Divine Ire

Divine Ire had me so excited for this league. I had such high hopes, yet it still feels like a dead skill. Of Disintegration goes up 94% in damage vs the base gem, yet it can't even do half the damage of Storm Burst when scaled with decent gear and a lvl90+ passive tree.

I like the idea of Disintegration doing alot more damage durring beam and zero while channeling, however it almost feels like the damage from "of Disintegration" needs to be the damage of the base gem and Disintegration needs to be doubled.

While PoB has not been updated with t-gems if you simply put "Divine Ire deals 94% more damage" you can build around its t-gem varrient. I've been playing with it and storm burst since day 1 of season and in both theory and practice Divine Ire is lackluster.

You can't make comparisons like that or the skills just don't stand up, well you can but it isn't really productive.

Stormburst has similar values to every other skill but an extra scaler, that will make it perform better automatically unless they cuck it by assuming you'll stack said scaler (which they do occasionally)

Also Storm burst is pretty gross to selfcast whereas I always found DI performed substantially better - and PoB simulates full uptime casting which you'll only get if your just slapping them both on totems. In reality DI fairs better to cast while occasionally interupted.

Stormbursts damage is more BS the longer its duration is if you selfcast much like poison.

This is me going for a long winded way of saying just play disintegration if you think its fun, If you compare something always sucks. I bet both suck compared to Trans Pbrand that is so unbelievably busted I can't believe it made it in, it'll definitely be gone next league.

The thing is, DI and SB have always been very very similar skills. They both channel, they are both physical -> lightning and other than the duration they scale in the same way. This isn't apples and oranges, im actually comparing extremely similar skills.

If we ignore totems and go with self casting, the only time DI ever beat out SB was back when you could scale mass ele as extra chaos and used trickster ascendancy. However, even then it only beat it because after a certain amountt of DPS you didn't need to channel and just half second held and nuked a whole pack, so it felt better.

The point I'm making is that GGG took the time to tweak the gem and even put in two t-gem variations, but unless you just want the ascetic of Kamehameha the skill feels like the work they put into it was worthless. I can see people trying it just because oh man "Kamehameha got a buff!" And then it's dead again for the next 2 years..

Its like comparing Fireball and Firestorm because both are fire spells.

Fireball is a single projectile, firestorm is an AoE..

Ok, let's forget comparing DI it anything else at all. Let's just look at it vs every other build. GGG tweaked the skill and made two t-gems for it.. in its current state how likely is it you would put thier efforts to use and make a build with it?

Currently on softcore trade its only used in 0.2% of builds. I highly belive this is only due to people wanting to check it out and it's going to become a dead skill again before the leagues end if it hasn't already. SSF is slightly higher at 0.5%

I'm simply trying to discus the state of this gem as imo it's current state is below par.

I already made a replacement for my old doom based hexblast one shot assassin I made in sentinel I think with a template for Disintegration DI and it looks hoppin. Its expensive though hence why i've not made it yet but the numbers are fine - and if I get fine numbers on HC its more than playable on SC.

I'm not really disagreeing with you here either I think most channeling spells are actually weaker than they should be but my point is its far from the tallest nail in the "what needs balance" discussion.

The fact that a tiny portion of players use it is pretty irrelevant, an overwhelming number of players follow the meta and use the popular guides without deviating, a much smaller percentage actually experiment every league with the weird shit we are offered.

IMO all we should care about is is a skill viable? Hard to answer because we all have a different measure for it but I think DI is most definitely viable - the best? Of course not, but I'm confident i'll be able to drop everything non Uber with it on HC which means Ubers as well would be simple enough on SC.