How is Wither allowed?
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Are the debuffs on the MONSTERS from Wither casted by a TOTEM be bound to the totem? I don't think so, so recasting the totem SHOULDN'T reset the debuff-stack-count. (I guess, would be surprised if that's not the case.)
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" The 'Wither' stacks on the target are not bound to the totem. Thing is that if you have just enough cast speed and duration to get 20 stacks with the totem then recasting the totem will interrupt this and you only end up with 15 (or whatever) stacks. Which is still very strong obviously. Its just that in my experience the numbers look much better on paper than in real gameplay. If everything goes smooth real gameplay matches the numbers. But not always everything goes smooth and reliance on Wither totem is then a weakness of a build which needs it. And in comparison with Ignite I still need ~8 (or whatever) seconds to get full DPS output. It is an "equalizer" which closes the gap between strong and weak (DPS wise) builds. If the game wouldnt be so powercreeped that (almost) everything dies real fast to a strong build it would be severly out of line though. But the reality is that only a few things dont get killed by a strong (DPS wise) build very fast. And some of those are immune to poison. Nonetheless Wither is one of the big boss killers. I have myself "complained" about that long ago when it was still bugged to not double dip. No wonder it's lost, it's in the middle of the jungle!
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wither is only op because of double dipping
fundamentally it was designed as a means for an attack like essence drain to do decent single target damage. chaos damage sources realistically dont do a ton of damage on their own it is only when you include the massive problem that is double dipping poison which turns even physical damage into a dangerous chaos damage source that having 140% more damage from wither is an issue. |
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" Thing is Wither is meant to be used by those builds, so it would be an issue if they wouldn't use it. The thing here is that it was meant for Essence Drain initially, that's when it came out, but it is much more useful for double dipping poison builds. If double dipping is fixed Wither shouldn't be that special. Because you need a build that actually gets to a lot of stacks. Most builds using Wither have not much cast speed, and if you just use the gems in the link you are mostly limited to something between 10 and 15 stacks. So with that in mind people should wait for 3.0 it doesn't make much sense to think about those things until we know what GGG wants to do with double dipping and how they fix it. We don't know if they change every single moifier to only apply to either direct or damage over time (like the Trap gem) or if they fix it mechanically by mods getting used up. If you deal physical and chaos damage with an attack and have increased chaos damage and poison, the chaos damage part would get increased chaos damage, but the Poison generated from the chaos damage would not get it, while the poison generated by the physical part of the skill would get increased poison damage because the physical damage part of the skill did not use that modifier. This would be a mechanical fix. Of course Resistances and Duration would still double dip and for Duration this is a bit hard to fix, Ignite, Poison and Bleed though could just ignore Resistances (although Bleeds would have to be seperated like Poison and Caustic Arrow and Ignite and other Burns). |
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"sure, wither was designed to aid chaos builds. the problem is even without double dipping, it is simply too good not to use. 10-15 stacks would put it at 70-10% more chaos damage taken, which is higher numbers than any comparable curse would do, and it doesnt even count as curse. as such, a spell totem with wither (and now cwc) is a free and a huge damage boost. if you look at things such as ele weakness, conductivity/flammability/frostbite, proj weakness, etc they are very balanced and consistent (sure they can be *boring*, but boring and consistent across the elemnts is much better imo than terribly unbalanced). and you dont have a situation where an elemental build HAS to use flamm or ele weakness. or projectile skill uses proj weakness. theres choices here and there. no such choices for chaos-oriented builds anyway, I was just saying how certain things are only used if they are too powerful. poison without double dipping is a simple % increase in dps, but investing into it without double dipping isnt cheap nor is the output powerful. so, its fairly natural to assume people wouldnt care for poison unless they could just slap the effect for the initial % boost and leave it at that. but double dipping changes all of that. which brings me to my speculation that GGG did not remove double dipping when it couldve, because they realized that people wouldnt really fuck with it if it wasnt for double dipping. |
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