pathfinder rework feedback

Ascendancy feels much more chaos focused than before, but the numbers just aren't impressive to me on budget gear (whatever that means to you I guess).

Tankiness feels great, life flask node is like 5000 regen easy peasy, on top of like 60% flask effect so huge armor/es/reduced ele taken. Dawnbreaker is an easy way to convert phys to ele taken, then helmet enchant loreweave whatever. Very tanky, can handle no regen maps etcetcetc.

Wither effect is a strong stat, but kind of lame for an ascendancy. Just as an fyi poe calculates wither rounding down in the middle of the calculation. Very good, but not as good as 50% sounds. so instead of like 140 extra at max stacks it is like 125 or whatever.

Permanent flasks are nice, easy enough to get. Wish the node had some cool thing like nearby enemies are hindered/blind/stunned when you use a flask or something. Basically it can sustain rf with very very little investment... kind of. Some caveats to that. Depends on flask effect and whatnot.

Master distiller seems unusable. 2 flask charges used is quite a bit. Better than poisonous concoction, but most builds stack more attack speed than poison conc/explosion conoct do. I love this node on paper, but with any sort of trigger setup those charges are gone. If I was only doing 1 attack then maybe I could have it be permanent, but then I wouldn't get my flask effect without mageblood (which IMO i don't have, I am a pathfinder for that reason). But if I use like frostblink/flamedash, attack/cast 4per second, it eats up charges real quick.

The benefits are tempting. In practice it is meh.

just food for thought.

if I had to fix master Distiller, I would make it a pendulum buff
3 seconds crit multi and chance
3 seconds 30% pen
3 seconds damage as extra chaos

so at least people could forbidden flame it or whatever.

just a fyi wither is base 6%, so 50% inc. effect is 50% inc effect, no rounding involved.

personally I dislike the pathfinder rework, and I loved the pathfinder before...

veteran bowyer was just more useful for elemental builds as it just worked, sure it was niche... but it worked(10% ele pen, some phys as extra and flask charges gained for builds that applied elemental ailments and used unique flasks that took tons of charges), the new master distiller is just awful(you would rather just grab a small node for flask effect than take that nonsense).

the 10% flask effect gain on the magic flask effect node was just to compensate for murdering the flask effect flask mastery, so that's not really a gain.. its actually a loss because it doesn't effect unique flasks... let alone the flask charge gain mastery being gone to making it much harder to sustain certain flasks even with full investment into flask mods(both passive tree and gear + 28% quality on flasks to maximize duration).

the big loss to me is the change to nature's reprisal, yes it is a "buff" at the high end... but id rather have a lower high end and a better average which the old gave between the AOE/always active damage which would make clearing with things that didn't stack wither fast better... to many build creators go wither on hit, set wither to 15 stacks in POB config and go look DPS go higher. Wither on hit is kinda irrelevant because sustaining max charges with withering step wasn't hard(between inc. duration support and other duration sources, wither expires slower glove implicit and temp chains)

Master surgeon is really good, I find that kind of playstyle annoying though and rather pointless at the higher end of gearing(what good is tons of regen when you aren't taking tons of damage).

overall I feel the rework greatly narrowed the build viability on pathfinder while barely enabling anything new to replace what got killed.

Master distiller is bad but everything else is better than before.

Flask charges gained from previous veteran bowyer is on the tree now. 10% pen is meh and there are numerous ways of dealing with enemy elemental resists now.

The 50% withered effect is just insane. There is a chaos mastery that gives 5% chance to inflict full wither stacks. So any build that attacks fast will have 15 wither stacks in a few secs.

The only thing you can argue is that the chance to not consume flask charges is moved away so on most builds you'd have to give that up. Doesn't seem to be a big deal unless its a unique flask with low duration like dying sun.