GGG Please, Chieftain Ascendancy is Dog Water

I think bls str stacking con path totems are dead as a build in the endgame.
We lost
Totems immune to fire damage( reflect immune

A boatload of stats. Like a literal boat like 50% increased, 25% more something in that ballpark

Totem life leech ( now recoup from damage taken)

10% increased strength

Covered in ash

We get
Free all resist

Unaffected by ignite

Totem regen (bad)

Totem taunt

Maybe setting enemy resist to 0, sometimes.

More regen.

5% explode, on aoe, teleporting death totems.


We got gladiatored.

Ho ho.

The funniest thing about the rework seems to be the number of "bait" nodes there are in the ascension:

-- 5% explode chance on kill -- not high enough percentage to chain & help clear. Non-map bosses don't generally have many minions running around so that like doesn't help much there either.

-- Totem taunt hasn't been reliable for me. Recoup, given the small totem hit points, generally is likely to return only a few hundred points to the player so that doesn't help recovery NEARLY as much as 1% or 2% leech would have -- of which both of those leech options are gone.

-- The non-unique jewel converting nodes into fire damage isn't needed. Increased damage isn't what we need to scale builds as there are TONS of that already on the passive tree. Multipliers to damage [Crit Multi, DoT Multi,...], increased attack / cast speed, enemy damage taken effects, etc. is what's needed to properly scale damage.

-- The DoT over time if you're both nearby & stationary seems like a nerf as it seems to set the resistance to zero [thus has no resistance] so it won't let your normal curses + exposure + scorch take the resists into negatives because it ignores modifiers and hard sets the res to zero ... thus only decent when you don't have good gear.

-- If the cooldown on some of the slam nodes are still there [2 seconds?] then that doesn't do anything for strike skills. Slam skills with similar buffs before weren't particularly impressive with BETTER nodes available so even slam is questionable.


Really there is one node that seems good, another node that's required to get to the good node that's acceptable ... and then a bunch of nodes that could wind up being bait nodes barring substantial updates to melee and esp. slam skills.