Acolyte of Chayula Ascendancies/Skills

These ascendancies are just bad, ravenous doubts and consuming questions require physical damage to actually work properly and 90% of monk's quarterstaff abilities are elemental focused and the ones that aren't hit like a wet noodle why...

Make Mantra of destruction viable and usable only for Acolyte as of now having to combo x8 and then have 1 hit infused with chaos damage is straight up a waste of a gem slot and a joke, staggering palm looks great but why bother using it when you can stagger way quicker with tempest bell plus the AoE is BAD, having more AoE or some sort of hard CC on it would be an improvement imho.

Hand of chayula is one of my favorite skills on the monk kit being able to apply marks/curses with 1 hit is great for bossing and dealing with annoying rares, but ive been trying to make expanse work on it but it simply doesn't if it hits +1 target sometimes its a lucky hit, instead of having that darkness ascendancy why not focus on mantra + hoc making one combo of another spreading curses/marks to an extent, you can do it now with contagion but it isn't very reliable.

Embrace the darkness and Inner silence are straight up nerfing your character, so you lose all your spirit being unable to use heralds just to get an awful shield that prevents a 1 shot meanwhile you gain 1% extra chaos damage if your not hit? Why? How do you manage to not get hit in maps when your swarmed sometimes right of the gate?? Maybe make it something like CI since well it fits the theme...

Chayula's gift is just great.

Waking dream and Lucid dreaming apparently is what most acolytes are running playing pac man with freaking awful flame positioning, when you most need them nowhere to be found, the duration of the buff is also meh at best could work if it had more duration but since mantra of destruction isn't viable gotta wait and see i guess. But i have fun playing pac man not gonna lie.

Reality rending well im not even sure if it works properly with elemental damage, did a few maps with and without didn't notice anything special or maybe im using it wrong?

As of now im playing my Chonk as a Invoker basically Ice strike/Charged staff, its cool and all but if i wanted to play invoker id go for that ascendancy... Tested a few chaos skills/hexes/debuffs but they just feel very clunky a lot of kiting required for little payoff.

Anyway i apologize for the wall of text just wanted to provide a bit of feedback on a class that as so much potential and hoping GGG will make it more enjoyable!

Regards,

Darkness is more effective ehp When you consider it being an offensive and defensive mechanic and mesh it with other layers of defense it’s actually quite good. I think you chose the wrong ascendancy for a melee monk lol

Stacking ES with eternal youth + embrace the darkness works to an extent but for me at least wasn't worth losing my heralds which blow up entire screens for another layer of defense, evasion/es do a fairly good job at it imo.

We didn't know what exactly the skills would be so how was i and everyone else are suppose to know, since monk's tool kit is mainly focused on melee.

You should have went invoker. Straight up, acolyte of chayula imo is more of a ranged style monk for casters or string pluckers especially if you go darkness nodes

Considering that ravenous doubts and consuming questions combo of each other id say it could certainly be a great melee option and a lot of people considered the same.

Basically rerolled another monk to be Invoker, quite disappointed with Chuyula myself.

Leech feels very inconsistent on whether it'll work like you think it is (letting you sustain your mana and energy shield) or if it'll basically do nothing. Mantra of Dextruction basically has one innate combo with Whirling Assault (because that'll hit your 10 combo requirements immediately), but that skill has its own issues. There's not really a good blend of chaos and physical, and the Hand has such short duration on the curses it was physically painful to keep it up on a boss.

Conversely lightning monk feels fantastic. Invoker is just great across the board and feels like a PoE1 level of Ascendancy in how it just gives you so much power in a specific area.

Yea exactly, i tried with whirlwind assault and well it worked as you expected paper bag damage, hoc is great for repositioning love it but like you said the debuff is far to short but it kinda works, problem is that theres no skills that synergy well in the monks kit to make chonk work properly, i also went ice/light herald ice strike + charged blade and just blow up everything and it does feel amazing great poe 1 vibes for sure, just wish chonk was as reliable as invoker..

I did have an idea earlier that there's a lazy, but flavorful fix they could do. Have one of the Chuyula ascendancy boons be your Elemental damage from skills becomes Chaos damage and change the tags. Bonus if they also update the VFX, too. Imagine Charged Staff but its an evil ominous purple glow? :P

Bwahaha that would be glorious zoom zoom like Mace Windu :D but i gotta say that would be OP as hell, imagine converting your elemental damage to chaos damage (but hey considering those grueling hellish god forsaken trials i think we deserve it) everyone would reroll chonk xD but the premise of the idea has a good base to work upon.

Anyway i gotta get some shut eye been playing all night haha, be well my friend!