3.13 Inquisitor Rework or "Look how they massacred my boy"

<edit>Just to make clear, by "my boy" I mean my specific build, not that the whole class is ruined, although I am critical of the changes done.</edit>

A little preface, I'm what you could call an Inquisitor "Main". I'm posting on my console account but I played on PC since closed beta without missing a league.
My comfort build of choice is my very own Crit Staff Glacial Hammer build and despite that skill really needing it's threshold jewel to be great, I even played that build in all three recent events in SSF and did well. Got two Demis out of it (lost interest in Endless Delve) despite Inquisitor being very popular. Partly because people probably thought it would be an easy Demi because of how few people on PC play it (0,13% of the top levels meme) but also because it's just a really nice ascendancy, especially for shorter events.
Inquisitor had two things going for it, Accessibility as in you get mediocre power just by doing Lab instead of a bigger amount of power later on from top crafts and ease of use/quality of life. That's why I loved it so much. It just solved a lot of problems and simplified the gameplay, which made it a great ascendancy for beginners and people who are slow like me and want a relaxed albeit slower pace.

Now I don't think every rework from GGG is bad but since the stuff I used from Inquisitor (Pious Path + Inevitable Judgement) was so perfect for me, I was dreading any change. I hoped the ascendancy would continue to fly under the radar and be left alone so my heart really sank when I heard about it's rework in the announcement stream. All my hype from the stuff before and after died. I may sound overly dramatic and maybe I should sleep over it or wait until it's live and I can try it out (and it rather looks like I'll finally throw in the towel on playing Inquisitor) but I feel that I will also lose the spark that get's me writing. So, wall of text here, trying not to be too irrational or unfair. But the changes are pretty straight forward, there isn't much to interpret or understand.

So, let's get to the actual changes and how they impact my favorite build (remember my 8 points are Pious Path + Inevitable Judgement):
I lose:
- 100% crit chance on the first hit or on ailment immunes
- 45% crit multiplier on anything I don't one-shot
- 20% increased freeze and chill effect
- flat 15 mana regen
- 20% increased attack and cast speed
- 200 ES regen

Ouch, so what do I get for it?
- ~200-250% crit chance all the time
- +5% increased damage taken by enemy on my consecrated ground
- my life regen also regens ES and of my allies (on the cons. ground), which for me will be something like 10-40 ES regen

So not really anything in return but massive crit chance. But I was already critting pretty much 100% so they are wasted. I guess it's nice that I can care less about crafting crit chance on my weapon and it will alleviate a bit the massive Assassin's Mark nerf which worked great with Blasphemy before that "rework".

Let's get into some detail.
-The 5% increased damage taken sounds nice but it's not that useful in practice because while you may always be on consecrated ground, the enemy often isn't. I hope the lingering effect of Pious Path also affects this so it's useful to touch the enemy from time to time. As a melee build I'm already switching between chasing the boss and running away from it. Most casters will have even less use of this.
-Like I just mentioned, the crit chance change might be a buff in some cases and allows more spells to reach better crit chances on this side of the tree. Something that was missing. Paying with the loss of 45% crit multiplier is a big blow though and on builds like mine that already worked to get 100% crit, it's just useless. And stat stacking is hardly a very interesting mechanic.
-Non Damaging Ailment Effect is a pretty rare stat, why take it away? Especially the cold variants of it were always too far away on the upper right quadrant so they won't even stack. Just give accessibility to it on the left side.
-The flat mana regen was great and made mana a non issue with my cheap attack build. It felt so good when leveling, that I sometimes take it first, or for example in Endless delve when the Alira mana regen wasn't accessible. Why take that convenience away? It's not powerful at all, just ease of mind as long as you use a cheap skill. Was there an advocate for mana flasks involved?
-The 20% cast and attack speed. Well, it might have been very straight forward instead of hiding behind hoops but boy did it feel good. Glacial Hammer is already on the slow side with a 2h weapon and we aren't getting that much attack speed on the tree on this side. again, so many nerfs to an ascendancy that wasn't popular. Why oh why.
-The flat 200 ES regen. It felt so cool to see my meager ES refilling in an instant. It was mostly a nice 50% Stun avoidance because you pretty much always had some ES. Since the build always feels squishy with less than 3.5-4k armor and almost all of my gems are red, I run almost exclusively armor bases to reach that since there isn't much armor scaling around. But any little ES amount was great with Pious Path. To get to 200 ES regen with the new node, you would need 1666 ES with 12% life regen (6% from tree and gear and 6% from Cons. Ground). That may be normal for hybrid casters but certainly not for attack based Inquisitors. It wasn't even that powerful in terms of ehp. So I guess it was meant as a buff for someone who is not me. It also has the potential to be quite powerful as a very specialized support but since the one getting the buff needs to be on your Ground, that has limited appeal.


What about the nodes that I didn't mention yet because they don't impact my build?
-Augury of Penitence: unchanged, super boring stat multiplier. Probably still popular because it's the bigger number in PoB compared to Pious Path. I imagine that's why it was thought to be "fine"? I don't think it's fine. Again, boring and if you can't survive without the 8% less elemental damage taken then you have problems elsewhere.
-Instruments of Virtue: 30% more attack damage is about two thirds of an support gem and 8 seconds might be long enough to use a few utility spells while you can't attack anyway. But usually that time (non instant spells) could be spent attacking so it's situational if it's actually a damage buff and frankly, I already have enough buttons to press. As a lover of 2 handed weapons, Battlemage has some potential but in the end, it's just another boring damage multiplier.
-Instruments of Zeal: Some more hoops to jump through that has a damn big payoff, so people will do silly builds to get insane numbers. Wait for videos of people Shield charging/Leap Slamming on a spot as the ritual before every big encounter. I might even play something like Discharge with it because the aoe buff is so nice but ugh, I don't know. This is the one node I think I have to play with to judge.

So what was this rework about and who was it for??
There seemed to be a lot of Nerfs of the things Iqnuisitor was already good at. The weird thing is that mostly quality of life stuff got removed along some power. Which is weird since they claimed they wanted to rework the ascendancies for power and identity. Instead we get some wacky new stuff that seems to convoluted to be used by most people. There will probably be some certain cases where these combine to make something op and do 20 million damage but what I loved about this class is that it got me to 1 million pretty fast and easy within my slow league progress and a lucky craft or find. And in my mind, that was fine because it had a lower power ceiling so it's ok if that was easier to reach.
I feel like the class will now be clunkier for most and op for a few minmaxers. As if we didn't have enough of those ascendancies. It definitely feels like a kick in the nuts for me, personally. I just had found the motivation to pick my build guide back up and update it for 3.13 proclaiming that it's even ok to play it in SSF.

I can't really figure out if the rework was just trying to really press us into doing some hybrid shenanigans but I doubt it will see much use in that regard other than the usual movement spam - spell. The true Battlemage type that uses both attacks and spells offensively is as realistic in PoE as usage of the CoMK support.

Inquisitor was my sweet little island of calm. My comfort build got nerfed to the ground (Assassin's Mark rework, Hegemony's Era nerf already took out some ease of the build). Who would have thought. And I even rejoiced at the 6% GH buff back then, knowing that despite what people think, the build was fine (please give access to Winter Burial outside of trade!!) and I loved the GH rework with the massive freeze on every third strike. Yes, crowd control locking bosses might sound cheap but it comes with a lot less killing power (but enough for us casuals) and some of the biggest baddies are immune anyways. I rather have relaxed longer fights.

My current plan is to go back to make Heavy Strike work for both clearing and bossing then. I just like 2-handers and melee builds. Flicker Strike was also a long time favorite but too many game mechanics now punish that playstyle. I can't really go back to that although there are still some variants left or newly introduced that I haven't played yet.

My only positive thought about the rework is that I feel like it's a hidden admittance that Inquisitor was actually too good and needed those nerfs. I doubt it will help it's popularity though.

<edit>
Just so it doesn't sound as if I only ever played one type of build with Inquisitor, I rolled a few elemental attack variants but they usually end up with the same DPS and clearing of GH just without freezing and I also rolled a few crit casters. My favorite ones, pure Ice Spear with Cold to Fire and Winter Orb CoC Ice Spear both got destroyed be skill reworks. :p

You have no idea how I am so excited about the new inquisitor. Would be good on so many builds that use repentance bracers.

Nerfing the conc ground nodes is pretty disappointing.

Honestly, do yourself a favor and remove those "i've played variants of the same build for years and now things changed" goggles and look at the bigger picture here.
There were like 2 reasons to play inquisitor. Ailment Immunity and ignoring resistances, both remained untouched. Those things you whine about, sorry but they aren't even relevant for most people. Like what melee build relies on mana regen? Even during leveling. You have easy access to mana leech and especially for leveling there is thiefs tormet which solves all your life and mana issues on it's own. Life regen applying to ES in the worst case saves you the node(s) for Zealots Oath and in the best case let's you double dip on your regen on, for example corrupted soul builds. Situational 45 crit multy gone in exchange for 200-300% critchance? Guaranteed and always? And you honestly complain about it? If your build had 100% already then cut some of it somewhere and invest into crit multi instead? It isn't exactly hard to get 45 crit multi from either tree or gear. 200-300 increased crit chance is way harder to get. Plus you get 50 Str and Int for free on top which might save you a couple of skill points.

I don't really know about instruments of zeal yet, can't think of a way to really utilize that but i am sure there is, and instruments of virtue actually has a meaning now instead of just being the "well there is nothing else to allocate for my build so i could take this node" type of choice. 30% more attack damage for using flame dash as a movement skill is pretty awesome, especially since it's one of the best movementskills in the game, all the more for chars that are supposed to fight Sirus. And on top you get your weapon damage as extra added spell damage. Depending on what kind of weapon you use that's 200-500 flat spell damage right there, unconditional and for free. Even if you never intend to attack things, that node might be worth it for battlemage alone.

So yeah those changes are by no means a nerf in the big picture, surely some very specific builds somewhere will get hurt but overall this is massively increased potential for an ascendancy that was literally just the "worse assassin" up until now.

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

Honestly, do yourself a favor and remove those "i've played variants of the same build for years and now things changed" goggles and look at the bigger picture here.
There were like 2 reasons to play inquisitor. Ailment Immunity and ignoring resistances, both remained untouched. Those things you whine about, sorry but they aren't even relevant for most people. Like what melee build relies on mana regen? Even during leveling. You have easy access to mana leech and especially for leveling there is thiefs tormet which solves all your life and mana issues on it's own. Life regen applying to ES in the worst case saves you the node(s) for Zealots Oath and in the best case let's you double dip on your regen on, for example corrupted soul builds. Situational 45 crit multy gone in exchange for 200-300% critchance? Guaranteed and always? And you honestly complain about it? If your build had 100% already then cut some of it somewhere and invest into crit multi instead? It isn't exactly hard to get 45 crit multi from either tree or gear. 200-300 increased crit chance is way harder to get. Plus you get 50 Str and Int for free on top which might save you a couple of skill points.

I don't really know about instruments of zeal yet, can't think of a way to really utilize that but i am sure there is, and instruments of virtue actually has a meaning now instead of just being the "well there is nothing else to allocate for my build so i could take this node" type of choice. 30% more attack damage for using flame dash as a movement skill is pretty awesome, especially since it's one of the best movementskills in the game, all the more for chars that are supposed to fight Sirus. And on top you get your weapon damage as extra added spell damage. Depending on what kind of weapon you use that's 200-500 flat spell damage right there, unconditional and for free. Even if you never intend to attack things, that node might be worth it for battlemage alone.

So yeah those changes are by no means a nerf in the big picture, surely some very specific builds somewhere will get hurt but overall this is massively increased potential for an ascendancy that was literally just the "worse assassin" up until now.

I mainly don't disagree, but wanted to quibble with the idea that mana leech for full elemental builds on the top-left of the tree is easy to get. It's not.

What was the point of removing the mana regen? I'm curious as to whether there was a specific reason. Sometimes the minor details of GGG's decision-making can seem a bit random or haphazard - while the overall direction of the ascendancy clearly is not, that particular change is.

Perhaps some attack mana leech (not just physical damage) was added to that part of the tree. We'll see, I guess.

The reason was probably "it's not needed anyway and doesn't add anything in terms of flavor or power so lets remove it for simplicity's sake". I've played a lot of melee and also a lot of elemental melee and using mana regen to support my build never even once crossed my mind and i am honestly surprised someone did. Both the shadow and the duelist area have mana leech nodes so no matter where you go bottom right or top right, you won't have mana issues.

It's not exactly hard to get conc ground under enemies. Zealotry does it for free, among other things.

Overall these are HUGE buffs to the Inquisitor for a large variety of builds: doubling up on life regen through Pious Path or flat added damage through Battlemage (not to MENTION how insane that node's interaction with Wrath is), or combining self-casting with a movement attack with Fanaticism. Shield charge into Divine Ire comes to mind, for instance: you dash in and gain 75% more cast speed to charge to full beam damage nearly instantly, unload, and dash to the next pack.

Mostly, I think the problem is kind of with anyone expecting to keep playing the same build league after league after league. That's not this game. I get it, when you're new to the game you just want to stick to something that you know works... but how are you going to get better if you don't actually make a bunch of different builds? Learning what makes a build work and not work only comes from trying different things; there's a reason guys like Mathil can take literally any build to endgame in 3-5 days, even when it's a skill like Sweep which everyone "knows" is terrible.

i do not like these changes, at all

mana regen - huge, unnecessary nerf. getting (elemental) mana leech on the tree always has a cost (useless travel nodes, picking junk anoint etc), this flat regen solved that for free. unneeded nerf (esp after warlord's mark is no longer an aura..)

45% crit multi is a murder in broad daylight. noone cares about crit chance, crit multi is the hard part to get (you ALWAYS pick it, ALWAYS. there is no free crit multi for grabs on the tree).

200ES regen was very, very cool for EB/MOM builds. sad to see them go just like that

split life/ES regen is cool'ish. i like hybrid builds but these are MUCH better with corrupted soul + trickster + life leech + energy leech support. you get 10k life+ES with leech to BOTH. no pure life build, no matter how much useless AR they stack will ever reach that tankiness. maybe you can boost it even more with this regen split? maybe. but that is not for melee anyway

but that are just aesthetics. numbers you can work around. the real problem are the 'conditional' nodes.

30% more attack damage if you flame dashed/dashed around recently. WHAT THE QUACK?! berserker has 40% for a small penalty of dying more often and this one is 30% for (in reality) free? what??

and then.. attack 4 times in place to get INSANE caster damage. ive already checked, getting 4 cyclone procs takes less than a second. this node is hot garabge, it does not promote 'battlemage', it promotes doing stupid things for even more stupid damage increase.


on a side note as a fellow inquisitor (non-crit) glacial hammer: ice crash is just better. ive been farming shaper guardians on that character and i knew my boss damage is bad but.. it seems these bosses are somehow chill immune thus making hypothermia and other 'on chill' effects not work. speccing into skitterbots solved that. yet another proof that flat, unconditional damage (ice crash) is much better than even very high bonus from status ailments (glacial hammer) - endgame bosses where damage matters the most simply resist these effects..

in general, start forgetting about strike skills.. i cannot imagine doing 10 bosses in one arena using glacial hammer :)

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

there's a reason guys like Mathil can take literally any build to endgame in 3-5 days, even when it's a skill like Sweep which everyone "knows" is terrible.

while the point you make is perfectly valid, that actually is not the perfect example - Mathil uses the same setup to make bad skills work: slap abyssus. take that away and most of his 'look at this bad skill doing endgame' builds are in ruins. Abyssus on his latest sweep build provided like half of his total damage. not to mention that you wont see him doing REAL BAD skills/setup (and succeeding, he dropped Cleave with disgust)

sweep is functional (at melee level) but slams outclass it in each and every way imaginable.

"

sidtherat wrote:

and then.. attack 4 times in place to get INSANE caster damage. ive already checked, getting 4 cyclone procs takes less than a second. this node is hot garabge, it does not promote 'battlemage', it promotes doing stupid things for even more stupid damage increase.

Honestly, none if it really surprised me, by this time I'm pretty sure they wouldn't know battlemage gameplay if it entered the office on a red carpet followed by a pro wrestling announcer and gave them its business card.

"

demon9675 wrote:

I mainly don't disagree, but wanted to quibble with the idea that mana leech for full elemental builds on the top-left of the tree is easy to get. It's not.

What was the point of removing the mana regen? I'm curious as to whether there was a specific reason. Sometimes the minor details of GGG's decision-making can seem a bit random or haphazard - while the overall direction of the ascendancy clearly is not, that particular change is.

Perhaps some attack mana leech (not just physical damage) was added to that part of the tree. We'll see, I guess.

Thanks, saved me writing that. It's not trivial. Assassin's Mark Blasphemy gone also hasn't helped keeping up resources.

And to reinforce the crit multi nerf, I'm already taking all the reachable crit multi on the tree of course.

"

It's not exactly hard to get conc ground under enemies. Zealotry does it for free, among other things.

A 50% aura that only benefits crit casters and has a 10% chance on crit to happen is not "free". Sure it will proc pretty fast but surely not for attackers.

"

Mostly, I think the problem is kind of with anyone expecting to keep playing the same build league after league after league.

I'm an altoholic, I like to make my own builds, I played hundreds of different wacky and often failing builds. I also play along build guides and sometimes even try "meta" builds. That Glacial Hammer build is just what I keep returning to because it feels so perfect. I'm always missing something from the other builds. They are either squishy, boring, lacking impact, need zoom zoom to keep going, are finicky to play or need expensive items. This build was none of that. Decently mobile, nothing to keep up apart from charges, which autogenerate while in the thick of it (yes, all three types), isn't too frail to die at the first lag spike and does decent enough damage to freeze lock anything it doesn't instantly shatter. The clear is way better than people might think with Splash and Ancestral Call which also leads to a lot of overlapping damage areas, which is why I love when three Syndicate Members spawn right next to each other.
<edit>I'm not opposed to change and PoE being a living game that keeps evolving is what kept me playing through all these years, I just hoped that Inquisitor would be ignored for a bit longer and therefor always looked with worry at the low representation of the ascendancy (when looking at the highest levels and on PC) that meant it couldn't escape the gaze of GGG much longer. Though I think popularity is bad data to ground reworks on. Yes, Inquisitor could have done with a slight rework and especially that lower left arm that just wasn't practical or effective and in my opinion Augury of Penitence was just too plain. It was basically a 15% damage multiplier to my build when Pious Path was a 10% one but with good buffs to quality of life and survival so it was the obivous choice. They now solved that with nerfing Pious Path instead of giving Augur something interesting.</edit>

Now, I don't want to just keep on whining. I might still try to play the build and find yet more work arounds for all the nerfs but it's not the build I could wholeheartedly propose to any beginner or lover of crunchy punchy builds anymore (that Shatter sound <3 ). And I don't think these changes will have the desired effects. Yes, there will probably be some certain new builds that use the new nodes to get some big numbers (because that seems to be what it's all about, screw how a build feels) but PoE isn't made for scaling multiple things at the same time.
I'll also try myself to find fun combinations of spells to use those new nodes. I'll live, I'm not quitting or anything. It's just that my feelgood build got murked and it doesn't seem to have to be that way to facilitate the changes.