Acolyte of the Chayula

Intro

As a a bit of background on me, I have created some videos about the build I am playing and coming up for solutions however all roads have left me to just to play as invoker with unbound avatar and the resistance ignore on crit allowing some points to be invested in defense instead of pure damage tree's. In this post I will highlight the problems of Acolyte as the opportunity cost to design of passive tree with our limited selection of skills, weapon types etc have left me addled.

Acolyte is focused around doing chaos damage and not crits. I am going to be making another Acolyte to test a mana based build. I think it will be bad but I want to test to gather more feedback from other acolytes as well as possibly ggg themselves. I have played PoE on 2 accounts since 2013, this is my second account created in 2015. Short story but I think my feedback will be incredibly in depth over my time playing this ascendancy and trying to "figure it out". I will come back and update my post with replies and continue to post videos (exiled vessel on yt). The reason for a second character to test is due to passive respec. If the build is bad then I will have to farm on a bad build to gather gold to respec back to a build that isn't as bad based on my current (at least I view it as) bad build. Additionally if we get passive tree respecs I would be able to test even more things on multiple characters.



TLDR All of the conditional aspects of this class do not result in a fun dynamic playstyle unlike invoker which is clearly leaps and bounds ahead of acolyte.



First up, balance of critical hit, chaos damage, penetration, exposure, etc.

Allocating critical hit chance, penetration, exposure, and defense as an acolyte leads you to ignore the chaos damage scaling on tree (My conclusion is to try an elemental/chaos non crit build). The point requirement to get both critical hit, chaos damage, and penetration creates a huge passive tree issue for the acolyte ascendancy. Exposure would only benefit our primary damage source however I believe its a higher value than trying to get even more damage as added chaos or chaos % as its more situational damage scaling.

Currently I spec into shock, shock magnitude etc as it can scale the lightning and chaos damage that I would apply to an enemy however in actuality it just created a very scuffed tree for my character and after reviewing a lot of other builds people have posted videos on youtube discussing i've seen the imperfections clearly but cannot respec an entire tree and don't have tenacity to farm the gold to make an attempt to improve.

Darkness

Darkness is conditional flat life at the cost of spirit. I think offering an alternative of "Convert all energy shield to darkness" would be a much better design we could build into. I do not know what internal testing lead to these values for a level 100 character with the 10% increased darkness scaling on small passives. I do understand that even at 4k life which would be disgusting I think in the current test the 15% more life on the titan pulls ahead even if a level 100 acolyte had 1k darkness as it is situational life.

I think instead of added as extra damage per 20 darkness it should be just labelled as chaos penetration allowing acolytes to not build around chaos resistances. However I think mantra of destruction should be stronger and i'll discuss my thoughts on mantra later as it is... incredibly awful.

I would also be completely happy if darkness was entirely removed and replaced with a better alternative or maybe an unbound avatar like skill involving chaos damage res or something as the other nodes provide a lot of chaos damage baseline.

Into the breach

I have a love/hate relationship with this. I like when the buffs stack up in a corner and you can walk over and get them especially in campaign when your life or mana flask run out. However in maps you still get one shotted by a white monster using a slam skill as an evasion acolyte and they have a base crit chance which is insane considering there is no way to reduce slam damage from white monsters if you get stuck or stunned you just face tank a potential death. After getting off topic a bit... I do not like the inconsistency of what is available in correlation to what would benefit you in the moment of combat. This feels much much worse than a pendulum effect. The design aspect of the skill is really cool but not practical in a lot of situations.

Maybe flames should just auto absorb after 1s while in the breach radius? Additionally there is a bug currently where any spirit cost links associated with Into the breach skill do not reserve spirit. This is the only massive perk of Into the breach as I can get vitality and the 4% of life recovered on kill effects for free without dipping into my spirit for utility.

Alternatively maybe flames should just be considered power, endurance and frenzy charges and the second node should just increase maximum power, endurance and frenzy charges allowing acolyte of the chayula to take chaos damage nodes on tree, generic attack scaling and play whatever charge build. Or the second node gives you additional chaos damage per charge on the character currently. Who knows but its a possibility of interesting design without obvious gameplay impedance. I still think that the flames should just auto absorb within the breach radius regardless of whatever happens. There could be a delay starting at 2s and ramps up to 1s at a level 20 gem.

If you decide to make into the breach auto pickup then I think the small passives should be radius scaling for into the breach aiding in this "breachlord-esque" design

Mantra of Destruction

This skill I view as acolyte's "Unbound Avatar" but instead of just being a 40% more damage multiplier with additional effects. Mantra buffs one skill for a one hit slam skill style playstyle that then buffs you for a few moments after and is reliant on killing enemies which some bosses have no adds to gain flames off of. This skill needs an entire rework. It's significantly weaker than unbound avatar, higher uptime potential with combos but essentially pressing it is not instant as its an attack I do not play invoker but I assume unbound avatar is instant or at least a much faster cast while having no condition for bossing focus or that last tricky rare in your map or campaign zone when you have no additional mobs nearby to kill.

What I would like mantra of destruction to do:

Imbues your quarterstaff (similar to charged staff) with the Flames of Chayula. You gain 1 flame per second. Upon reaching maximum Flames of Chayula you ignore enemy chaos resistance for 4 seconds. I think this would be balanced as it implies a duration between gaining flames, requires combo to use the skill, and duration would negatively impact the flame per second ratio while improving the duration of ignoring chaos res. Yes the skill then instantly becomes good on invoker but invoker could lose 30% of its damage and still be significantly stronger due to passive points saved on penetration and the sheer amount of more damage it offers for a much longer duration.

Mana leech

My speculation is that it is very bad but I have come to the conclusion that it must have been balanced around the physical daze skills or a very fast hitting monk that allocates points into mana leech or movement speed to collect flames.

Harness the void

Essentially giving the character a % chance to hit for bonus chaos damage (basically critical strike with added as chaos). This is what makes me also believe the acolyte is supposed to take chaos nodes and not critical strike chance nodes. The chaos nodes would essentially be converted to a critical strike damage multiplier and if you would have some flames or full darkness you'd gain even more damage scaling.

Maybe this ascendancy node should be critical scaling? Give acolytes increase critical strike chance per flame of chayula? Would this be too broken with poisons or some other niche archetype that has not been released yet?

In conclusion

I just see it as 1/10th of invoker and probably a lot better as a spell caster or poison build than an actual melee staff chad. But the same can be said about invoker, it seems busted as a caster especially with critical weakness being on spells (eye of winter) but not any of the acolyte or invoker's toolkit at base value. I leave GGG with a final question. Were daggers or another weapons archetype so broken on acolyte in endgame you had to turn it into whatever this is currently?

I league started Acolyte of Chayula and rerolled to Invoker after failing to be able to kill the Act 2 boss. Invoker made the game so much easier to play.

Monk has no reliable access to Chaos damage. ED/Contagion can be used but it's not good until Contagion spreads, which is not usable on bosses. Hand of Chayula is clearly meant to be some sort of damage skill with Despair and Decay, but there isn't enough Intelligence available early-game to Monks to make it viable.

The flames are too short without the second ascendancy to be meaningful. The build also feels like it wants to take CI (especially because of the passive in the Monk tree that takes damage when using a skill), but the Flames do not restore ES.

Overall it feels like a noob trap class. Might be viable with poisons, not sure though. Probably scales insanely well late-game, but getting past act 2 would be an achievement with the class.