Zerphi's last breath and channeled skills

So I tried using Zerphi's with Wither, and it doesn't seem to work. It heals at the first cast, but then stops. Is this intentional or is this a bug?

Intended. The mana cost is on casting the skill and not the channeling cost.

Channeling clearly costs mana though, and the line on Zerphi's reads "Skills used during flask effect grant 800% of mana cost as life". Wither is clearly a skill and it clearly has mana cost. So according to that, it should work...?

Channeled skills are only "used" during the initial cast, after that you are just maintaining the skill. It's an odd and sometimes unintuitive distinction, but is how PoE handles this.

For stuff like wither that doesn't stack damage the longer you keep channeling, you can just restart your channel all the time. You're gonna lose a bit of damage (not a lot though), but you should be able to activate the effect relatively often. Don't expect stuff like Wither or Blight to have high mana cost and result in a lot of healing though. Also, I'm guessing (especially with how many people cry about this) that Zerphi's gets one of the next nerfs after VP, so I wouldn't base a build around it.

Don't think they will nerf it during the league though, so I could have some fun.

BTW, Scold's Bridle works with channeled skills, which makes the entire thing even more weird. And yes, I can restart for every cast, but I won't do that because I kind of like my hand. Sounds unhealthy to click that much.

it's not that weird, the wording is different


scolds only counts mana spent. typically your spell cost is the same as your mana spent per skill, but that's not the case with channeled skills

so a channeled skill has only one cost for the only trigger. but you do spend mana on additional channeling.