Feedback on the state of Chaos Spell DoT

I have been playing around with chaos spell dot since launch, and by now I have tried out most of what can be tested. Chaos Spell DoT is in a very wonky spot. It is hard to say whether it is bad or not considering balance will be shifting many times during EA, so I’ll try not to focus on good or bad, but just mechanics and meaningful choices.

I also want to point out that I realize some of the relevant tools (classes, gems) are not in the game yet, but my hope is that this feedback can inform the design and prioritization of some of those tools to make sure they hit right.

I have narrowed the issues down to three main problems with the playstyle

1. Lack of main skill options
Right now we are railroaded into Essence Drain/Contagion. At first glance you might start seeing options and get ideas of things you could do, but all roads lead back to ED/Cont. There are some poison options, but those function very differently and do not fit into the spell dot archetype.

Decaying Hex is bugged and does not scale with support gems, but once this is fixed it will add a legitimate alternative to ED and opens up some options. In addition to this, I think adding Soulrend should be a priority as it will add a third option, and then the archetype in my opinion would feel “complete” with several different options and playstyles.

2. Bad support gem options
Let’s run through them:
Swift Affliction - 35% more dmg, 20% less duration
Chaos Mastery - +1level (~12% dmg)
Intense Agony - 50% more dmg if inflicted on full-life enemy, 25% less duration
Minion Pact - 40% more dmg but drains 100% of your hp from nearby minion (it must survive)
Drain Ailments - Removes an ailment on application to deal 35% more damage
Hourglass - 40% more dmg but +10sec cooldown

Swift Affliction and Chaos Mastery are non-conditional, so those are good (and mandatory).
Hourglass you would think would work well with a dot, but it is horrible to play with and although I was excited to use it, I have come to avoid it like the plague. I think I would rather have an empty socket than have to use Hourglass. If you miss, and there are many reasons why you might, then that’s a 10 second setback which is not only very bad, but very boring.
Minion Pact works especially well with CI, and although it works it has an annoying conditional (living minion to drain 1hp from). This is basically just a box you check which has nothing to do with the rest of your build.
Intense Agony does almost nothing against bosses but make you have to reapply ED more often.
Drain Ailments is really weird. Long story short, there is no fun way to make this work. You could weapon swap to a bow/xbow and toss a poison gas at bosses, to then swap back and cast ED which can then absorb the poison for more dmg. This is not only annoying to do, it also doesn't function vs. packs of enemies.

So, adding all this up, you end up with this setup:
ED, Swift Affliction, Chaos Mastery, Minion Pact, Hourglass. Then you swap the last support between Intense Agony for mapping and Drain Ailments for single target (where you must also add a source of ailment).

I guess you could argue some of these conditionals could be fun to fulfil, and me finding the drain ailment method (for example) annoying isn't valid, and you might be right. However, I still think that there should be way more conditionals to pick from, so you can find something that suits you instead of the game picking your gems for you.

3. Contagion is now single-target
Ever since I started playing at launch, I have been going back and forth on how I feel about Contagion being single target. Some moments it works perfectly fine, and other moments it feels terrible, terrible, terrible to play with.

Personally, I think it should just be AoE like in PoE1. Playing around with target prioritization could solve the issue, but I think it is a needless overcomplication that doesn't achieve anything meaningful. Fundamentally, having to hit the same target twice with different single target skills in PoE is quite a tall order, especially when one is a projectile. You could also make the DoT skill into an AoE to make it easier to overlap the two effects, but then every relevant DoT would have to be AoE to function with Contagion. Again, much simpler to just make Contagion AoE and move on.

Anyway, it seems like Contagion generally will prioritize targets near the cursor which have a chaos DoT on them, except if there is a higher rarity enemy nearby, in which case that one gets priority. This is very bad, because normally when you are facing a pack with mixed rarity enemies, you want to start with a low rarity enemy, so your ED can then spread to the rest of the pack and refresh duration multiple times as it clears different sections of the pack. You cannot start with the rarest enemy because that one typically won't die in one cast, so you can't start your chain from it.

Let me show you an example:


In this scene, I had just cast ED on the spider marked with “1”. You can see my cursor is over the spider and it is highlighted, so I have clearly targeted it correctly. Then I cast Contagion, intending to kill the spider first to let the contagion spread to the mobs marked “2” and the boss marked “3”. When the “2” enemies would die, they would then re-apply the ED to the “3” enemy once again, ensuring the maximum possible ED duration in this scenario. And by the way, it was using Hourglass in this fight, so with a 10sec CD on ED, every second of ED uptime counts.

Unfortunately, as you can see at the top of the screen, circled in red, the Contagion effect was instead placed on the boss. The spider died immediately, and I was left to run around and twiddle my thumbs for ten seconds before I could try again. If there are enough little enemies around a rarer enemy, you literally cannot start the chain as ED will always hit one of the enemies in front, while Contagion will always prioritize the big enemy in the middle. This is a frequent scenario when you encounter packs of mixed normal and champion enemies, because champions also don't die in one cast.


In conclusion
The chaos spell dot playstyle has several issues right now. When it works, it works great, and most of the time it does work. However, there are repeated and frustrating issues with it that just make it feel incomplete as an archetype. The more you try to improve your character, the more conditional rules you are placing on yourself which just makes you feel less in control of your build. And lastly, due to the lack of variety in working skills right now, you are highly railroaded into some very specific skill and support options.

You can use Vile Effigy with Envenom to have it spam low damage poison procs for Drain Ailments, but aside from that I agree with your other points.

The part that really sticks out to me is the removal (compared to PoE1) of a "chaos damage over time multiplier" stat, which makes it just have less scaling directions than poison which DOES have such a stat in poison magnitude (and also another scaling direction on top of that in poison count). Having like half the chaos notables on the tree just give "increased chaos damage" feels pretty bad since that's additive with increased spell damage.

I'm pretty certain intense agony doesn't work at all, I see no change in DPS when slotting it

Yea......chaos spell dots need some love.

It's worth mentioning that hexbloom and decaying hex don't work at the moment. When the curse spreads, the damage does not.

+1
Chaos Spells in general are pretty worthless imo if you compare it to any other type (cold/fire/lightning) etc

The targeting system in general definitely needs work. Dropping a bell as a monk and having the game think you want to target the boss instead of the bell is very common and very frustrating.

Bump

Yes to all except the drain ailments issue.. that's not an issue.
You have a fire pet as a witch, it applies ignite to everything around it constantly. Having an ailment to drain is literally a non-issue.
Dont use the pet? Ok, put in firestorm then, raining fire across the entire screen. Again, not an issue.