Witchfire Brew now applies Despair NERF

It's a byproduct of adjusting curses. Suck it up buttercup.

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bionicpope wrote:

We don't know what new items they are adding in 3.1. We might see a new flask that does something similar to Witchfire, we also might see that Despair is stronger than people are assuming.

That is the stage we are at right now, everyone is assuming and making builds around the nerfs we know about. We need to see the buffs, and the other nerfs before we start pulling out our pitchforks to chase down GGG.

I've been planning a build so off the beaten path for Abyss that not a single change in the Path of Nerfs update and likely not a single buff in the patch notes today is going to affect it. They don't make uniques for the nonsense I'm getting myself up to, and they don't buff skills the way this is going to go.

But yeah. I'm not pitching forks at Grinding Gear, I was mostly chiming in on A.) the fact that people keep giving the OP shade for wanting Witchfire to retain functionality at least similar to what it was originally released as, and B.) considering Witchfire switching to being Despair in a bottle (insert low-quality-alcohol joke here) instead of Vuln in a bottle to be a net buff.

Despair Brew may be a buff for Poison spammers or Chaos degen builds, but it is most certainly not a buff to players who used Witchfire Brew as a high-level Vulnerability they didn't have to waste time casting or waste their reservations Blaspheming. Whether it's a net buff or not doesn't really matter if the functionality people currently use it for disappears and the new functionality the flask was given doesn't do a thing for them. Despair could be absolutely gobsmack amazing for Chaos/degen builds and it wouldn't matter a lick to guys who used it to amplify their Earthquake damage with Vuln's phys debuff effect.

Might there be a new Vuln-in-a-bottle flask in 3.1? Certainly - but I'm fairly sure we all know the odds of that.

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1453R wrote:

Might there be a new Vuln-in-a-bottle flask in 3.1? Certainly - but I'm fairly sure we all know the odds of that.

I really doubt it. Witchfire is a supporter unique. They generally try to avoid creating items that are that similar to supporter uniques to avoid upsetting the designer (for example, Charan was understandably displeased when they released the Cauteriser shortly after The Goddess Unleashed with a similar physical added as fire effect). And to be honest, I wouldn't be happy if they changed Witchfire from its original design goal and then made essentially a copy of the item to fill that old goal without at least discussing it first.

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1453R wrote:

Witchfire Brew was an excellent choice for characters that either had a hard time building up the Intelligence needed for a high-level Vuln curse on their own, or who were willing to pay the price of a limited-use flask in exchange for not taking up their reservation space with a Blasphemy curse. it actually fit a number of nice builds beyond DoT-ery, being that it was more or less a bottled Phys-damage debuff.

SNIP

Vuln being a Strength curse may be better for the overall health of the game, but let's not pretend poor Witchfire Brew isn't taking it square in the johnson on this one. Nobody wanted or needed Despair - plenty of folks really like Vuln-in-a-bottle.

Thanks for the insight. I only ever saw it as useful for ED/Blight/Poison (before poison got rekt). Didn't think about its use as a "free" high level vuln for heavy phys damage users. I saw this as only a buff, but I can understand the OP's point now.

I stand corrected.