everything wrong with Spectral Throw

so.. here I am, lvl 75something, leveling (with twink gear) as Spectral Throw. the experience is so bad that Im actually, literally taking a break of POE for some time.

here is what i gathered during my journey:

1) 'Spectral Throw got power crept' is a cheap excuse. numbers being bad IS a problem, but tripple its damage and the experience still sucks.

2) Spectral Throw has a very high 'sunny day scenario' damage multiplier - you actually can make your projectile hit a target 5+ times, getting easily the highest damage effectiveness attack in the game. sadly, GGG knows that, and balances around that making anything but that one scenario (unlikely!) miserable

3) Spectral Throw feels like sh.. on any 'small' weapon. Playing with two-hander? hhmmm okay i guess. playing with claw? f.. no. size of your weapon (in game terms: unbuffed weapon range) makes or breaks this skill.
it might be thematically interesting but it makes for garbage user experience.


now some details

re1) for Spectral Throw to have a good single target (clear is good already) you have to hit the target AT LEAST twice - preferably thrice with single projectile. problem? ofc it is a problem. POE nowadays is a very mobile game - bosses move around OR have a VERY short damage windows OR BOTH. Spectral Throw is a ramp-up skill, just like poison. but.. you cannot guarantee the setup. if your target moves or the phase ends, your projectiles wont score their 2+ hits.

this is the first reason why damage feels garbage. it IS there, you can sometimes line it up, there is player's agency there. but the game.. changed. it is simply WAY faster than in 1.3.

end result? most of your hits hit once and thats it.. autoattack's level of efficiency.


re2) to get your 3+ hits you need to have a boss near the wall or be PRECISELY in right spot AND use a big weapon (yes, it affects the damage). how often can you make that? the .3 hit delay makes knockback unreliable at holding enemies in place (ive tried.. it ALMOST worked but any slow mob can simply ignore the knockback).

POE's legendary targeting system doesnt help. Lack of any aim asist for a skill that actually requires pinpoint accuracy kinda sucks. Power Siphon/Soulrend thrive thanks to subtle autoaim.

Re3) this is big one. Due to .3s attack rate and interaction between hitbox and weapon model there is a tremendous gap between a Staff and Claw. Im not joking - it might be as much as 50% difference in hit rate for some encounters. Any movement during engagement promotes big weapons CONSIDERABLY.

It is terrible situation. Like absolutelly terrible. Playing it with claws is horrid experience. I wonder if mtx change situation. They might actually do.


Then there is the love hate relationship with projectile speed. Gem swaping sucks. But xlearing without proj speed sucks even more. Something has to be done there.


Solutions:

- throw distance is no longer fixed. The max limit behaves as is. But if you target/GROUND closer to yourself it will set the apex accordingly. To avoid abuse some min distance could be set. It fixes the proj speed issue.

- slight auto aim added. It snaps to the center mass just like marks do. Nothing outrageous.

- all weapons use the same hitbox. I dont care about immersion. There is already none with the sea of rgb puke our skills emit. Gameplay demands that dex aligned skill is not auto-loss with daggers.

- make 'projectiles bounce from walls' default for Vaal version.

- make .3s interval into .2s. This might actually make combat positioning a thing. Right now if you guide 5 blades into a boss it results in one hit anyway.


All in all.. this skill is quite easy to fix. Right now it does a solid disservice to the game. Leveling experience is GARBAGE. i had Oni ffs, all the uniques in the world and the damage reeked and experience was catastropic. Impending doom that most of the playerbase treats as no-show is a racing spec compared to this.

I got traumatised. Hope ggg does something with this skill in 3.15. It is so bad that im literallly taking a break. I know we will get 10 new skills or so. Cool. But just delete or fix skills that are actually terrible first.


gear used if anyone is interested. shouldnt be - it is lvl < 80 character after all:

Really nice to hear such good and actual feedback about Spectral Throw.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/547108/page/23

I tried ST myself in 3.13 Ritual League as league starter in SSF League.

And boy, lets say i was surprised but not in a good way.

I played a lot of zdps buils in SSF but ST is the new floor-level of dps in my special case. It ended up being a DW crit impale champion with 2x foils for more weapon size.

It kinda started nice once i got multiple projectiles and Vaal ST and kept being nice till around act 7.
Especially in clearing Rituals during campaign.

But damage started to drop of significantly around act 8 when monsters/bosses got more HP/armor. Also when bosses moved a lot, it negated the buzzsaw effect. Had 5L around this time.

I had to reroll after i hit lvl 84, still on 5L.
My dps was so low that i could barely kill white map bosses. And with white maps i dont mean running yellows/red maps without alcing. I literally mean white T1-T5 maps.

But even with no DPS i still tormented myself and did yellow maps up to T10 with wet-towel dps. I hoped it would get better but it did not.

Like you said. ST is way too old. It feels only nice when players can apply the buzzsaw effect on slow & stationary enemies.
But in current patch 3.14 with lots of teleporting/dashing/running enemies ST has no place in lots of cases.

I got a confirmation how good this skill was when i looked at SSF poe.ninja after a week and half. Only 6 players over lvl 82, the others are raiders mainly.

https://poe.ninja/ritualssf/builds?time-machine=week-1&skill=Spectral-Throw&allskill=Spectral-Throw

I tried Int stacking spectral throw (HOWA) with 2 different classes and then shifted the same gear into Int stacking wander and boy, the difference is like night and day. (on single target setup 700k vs 3-10 mil[noflask-flask])

I wasn't aware of difference in hitbox size for various weapons (I thought weapon range was normalized couple leagues back, and it was practically removed from skill mechanics) but it could explain a bit inconsistent damage and mobs slipping undamaged in ultimatums

When I played it in Delirium as aurastacker (eirikeiken Ichimongi version) it was fine because char was practically immortal and dmg was plenty. I was still doing about 1/10th damage of spark/ek/BV aurastackers.

From my perspective, this skill should have in-built mechanic that utilizes the repeated hits, either %more damage for sequential hits (to promote the positioning ) or something more inventive

The Vaal Spectral Throw pebble problem is ridiculous and practically unusable in certain arenas and areas.

It seems to me Spectral Throw is (yet another) outdated skill.
It's been years now that it is not suitable anymore for the latest PoE content's philosophy (i.e. let's spawn zillions of monsters at once : Delirium, Ultimatum, Delve, Heist, Incursion... even just juiced-up Maps).

i want to emphasise this: 'clear' with Spectral Throw is ~fine, there are far worse skills out there.
I opted for meme setup (Fury Valve + Deadeye + Fan of Blades*2) and it clears really well. BEFORE applying 'explody chest' ofc.

issue is with single target. sadly the issue is pretty gross (and imo easily fixable..) - not only the base damage is low but the scaling depends on extremely clunky mechanics and so-so support options

and the weapon size direcly hurting your damage is just sad.

Imo im not mad spectral throw is dead. It was meta for soo many years with no true alternatives. Same with COC, but somehow COC is ridiculous again. So yeah they should probably bump spectral throw a little bit.

I wouldnt be surprised though if something replaces it thats similar in 3.15

What did CoC get?
- CDR on almost every piece of gear through crafting
- reduced cooldown to all CoC sources
- AWK COC
- Updates to lots of skills to fit more CoC playstyle

Ye, CoC got some nice treatment over the last years. I still remember GGG complaining about CoC hitting too many mobs too fast to cause server issues which cause direct nerfs to some skills (Discharge mainly back in the day)

Some more skills could use some ways to scale and GGG should stop evaluating weapon skills with 600pdps one handers :)

Everything you've said is true.

While farming Oni-Goroshi i've felt too that weapon hitbox is much better with 2h.

There are so many things wrong with this skill that it need overhaul from ground up. It's in the Heavy Strike range of bad and even more frustrating if you chase those multiple hits.

Personally i have 3 major issues with it
-GMP swap
-range and hit box, like you've said it's default attack most of the time
-damage

I really hope they will introduce new attack based skills that are not abominations of spells in 3.15 . Meta and spell spell spell is getting super boring.

so, the character is stuck at lvl88, maybe ill get her to 90-91, maybe ill attempt sirus. maybe, right now i simply enjoy the weather and post-pandemic world with no reason to play games.

but, if this skill stays the same (im mostly about mechanical stuff. the numbers are whatever) and it gets hit by the ~30% generic nerf then.. i dunno.

maybe its time to simply remove this skill from the game? with a rather solid gear (including 20ex+ worth of clusters - Fan of Blades etc and a 400pdps claw), legacy explody chest and 5k life (not a problem so far, i have 79% max res and ailment immunity) the damage (effective, in game, not POB numbers) is GARBAGE

it is like playing endgame on a 3Link

now i know why a new player cannot play Scion from the start. if they could, noone would get to maps. it is THIS BAD.