Chainbreaker Keystone

Hi there,

I have concerns regarding the rework of the Chainbreaker keystone as mentioned in the recent development manifesto. That thread is pretty swamped by now and I'd like to make my concerns more visible. Using the feedback and suggestion forum seems the best place to achieve this; I hope some meaningful discussion can take place here.

The way that I understand the proposed rework, it will make the keystone unusable. During Sentinel league I created a "Bowserker". My build uses bleed dps via puncture with snipe (from Assailum). As a ranged character, rage support and other notables on the skill tree are not an option for generating rage. Without Akoya's Lethal Pride I am forced to use roundabout ways (ie cheesy tricks) to get my rage maxed especially before I go into a boss fight. It was stated in the manifesto that Chainbreaker in its current state is too difficult to use properly. I do not find this to be true.

Chainbreaker currently requires % mana regeneration to increase your rage regeneration rate. This required some investment for my Bowserker using the skill tree and equipment, but honestly was not that difficult to achieve.



The above image shows a rage regen rate of 10.7/s which was achieved with only 257% increased mana regen. You can also see that I still have base mana regen of 21.4/s so the build does not rely entirely on mana leech. This setup gives me very little trouble keeping my rage meter high. As a bleed build I do not have to spam attacks which helps prevent overuse of rage, but again I do not have melee options to help generate rage so I feel this evens things out. In the manifesto it was stated a desire to lean harder into turning rage into a resource that needed to be managed. I feel I have already done that with this character. Below is an image of my Bowserker from Path of Building where I have Chainbreaker unallocated.



As you can see my % mana regen is the same as previously stated, but it is only shown here because it is modifying my mana regen (instead of rage regen). Unfortunately my base mana regen is so low that I only have 76.4 mana/s. This means under the proposed changes to Chainbreaker I will only be regenerating 3 rage per second which is a far cry from the almost 11 rage/s I am currently getting. This would require further investment in more caster focused mods to boost my base mana regen. I can achieve ~200 mana regen/s by using a level 22 Clarity which would grant about 8 rage per second. 8 rage per second still falls short of my current rage regen. A level 22 Clarity will also almost double my current intelligence requirement and in turn require further investment in caster focused passives and equipment.

In summary: I very much do not want to need to use a skill called "Clarity" in order to boost my ability to "Rage". It all sounds just... so wrong. If you made it to the end here, thanks for reading. I am interested to hear what you all think.

Out of curiosity why are you using rage with Puncture/Snipe? Just for the move speed?

Rage grants attack speed, move speed, and increased damage. The damage increase does not affect the bleed, just the attack hit. However I am using Bear's Girdle leather belt, which grants % increased physical damage per 10 rage which does affect my bleed DPS.

Rage also allows for the Berserk active skill which adds a nice layer of defense via % less damage taken.

Being a Bowserker is also just lots of fun and I wanted to try something different.

Fair enough. Sounds like a neat build!

I was curious about that to... Every 25 mana regen seems wrong for some reason. That can't be right to expect chainbreaker builds to get like 200-300 mana regen a second.

Its a nerf, I could feel it as soon as they listed it - the top end is going to be higher as its tied to a combination of stats rather than an individual one but that also means far more gear cost too.

Ironically I played a rage vortex hierophant in scourge league and he probably has double the rage generation he had before :p all my other characters are much worse.