damage still counts as applying a penalty.

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rdespair wrote:

...Back on topic, Blight + Cast while Channeling + Icestorm might be interesting (7-link, both abilities are duration-based AoE spells that slow enemies).

The question to ask yourself, in this and any other case, is as follows: "Is Blight > CWC > [Skill] better in any appreciable way than [Skill] > Spell Echo/Faster Casting > [Extra Support Gem]?"

Blight is almost entirely useless for damage, it severely constricts its CWC sub-spell's range, and the sub-spell will only cast once every ~0.5s, the same as any non-item trigger spell. If you're getting the 5k+ Intelligence required for Icestorm to be good, why would you then proceed to cast Icestorm less than half as often as you could via CWC Blight?

CWC has to enable some pretty intense synergies to be worth cutting your support links so short, and also basically flat requiring a ferociously expensive 6L to function. Either that or it has to be outright hilarious, like dual Snakepit/Dying Sun Sire of Shards Incinerate > CWC > Fireball ALL DA FIAH builds. Just bolting two spells together won't be enough when one of the spells by itself, with stronger supports, outperforms the combo.