Vaal Righteous Fire - Another thoughtless nerf

My RF chieftain currently has around 7000 hp, 80% resis, 30% spellblock, 7 endurance charges, fortify and over 3000 life regen.
Yet i have trouble staying alive when i use vaal RF.

this is the gear

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Vaal Righteous Fire

Now deals 80-99% of Sacrificed Energy Shield and Life as Fire Damage per second (previously 161-180%).
Now Sacrifices 60% of your total Energy Shield and Life (previously 30%).
Now grants 10-19% more Spell Damage (previously 15-28%).
Now has a Soul Gain Prevention duration of 6 seconds (previously 12).

Vaal Righteous Fire has been nerfed with last patch, the duration has been halfed, the cost doubled, and the damage halfed.

My RF chieftain deals around 6.250.000 dot damage per second, which is not alot compared to other builds, especially considering the currency invested. Bosses take a while to kill, especially conquerors and bosses like sirus. It takes alot of running around trying not to die.

Vaal RF deals 4.500.000 dot damage per second. Instead of the normal 9.000.000 it used to. And now instead of putting me down to 4800 HP, it puts me down to 2800 HP. I get oneshot ALOT, and i'm unable to use the skill on bosses since i want to level to 100.

Clearly this blatant nerf was made to make vaal RF less attractive to casters who use it to boost damage. However you only managed to make it unattractive and borderline unuseable for normal RF players.

For no good reason at all, nobody asked for this. Why would you nerf the normal use of this spell ?
Almost nobody plays RF because quite frankly its utter dogshit compared to other dot spells. Even firewall has more damage and comes without the cost of needing a billion life regeneration.

The cherry ontop of all of this is that the spell damage, which btw is the reason people use it on casters, doesn't even increase RF damage. Why not just remove the spell damage bonus and add something that is actually useful for RF builds ?


You ruined vaal RF, please undo this stupid nerf and to fix casters abusing it for spell damage just remove the bonus and replace it with fire dot multi.

thanks for coming to my rant.

Casters especially Agnostic/Indigon Mana builds abused normal RF together with Vaal RF for the insane extra damage it had to get nerfed. Righteous Fire builds took the collateral damage from what it seems.

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zzang wrote:

Casters especially Agnostic/Indigon Mana builds abused normal RF together with Vaal RF for the insane extra damage it had to get nerfed. Righteous Fire builds took the collateral damage from what it seems.

This nerf was overall short sighted.

It's so hard to wrap my mind around this...
If Indigon / MoM is the problem, why not just directly nerf those mechanics ? Why nerf it through proxy by nerfing RF ?

Also why does VRF need to give spell damage bonus ? RF focused builds do not benefit from spell damage at all, as RF does not scale with spell damage.

There is no point from it being on the skill gem in the first place, just remove the spell damage bonus and revert the QoL nerfs.

RF itself needs a damage buff, badly. It was in such a bad place already, since it takes forever to kill bosses with it. It has so many downsides, like requiring you to stack fire resis and regen, while offering no benefit compared to other spells.

Some time ago there was a Q&A with GGG where it was asked what is in particular hard to balance.
The answer was back then Righteous Fire the reasoning was something along the lines like: It scales from one stat (life) that provides defense and offense at the same time.

Some years later we got:

Aura stacking
Intelligence stacking
Mana stacking
Strength stacking

All kind of overpowered by their nature of one stat scaling offense and defense.
If you ask me about a reason for the current state then well i cant give you one as its a bit contradicting.