Lol @ Chaos dot archetype

There's been a few changes to chaos-related skills, from PoE 1 to PoE 2, that I don't really understand, and they make playing something like Essence Drain + Contagion kind of a clunky, zero-dps joke while leveling.

First, Contagion is no longer an area-of-effect skill -- it only hits one mob when you cast it. So if you want to spread it and the other dots that can go along with it, you need to ensure you're dotting up the same mob (with Essence Drain or whatever), which isn't entirely practical in a game such as this. You can use a support to make ED chain, but it isn't necessarily going to chain to the mob you need it to.

Secondly, for 30 spirit reservation, Withering Presence is an absolute joke when you get access to it. Technically, it can stack up to 10 times for 50% increased chaos damage on a monster, but because the duration refreshes before you get more than 2 stacks up, the most you'll ever have is 10% increased chaos damage on that monster. This is less increased chaos damage than you'd get from an single item mod in Act 1. With gem quality and specific supports, it's probably possible to make Withering Presence useful, but when you get access to the gem it is completely useless.

dont forget the weird auto aim making it so its essentially rng if the ED will hit the targ you got with contagion and not some random nearby mob, though i cant agree on low dps my ed/contagion melts entire screens in seconds has been through levelin and bosses
and yeah the aura is garbage

I found a workaround which makes it little bit easier, first cast ED, not contagion. Whichever target ED hits first auto aim with contagion

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shape3169#6973 wrote:

I found a workaround which makes it little bit easier, first cast ED, not contagion. Whichever target ED hits first auto aim with contagion

This works, but I found another issue with this. For smaller mobs, the essence drain can 1 shot the mob before contagion is cast, resulting in the combo not going off and the monsters swarming your character.

I like how there's more than 100% immediate, no setup needed lightning penetration in the passive tree but Chaos gets 3% and if you want more you have to make a ton of effort to get wither going.

Maybe the play is to somehow get hexblast working with a curse aura so I can just blow up the mob every second but the mana sustain for that would be crazy.

I'm not convinced Withering Presence actually does anything. There's a dialogue when it goes off once in a while but I've never actually noticed it making a noticable difference of any kind.

I kind of disagree on contagion. It still works great as a mobbing tool that helps you build up insane room clear in combination with other things.

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Victini#7730 wrote:

dont forget the weird auto aim making it so its essentially rng if the ED will hit the targ you got with contagion and not some random nearby mob, though i cant agree on low dps my ed/contagion melts entire screens in seconds has been through levelin and bosses
and yeah the aura is garbage

My experience is similar; the combined dps of the two skills seems fine, and the spread works out alright, IF the game decides to allow the contagion cast to actually land on the mob I target, instead of a totally different random other mob some distance away, usually behind the other mobs where I cannot hit with ED without doing a giant loop-de-loop around the pack to reach them, by which time Contagion ran out of course, making 'chasing the Contagion' a non-viable tactic in most encounters.

The 'workable' tactic for me for now seems to be to spam Contagion 5 times or so hoping and wishing that one of the closer mobs gets auto-targeted, and then casting ED at it, or for the mobs that are beefy enough, casting ED first and then Contagion seems to 'like better' hitting the mob I target instead of any other ones in the back.

However targeting is coded now, is really quite bad for the ED/Contagion gameplay style because both debuffs need to land on the same mob for the playstyle to work out effectively. As it is however, this happens too seldomly because the targeting is working against us, as if we roll a dice with each cast and need to hit a lucky 5 or 6 to get a hit on the targeted mob.

It's completely fine and expected, that of course a projectile like ED should hit whatever is first in line in its' direction of travel, but a skill like Contagion should never hit a mob that is not the one being targeted by the player if one is targeted, that feels awful and jarring to try to play with, because it's directly antithetical to claiming control over the player character.

Please, for the love of Kitava let us have targeting work more predictably.

Another issue I see with Chaos is the sheer lack of support options. I think ED and Contagion have only a couple recommended supports they don't share, a few are not in the game yet, and most others they would want are also shared. On top of this, getting enough options for them to both be 6 linked feels impossible. All this without considering any 3rd or 4th skill that may also share supports, such as curses or other chaos skills.


It is not the only archetype that seems lacking either, but the lack of sharing supports outside of GL has glaring flaws currently that some archetypes will struggle hard with until proper additions enter the game to fill the games and flesh out the builds, though this may still leave the diversity lacking. GGG needs to really consider how to approach this new gem system in relation to multiple skills with the same scaling factors.

I agree that Withering Presence feels lackluster, and using Withering Touch on Chaos Bolt is not bad, but there are also not good options to replace it with either, leaving the builds feeling lacking once again. I also fear that some of the scaling for it may overlap with other Chaos skills, making it more impossible to improve. This gets worse if they decide to add an Envy or Malevolence style aura.

I am not against the idea of different spells coming together with different jobs and creating combos using generic scaling, but the lack of viable supports and support diversity to mix and match what you want from similar skills is just crippling. I hope they can add enough to the game that it feels good. I don't want awkward duration mismatches for Chaos DoTs and similar levels of clunk simply because I can only give one gem more/increased duration due to a lack of options.

Clunky? yes. Z-dps? I mean, its not terrible.

I've been having great fun running a hybridized setup cross-interacting ED, contagion, decaying curse, and dark effigy.

Contagion a thing -> curse it -> ED it -> plop my totem, first thing dies and the curse explodes because doomblast, and now everything around it has ED + contagion + curse and I make unearths that now do the contagion part for me -> it all explodes again because curse -> more contagion spreaders -> suddenly the crowd is self destructing violently.

The fact that contagion spreads any chaos dot (including curses supported by decaying curse) and gets picked up by unearths is really fun.

Now consider also that blackflame is a thing that exists, converting your ignite damage to chaos dot damage. Toss out a solar orb, dump an ignite setup pizzablast on it, throw in raging spirits on reserve for a bit of extra meat in front and easy expose support, and you've got yourself a bejillion dot and one very belligerent totem spraying so many projectiles that tripple twinned shaper with doing bullethell would feel ashamed.

Definitely don't dispute clunky, it plays like a piano...but tbh, the amount of cross interaction I've found on contagion is violent.

I've tried a decent amount of ED/Contagion but its just so clunky compared to PoE1 that it's laughable. It will always feel like it has problems in this current state when we are being asked to not Contagion first. Mobs run at you at different speeds might run out of effects you look to activate and spread through Contagion and you need to be spreading them reliably or shit just starts feeling bad. If things start dying at different speeds or you don't connect with everything correctly the spread just doesn't happen right and you end up in danger and this happens fairly often.

I will admit because I think it's important this is the early level feels of ED/Contagion not with every single different form of DoT available but it just feels so disgusting compared to PoE1 it's just over. I'm trying to play HC you give me one of the most unreliable toolsets for like the first 30? levels or something like if Contagion just worked like PoE1 with auto target snapping to mobs with the AoE it would be a different story. Sure you can Unleash sure you can Arcane Tempo to try to snipe the white mobs dying too fast more reliably. It still feels bad. Please man just give us reliability like I can't have my initial spread fail because something weird happened.