Infernalist: How 25 exalts can give you 4 ascendancy points and other various feedback

Preface
I am writing this from the perspective of someone that is NOT using minions as I don't want this build to be pigeonholed into minions only. An ascendancy should further strengthen a build and not limit them in their available options. The idea of infernalist is really cool. So cool I decided to play it as first character even though I was highly skeptical from the start. Unfortunately it's even worse than I expected.

Pyromantic Pact
Congratulation, you now have reverse mana with more limitations that works worse than Mind over Matter with Eldritch Battery. This ascendancy can be played in two ways. The careful managing your infernal flame to avoid exploding that plays into the deeper ascendancy nodes and the full commit with no regard for your own safety. Regardless of the playstyles it still has some core design flaw. If you survive the 100% of your life/ES hit, since it deals fire damage, it can ignite so I hope you haven't been building into chance to ignite because it will increase the chance of you igniting yourself. If you rely on energy shield, which would be natural for a witch, it will disable you from recovering your energy shield for 4 seconds, good luck running around with minimal life, no ES that will recover and strong ignite for the next 4 seconds.

For the careful managing playstyle, infernal flame acts as a worse version of mana. You essentially limit the ways you can scale it other than increases to mana. It is completely static and provides no depth other than adding a risk of exploding yourself.

Full commit playstyle does open up a very cool and niche playstyle, self damage. By spending mana with no regard to your own health, you can spend as much mana you would like and take massive amount of damage. How can you deal with this you ask? There are only a few ways. Scale maximum fire resistance, this is easy through the use of +2 maximum fire resistance ruby jewels, soul cores and items. This will make the hit fairly manageable and most likely won't ignite yourself as it will only hit you for 10% of your life/ES. Great, we have now survived one full self explode, how do we recover? You would think recoup and Zealot's Oath if you're scaling ES, would be good, but recoup itself deserves its own post on how terrible it is. The other option here would be to recharge your energy shield, and hope it does so before you fill your infernal flame again. This can be achieved by various sources of faster start of energy shield recharge and energy shield recharge rate sources.

Having solved all these issue with making yourself explode, what benefit do we get that just scaling mana wouldn't get? A consistent way of triggering Barrier Invocation, allowing you to fairly consistently getting energy to trigger it. Just keep in mind, using skills from barrier invocation will still cost you infernal flame, which is why you want to avoid cast on x effects. If you can consistently trigger cast on x, you will kill yourself.

Bringer of Flame
This is a conditional passive that incentives you to stay in the range of 35-100% of your infernal flame, furthering the risk of killing yourself. The benefit here is that you can now ignite with other damage types than fire. You still need to scale your primary damage type along ignite to get any benefit from it, so you're now down a bunch of passive skill points. There are some interplay with Stormfire, frostfire and various other support gems and items but hardly worth risking your life. I do recognize its has a much higher value for a minion or teamplay build.

Seething Body
Further reducing your ideal workable area of infernal flame, you can get the equivalent of ilvl 31 well rolled prefix on a staff or wand without the risk of killing you. This is again much stronger with minions or teamplay build.

Loyal Hellhound
This one is great.

Grinning Immolation
30% more critical damage bonus is great, until you realize it limits you to never use energy shield unless you use a specific unique chest. You can use Dousing Charm, but you will never be able to fill it up quickly, and your one guaranteed charm slot is gone. If you insist on making it work with a life only build, it will require you to offset it with regen, which is already a limited source.

Altered Flesh
This is a nothing burger unless you get more maximum fire resistance and a significant amount of chaos resistance. If you scale ES, without any chaos resistance, this causes you to take 20% more damage from physical damage. You will need more than 50% chaos resistance before you take less physical damage.

Beidat's Gaze, Will and Hand
Cool passives, love the design, no idea on the scaling balancing. Can easily reach 1k life without any investment and will most of the time give you a noticeable increase in your chosen stat.

Demonic Possession and Mastered Darkness
If you're using Demonic Possession, I will assume you also use Mastered Darkness. Demonic Possession degen does not affect your ES, so in theory you can push it pretty far while being safe if you rely on ES as your defensive stat. Demon From gives you probably the best dodge in the game (I haven't tested any other classes so no idea if I'm right here), that's the only benefit really, you still have to deal with the 5% constant life degen. However since it's a shapeshifting form, it disables your weapon slots, allowing you to skip costs on your weapon. Unfortunately everything this form do can be achieved with a staff rolled with +6 skills, cast speed and spell damage, or even better +5 spell skill wand and +2 all spell foci.

Conclusion
This ascendancy needs a lot of work. There are cool ideas, but at the cost of too many downsides, or are outright outperformed by just a single item slot. It is very restrictive and requires high investment in defensives for a marginal increase.

Agree, when looking at both ascendancy, I have a feeling that is better to be able skip some points or do not take whole branch at all, coz you gonna get more cons than pros.

I hope this would change in the future.

"

SilverWF#6383 wrote:

Agree, when looking at both ascendancy, I have a feeling that is better to be able skip some points or do not take whole branch at all, coz you gonna get more cons than pros.

I hope this would change in the future.

I feel infernalist struggles more than Blood Mage when it comes to detrimental ascendancy nodes. For Blood Mage it is atleast only the first one but here there's just so many detrimental effects that only marginally compensates for the risks taken.