Chaos DoT builds just got GUTTED (despite nobody playing them). Here's WHY & How to FIX

For context, the 3.2 changes just dropped, and this focus is on Chaos DoT skills in general. While there are a few outliers like pcoc and Bane, Chaos DoT as an archetype overall, doesn't see play.

This is a pretty deep dive, and I wish I had longer to really flesh out my thoughts, but the league is tomorrow so...
I REALLY hope a dev from GGG can find the time to read, or a community member can present a TL;DR to them, because I think that this post will convince them to make some very quick and easy changes before league start to some extremely weak builds which got ACCIDENTALLY destroyed

What I think happened


How bad is it?


The specific problems



Solution


Thank you for reading my TED talk!

boss monsters is the only place chaos dot struggled outside of chaos resistant + other tanky mod rares.

so the hex changes is only a buff to the build, also punishment can't be ignored it adds a large increased damage taken multiplier to enemies once they get below 50%(even more relevant now that despair lost that line).

First of all it s not only Chaos dot who got gutted, melee replica alberon warpath is also fucked.

"

lolozori wrote:

First of all it s not only Chaos dot who got gutted, melee replica alberon warpath is also fucked.

they benefit more since they are getting higher -res.

Ah, dorkdude you missed the same things the balance team did. Did I forgot to include some thoughts or not convey them clearly enough? Either way this will be good clarify a few things and cement some points.

I think part of the problem is people just think "Curse buff patch"
That isn't true! Read the skill gems changes and go through the curses..
Do those look like curse buffs to you?
It's not the whole truth, and neither are the curse numeric nerfs in isolation, so we need to consider the whole patch, which is what I'm trying to convey, and I'll do so more below.

With the changes, Chaos DoTs relying on despair deal LESS damage, to EVERYTHING. Everything includes Rares. Therefore the hex changes are NOT a buff. So if these Ed/Blight/etc builds already struggle with chaos resist/tanky mods/bosses as you say, imagine what they do now?

As I laid out in the post the least we should do is return these skills to where they were. I'm positive that if the changes come through as they are laid out in the patch, there will be LOTS of skipping rares, or at the very least struggling more than before on rares for any Chaos DoT build. Even good builds like VG and Pcoc are going to feel it. It's a simple numbers problem.

Inescapably Chaos DoTs lost a 35% takes DPS mod. Where will that be made up? Against rares it won't be. Against bosses its more of a wash. The problem will be the time consumed for the build itself to kill rares. There is a point where the time/reward ratio is simply not efficient, and simply not fun. In fact you can spectate this time/reward behavior by watching any streamer. They skip packs and rares, and its all based on their builds for whether or not its efficient. It becomes a problem when you start saying no more often than yes to rare kills. Which I foresee being the case with the weaker of the Chaos DoT builds.

Also, it's not like these rares are "fun" to kill either, like some engaging dark souls boss, and they aren't likely to drop something useful enough to justify the time taken to kill them. Which is a problem because other skills don't share this problem. Which is the entire point of why balance issues are worth discussing. I wouldn't mind going slower to play a build that is fun, but the game evolves every patch, and each skill and class competes on a power curve where falling behind that curves does things exactly like I laid out above, it simply becomes inefficient and unrewarding to do certain content. When a build is so inefficient that you need to skip rare monsters, its a problem, which you CANNOT help but feel when you play those builds. Believe me, I'd love to have my own Path of Exile private server and mod it to my hearts content for my friends and I. Too bad there's negative incentive for studios to do this.

There's also huge flaws in "counting" punishment.
1) Punishment will require 100 strength at level 21. This is obviously not designed for witch/shadow trees which will require investment in gear slots/passive to get 100 (Fair enough a lot of us already run determ, but still the design intent is clearly biased for bleed/other physical dots). Not ideal.

2) Punishment is 50% effective for full DoT builds. If you play Blight, you have ZERO hit damage, so at best you might as well be playing punishment with 50% less effect. This is true for pretty much half of the Chaos DoT builds. Clearly not ideal. It is DESIGNED for builds which deal hit damage and DoT damage, which makes sense as the bleed angle with strong melee hits to soften them up and have your bleed finish the job.

**Understanding this point is CRUCIAL in video game balance, if this doesn't make sense to you, I will go to lengths unknown to make sure its clear
Punishment is a TOOL that you must expend RESOURCES to obtain
Punishment, and the opportunity cost to USE IT don't account for the fact that your build isn't very good with it. The Curse was DESIGNED, WITH OPPORTUNITY COST IN MIND, for builds which have BUILT IN hit damage and DoT damage. How useful it is, how much damage it deals, how hard it is to obtain, are all balanced around a hit based build which has DoT. Like Bleed. So the opportunity cost I pay as a Witch using a non-hit skill is LARGER than the opportunity cost a build which the skillgem was designed for pays. A simpler example is like a keystone. What's the opportunity cost for a duelist to take Iron Reflex? 11 points. A witch? 27. The game doesn't magically calculate and make Iron Reflex somehow 27/11 times better for a witch to use, it's the same Iron Reflex as the duelist gets. So the "technical 50%" loss is both from the opportunity cost to acquire it, and the usefulness of the curse itself on a non-hit build (and yes, it is an estimate, but calculating such things is beyond the human brain; 50% will suffice). For this reason, it is not fair to use punishment as a point to stand on.

3) It still consumes a curse slot. You have limited curses...
I cannot consider an argue rational that says
"X is not nerfed because you can expend resources to get this extra curse and its like nothing changed"
Except the fact that the curse isn't FREE. It costs resources, and having to run punishment to get BACK TO WHERE YOU STARTED is not a buff in any sense of the word; It's called a nerf.

So justifying spending resources on a curse with these downsides, and using it as a point in an argument are equally weak, if not entirely invalid.

lolzori, I WOULD say that I hate to say it, but I think you'll be happy to hear, that build got BUFFED!

The -chaos res mod actually increased on Despair. So your hit damage will deal more damage to every monster in the game

Now if you were inflicting poison, that would obviously fall under Chaos DoTs, but the more hit-based you are, the less you get nerfed.

In kind, and why I didn't focus super hard on poison based Chaos Dots, is because you will always have ailment scaling to fall back on, which pure Chaos DoTs don't have, which links you into crit multi scaling with perfect agony, which pure Chaos DoTs also don't have.

So while yes, Poison builds got hit, because Despair is basically garbage now, at least you have two more scaling options to fall back on, something pure Chaos DoTs don't have

I'd have to play my ED builds to know what is what, I doubt I'll bother with the loot nerfs from 3.19 still in place.

Anyway, for losing dmg on white mobs, I dont remember applying curses on them. You generally contagion, ED and move to the next pack. As long as 1 ED has enough dmg to kill blue and white mobs, no curse is needed. In fact its better when mobs take a bit longer to die as ED is sustaining you better. And ED easily overkilled white/blue mobs each time I've played it.

For yellow and uniques... I'd say curses (self-cast) defintely helped a lot. If the dmg got nerfed by like 10-15% thats sad but the dmg was already very bad even with big investment. I dont see what would cause a drop like that though?

For blight no idea. I've played only one build years ago and dmg was real bad.

I agree though, both of them need buffing. Tuning curses doesnt help either skill gem.

For punishment needing str... That might have held weight before determination was used in like every build. Now you need to pump str either way.

Yah, the damage drop is a bit difficult to see. You really have to read the curse changes thoroughly.
But certainly the damage loss on rare mobs is truly 50-80%.
Whatever your PoB says, cut it in half, at least.
We lost a 35% takes multiplier on Despair
We lost another 10% in malediction
We lost at least 10% curse effect assuming they DON'T take her travel effect away (another 5-6%, or 10-12% if they nerf the travels)
You lose every bit of curse effect YOU USED TO SCALE the "takes DoT Despair mod"

If you use blasphemy you lose another 25% curse effect, which is hard to calculate because its a change that hasn't been made affecting another change that hasn't been made (The others were changes in effective isolation). To REALLY know I'd have to be in-game with the gems and as much curse effect as a new build would sensibly stack (To be honest I wont know, not going to suffer dealing an order of magnitude less damage than my friends playing normal builds, and watch them do the maps for me as I desperately try to keep up), but I can ESTIMATE that it's going to be ~10% less damage (call it 40% CE, on a -30% chaos res Despair, to -42%, then slap 25% less right back down to -31%) So enemies you hit that have 0 or less chaos resistance before the curse would make for 11% less damage dealt to them, and if they have some chaos resistance your penetration becomes more efficient but at numbers at or below 30% its effectively the same, about 10% less damage (There's a graph on the wiki about penetration).

If you could get 50% curse effect before, that amps the old despair from 35% to 52% takes
That's just gone outright now. No recourse, nothing to replace it, no buffs to compensate (There is recourse, but its literally, I'm not joking with you when I say this, its literally that non-boss enemies will have 1% less chaos res now)
So... actually no recourse.

The Blasphemy problem comes with the Occultist baggage. As, if you want to apply 3 curses, how exactly are you going to do this? Your options are Bane/Blas which both have the 25% less penalty, vixen gloves (Which I sincerely apologize for mentioning, as they're probably going to get nerfed), or hard casting. There are others, but I'm not even going to try and quantify something like Doedre's Skin.

Hard casting obviously causes you to lose a billion damage by not attacking, and totally defeats the purpose of having more than one curse to apply, because by the time you've cast your curses, you've lost like 3-4 seconds of damage, so the whole thing becomes a function of curse duration/dps and I don't even need to do the whole calculation to tell you that it's not efficient to self-cast 3 curses, just kill the boss without them and it will be faster. If you want it to be worth it, well, too bad you can't make it so. You have to invest in curse duration and cast speed for that to be the case, and if you do that, you've un-invested in damage or survivability and defeated the whole purpose.

Vixen gloves have a pretty unique problem, they take the glove slot, which is traditionally how you get your + 6/7/8 ED/contagion setup. So if you want to apply curses without penalty with vixen, the damage you save yourself from your curses not being 25% bricked is lost because now you have a level 24 ED instead of a level 28 ED. Not to mention Alelopathy unique gloves which are a fantastic white/yellow map item cant ever be used with this nice curse setup because you can't equip two pairs of gloves.

Your final option is blas/bane, which just has the penalty. Deal with it.

So yah, add up...
~52% loss of a takes DoT
10% on Malediction loss (You take more damage by losing mal too lol)
10% loss on curse effect being nerfed (only the case for Occultist)
and a final 10% DPS loss on being forced into blas/bane
(ED losing 4 levels is like 11% DPS loss on the PoB I set up)
(I have no clue how to quantify the whole self-cast curse shenanigans DPS loss, you'd probably have to spec a curse wheel, I'll be generous and say you're already pathed to it and spend 6 skill points getting curse duration and cast speed wheels, so that's like 3 jewels or a DoT multi wheel, or you could just lose 30% ES, all of which sound like horrible sacrifices to simply "Get back what we lost". Honestly CBA)
and these things aren't all additive, they affect MUTIPLIERS, so some of the difference in their magnitude pre/post nerf is higher than the raw magnitude of difference between them (not by much, but still)
I don't use words lightly, it's a betrayal of language. Gutted is 100% accurate
I wasn't joking when I said it was one of the worst nerfs to Chaos DoT ever, on par with the chaos resistance change back in the day (It killed Ziz ED lol)

To be fully fair I should mention the boss damage. If you have a build that doesn't use Blasphemy, or Occultist, then your boss damage is pretty close to the same. You lose a little bit with despair alone on bosses, but with like.... 80-90% curse effect you get back to the old numbers assuming you don't have any other source of chaos res shred, and the boss isn't PARTICUALRILY resistant to chaos.

With the slight loss of boss DPS on the despair nerf (which is funny because every other curse got BUFFED on bosses) Occultist Blasphemers losing malediction and their built in curse effect, is about as I said... 10-20%.

Thanks for sparking more insights to this, boy I really hope GGG drops in for a good read. Sure would be nice to hear that they at least acknowledge this stuff happened. Even if its to tell me I'm wrong and for what reasons, I surely would like to know.

Chaos dots about the same as before, -chaos res is worth the most, increased damage taken is worth the least due to withers digustingly burdening presence

Basically I think you are barking up the wrong tree OP, you say Chaos DoT builds got gutted but what you actually mean is Occultist got nerfed ignoring that other chaos DoT users get a little bit more in some cases.

Your maths is too fuzzy and rife with absence of opportunity cost analysis to provide an accurate picture for the rest, Occultist definitely got nerfed there is no disputing that though.

Just to make it simple though

-30% Chaos Res + 135% damage taken > -9% + 143% damage taken

You can't possibly think the second is better so drop the angle about it being worse on bosses, there is no point you can invest in curse effect to get the 2nd to be better than the first.

Whats more the -30% Chaos res is basically better than that + malediction due to malediction also being increased damage taken not more.

Very large buff while bossing, you have an argument that it might be a nerf on rares but I'm yet to play a Chaos DoT build or any developed build really that struggles on rares when bosses have 10x the life or more.

When people say rares, they really mean league rares (legion, abyss, ess - the like) in 8mod 60%+ delly t16s. And yes, taking 2-4 secs more to kill a rare when there are 5 on the screen at the same time, each of which 2 shots you and that is if you weren't taking the altar "spank me more 4 more cash, daddy" nodes, hurts.

Looking at a past league favorite in standard and finding them neutered yet again hurts as well.

I would much rather have all the supposed 6 links of poe 2 become 5 links then be further subjected to the vision neverending nerfesto.