Acolyte of Chayula

So admittedly I might just be stupid, and I'm sure people in the thread will let me know if I am, but I feel like this ascendancy is increadibly weak, and can be made good with one simple tweak.

This ascendancy is going to be giving aditional chaos damage to the skills you were already using before. The problem right now is that there's no way to make that chaos damage consistent outside of branching into just becoming a witch, or going for ranger poison skills.

Flames of Chayula, the purple flames that give you the extra chaos damage buff aren't affected by extend skill effect duration nodes in the passive tree from the ascendancy tree (but will if you use mantra of destruction), and each stack timer is individual. That is, for every stack you pick up, that stack has its own individual timer.

What I would suggest, would be that this be changed. Allow picking up a new source of the buff, be it a flame or a kill with a mantra charged move, refresh the duration of the full buff to let you actually stack it up. It'll still be RNG if you can keep the buff inbetween packs because you need to run into other purple flames, and the way I use Mantra of Destruction at least, you'll use it with something like Thunder Fall, and everything dies.

As it is right now, you'll kill an entire pack with mantra of destruction, and run out of your chaos damage buff before you reach the next pack, making this entire portion of the class pointless outside of using the flames for self sustain.

But if you were going to just focus on elemental damage, you'd be better served just going invoker.

The darkness nodes are also pretty bad in my opinion. Some people might say there's no good auras, but those people haven't stacked power charge from afterimage for moves like thunder fall or charge staff.

Darkness completely removes your spirit for a up to 600 damage shield that can either recharge faster or give you bonus chaos damage while unreserved.

The problem is this shield will always be unreserved unless you went Mind over Matter and Eldritch Battery, which is a hefty skill point investment that can brick your build if you don't have the itemization to support it.

All to have. . . 30% extra chaos damage while you haven't run out of mana.

Admittedly the mana leech nodes want to support this, but its still heavily itemization dependant, and I personally have found no success with this. I also feel that taking those mana leech nodes synergizes way better with Flames of Chayula, since you can use the blue nodes to get back mana and energy shield, but flames of chayula have the other problems described.

Let me know in the thread if I'm just dumb.

You are right. Most of the nodes are not strong. Especially the Darkness. The 600 shield is useless when a white mob deals more damage than 600 to you. I like the flames, but it adds a lot of tedium to the gameplay. Maybe in endgame when we can somehow extend the duration of the spell or something?

As I said in my own feedback in my opinion now that this is a skill gem the skill gem itself should absolutely have duration, cooldown and area tags.

Cooldown recovery should scale with the rate of spawning flames that is intuitive.

More duration and skill effect duration should scale with the duration of the buff.

Area should scale with the size of the breach that you see and the flames should only spawn in the breach area and not outside of it.

I am playing a spell caster so I dont have access to use these mantra skills to refresh the stack unless I made it a weapon swap and melee wave which seems unrealistic.

Also I am pretty sure this is a bug but currently you can link Vitality, Clarity, Cannibalism and Herbalism in the skill and it appears in the character info that they work and are active despite the gem view panel saying you would not be able to activate the skill due to spirit.

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Penquisitor#3996 wrote:

This ascendancy is going to be giving aditional chaos damage to the skills you were already using before. The problem right now is that there's no way to make that chaos damage consistent outside of branching into just becoming a witch, or going for ranger poison skills.

"Extra" Chaos dmg means you get it on top of any other damage you do based on that damage. You can scale it with literally any type of dmg, there is no need to go for Chaos-DMG (except for poison stuff I guess).

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aDoreMe#3888 wrote:

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Penquisitor#3996 wrote:

This ascendancy is going to be giving aditional chaos damage to the skills you were already using before. The problem right now is that there's no way to make that chaos damage consistent outside of branching into just becoming a witch, or going for ranger poison skills.

"Extra" Chaos dmg means you get it on top of any other damage you do based on that damage. You can scale it with literally any type of dmg, there is no need to go for Chaos-DMG (except for poison stuff I guess).

I am aware.

But because of how the extra chaos damage works, because it is so inconsistent, because you're not going to have the bonuses most of the time, and you're going to invest in melee damage + whatever elemental damage type you're using, why not just go invoker?

Because you want Instant Manaleech or the Darkness stuff I assume? The % chance for Chaos damage is just that... (free) Damage. It's just a 2 Point node, these are often "take and forget bonusses"... Like Pathfinders 6 extra Skillpoints or something like this. They are usually not build defining.


Iirc Trickster has (or used to have) a similar node in PoE 1, you can check out for what that was used?

I would also want to add to my feedback

You currently can not use 2 mana flasks instead of life flask which would be useless with Mind over Matter + Chaos Innoculation.

And you probably want to take Eldritch Battery so you wouldnt even have Energy Shield so you can't use Eternal Youth to make your Life Flask work on ES.

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aDoreMe#3888 wrote:

Because you want Instant Manaleech or the Darkness stuff I assume? The % chance for Chaos damage is just that... (free) Damage. It's just a 2 Point node, these are often "take and forget bonusses"... Like Pathfinders 6 extra Skillpoints or something like this. They are usually not build defining.


Iirc Trickster has (or used to have) a similar node in PoE 1, you can check out for what that was used?

Yeah but like you see other people stating, the darkness buff is pretty terrible. If you're trying to use it as a shield, 600 hitpoints is nothing. You will get hit for way more than that by white mobs in lategame, and if you're trying to hold onto it by making some MoM, EB build, you're going really far in the skill tree to get this to work, so you're not taking other nodes that would be helpful to you trying to go from the center right to the top left, to make a 30% extra chaos damage work, and you miss out on spirit skills that actually synergize really well with Chayula (Like afterimage dodge. You'll be perpetually at max charges).

Assuming you're not trying to use both, and you're still just trying to use this for the instant mana leech with MoM, I don't think that's worth the ascendancy investment. If you don't know, energy shield % bonuses on the passive tree don't affect the mana you get from energy shield with eldritch battery. There's way better nodes for an ES setup than for MoM.

In fact, you're better off going with flames of chayula, using instant mana leech because the blue flames count as being "leeched" mana. So that's instant, and also boosts your defensive layer of ES.

This is probably the best synergy I've found so far, I just wish the purple flames were better.

yes Darkness nodes are way too bad right now.

The interaction with Mind over Matter, Chaos Innoculation and Eldritch Battery is obvious. You never take damage to Life or ES so you never reserve darkness and never have to deal with the dissolution effect.

But assuming level 100 and 600 darkness, 600 permanently unreseved darkness is just 30% extra damage at chaos at the cost of losing all your spirit. That is just terrible.

Even if Darkness didnt take away your entire spirit bar, it would still be bad to get just 30% damage out of 2 ascendancy nodes plus investing massively in the passive tree to build around it.
With how it is I think Grasp of the Void would need to give you 10% extra Chaos damage per 20 chaos instead of 1%.

Those flames are currently designed in a way that I can collect up to 3/4 and then burst some enemies while the buff remains. I think that is a good design choice and allows me do play around it. It's far more fun than basically stacking a permanent buff, as it would be if picking up new flames would refresh the duration. The duration seems fine, maybe even a little too long, once you get the 2nd related ascendency node.

Regarding the darkness, I found I felt quite tanky at low level just when I got the ascendency. It felt really strong. It might scale badly into lategame though - not sure about that yet, since I'm not there.
The +% damage buff from darkness stacks seems to be for pro players who play no hit runs, the damage buff for "normal" players seem to be the extra chaos damage.