Devour Support

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cacmeister wrote:

What if…. and follow me here…. the support gems that they have displayed thus far have minimal damage aspects but offer a form of utility.

GGG has been known to shake things up…..

The reason we have only seen the numbers on two gems…..

Is because they are going to reveal that they have reworked support gems and they no longer have more/increased damage as part of the support.

Instead they may add some sort of flat damage that may scale to a gimmick.

Like fortify gem offers 2 to 9 physical damage per fortify stack.

Deadly Aliments adds a 322/sec chaos dot instead of a % to dot damage.

I just have a feeling….

I don't see Grinding Gear taking such a drastic step for Path the First, especially since the news that Path the Second does exactly this was received very...hm. Not necessarily poorly, but with a lot of trepidation even from people who were otherwise nominally in favor of POE. I've seen many, many versions of "okay but what's even the point of a 6L/5S if you don't get any extra damage out of it...?"

Many support gems in Path the First also don't really have an identity outside of bolting more damage onto the skill, a'la things like Melee Physical Damage, Vicious Projectiles, Controlled Destruction, and so forth. There's only so many cutesie ways Grinding Gear could make those gems not-damagey, and I imagine they'd run out of ways before they run out of gems.

Anyways.

I could see this for a character devoted solely to Delving, yeah. Plus it just kinna looks fun to play with. I hope it's not just a melee support; they demo'd it with a melee setup but why would they limit it to just bonk? Hm.

Looks fun for a meme build with necro corpse consumption; could do flicker, spark etc.

I don't see this being used for its "intended" purpose of sacrificing damage for sustain, but you could say that about most jank mechanics in poe. The corpse removal is okay as well but generally not worth losing a 6th link.

Will hold out judgement until they show us the whole gem, if it has a damage multiplier on it I can see it being used even if it's in the 10 - 20% range.

On HC it will be used for sure - you never know when some random corpse explosion occurs.

On SC it's utility is kinda' limited. It might be cool for some melee necro with Corpse Pact.

One thing that occured to me - provided the support works with spells - is you could make Soulwrest work much better, or at least much smoother for maps. Rig up a spell that can pop a pack, pop the pack, and turn the entire pack into phantasms. You'd still need a way to create phantasms during boss fights, probably Desecrate + Offering as usual, but you could have some fun with some sort of Speaker's Wreath shenaniganry and forcing the souls of your enemies to dispatch your other enemies. Unsure if worth, Soulwrest has always been more of a toy than a for-real build, but fuck if it doesn't sound like a hell of a toy with Devour Support.