Wither On Hit from Balance of Terror is either not working or not applying effect/icon.

Associated bug report: 1,886,897,566


>> Background:
I'm using Balance of Terror with "Inflict Withered for 2 seconds on Hit if you've cast Despair in the past 10 seconds"

I'm used to wither being the purple circle from, say, wither totems, as seen here in the Wiki:


>> The Issue:
I'm not seeing any signs of Withered being applied on hit per the jewel, even under ideal testing conditions in case there's some issue with my normal build.

It does not show icons near the enemy, icons on the top enemy health/ailment bar, enemy character/ground effects (as above), or any other sign it has been applied. Chaos damage also seems completely unaffected (should be a noticeable boost to chaos damage as successive wither stacks are applied).


>> Testing:
I'm self-casting Despair, either on or off the enemy, then, just to give the best-case scenario for testing, I'm self-casting Purifying Flame to apply the Withered On Hit.

I also tried Hexblast and Essence Drain as well, in case there was some completely undocumented issue applying Wither On Hit with non-chaos damage, but this had zero effect on the issue.

Finally, I tried casting Despair both on and off the enemy before hitting them, though that definitely shouldn't be required per the Jewel's wording, still to no effect.


>> Proof:
This is a screenshot right after self-casting Despair and hitting this enemy with Purifying Flame within 2 seconds. I've got dozens of screenshots of rare/magic enemies, with Despair cast both on them and away from them (shouldn't matter at all), all showing zero visual/damage effects of any kind.

I unfortunately don't have one of these jewels, so I put off testing this myself in case someone more knowledgable would chime in.

On testing it out, first with Withered Touch and later with Wither, the Wither debuff does not appear to create those purple charge-like orbs around the enemy.

Instead, I only got a purple smoke clinging to the enemy.



I saw the second image you had in your post before it went down; while I thought I saw a little bit of purple around the mob's top-right side, if it was there it didn't stand out too much.

Ok, I've done several hours of testing and documentation to work this out... if I didn't feel like PoE was a job before, holy *shit* do I now. I appreciate that some things are an "adventure" of investigation into a mechanic or the like, but this just feels like poor documentation I'm paying for with my time.

Hopefully once PoE2 is out, GGG can do something like 3M used to, having their engineers spend 30-60 minutes per week on something completely different from their normal job to shake things up, in this case perhaps checking a wiki page for accuracy or answering community questions.

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Jadian wrote:

On testing it out, first with Withered Touch and later with Wither, the Wither debuff does not appear to create those purple charge-like orbs around the enemy.

Instead, I only got a purple smoke clinging to the enemy.

I just did a big test and updated the Wiki page for "Withered Debuff" (https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Withered) with new screenshots. The purple smoke is the new animation for the Withered debuff and I'm almost certain the purple charge orbs in the ancient screenshot from the Wither page were the old/original look of Withered way back, as it matches the Withering Presence Ascendancy Notable on the Occultist (see the wiki page I updated).

I have no idea when the debuff changed as patch notes probably rolled it up into "Updated graphics" or the like unfortunately as they rarely describe sound/graphics changes in any depth.

"

Jadian wrote:

I saw the second image you had in your post before it went down; while I thought I saw a little bit of purple around the mob's top-right side, if it was there it didn't stand out too much.

I accidentally deleted it from Imgur -- Reuploading/linking it now.




Ok, it looks like it's applying graphically after all, but it's just very difficult to see, and more difficult to capture (spend 10 minutes with no gear on running around these enemies trying to frantically hit "T" and then PrtScr within a second or two, then get back to the game before I got nailed.



An important note, which I put on the Aul's Uprising Wiki page, is that it, like so many other things, applies a "smoke" effect on enemies, likely part of the "Hits against Nearby Enemies have 50% increased Critical Strike Chance" version" affix. But since all smoke effects are faint and this one is dark blue/black, there was no way I was ever going to see this purple smoke from Withered.




DAMAGE: Finally, an update from the damage perspective, which is less conclusive so hopefully someone can test this on their build too.

It's hard to find enemies that don't die too easily but I can permafreeze to mouse-over them and watch their health bars, but in Blighted maps I found a few that were useful. I tested hitting the self-cast Despair, just as before, while slamming highly-resistant bosses and it does seem it makes a difference, just judging by the rate at which their health bars drain. Not a great test, but I think it may be applying after all. Still a bit tough to judge.

In case you wanna update the wiki page futher, here is the patch note

3.5.3 Patch Notes

"

Updated the Wither debuff effect. The rotating orbs have been removed in order to improve performance.

Fortunately took me one minute to find, not several hours.

Thanks, updated the Withered Debuff page.