Cast on Critical Energy Generation Math Not Adding Up

Cast on Critical energy generation is fundamentally flawed following prior patches to address the prior extreme ease of generation any and all trigger meta skills. Quoted are the respected changes made:

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0.1.0d Patch Notes
Trigger Gems and Energy Gain

Trigger gem energy gain was not in the right place and it was far too easy to use ailments to trigger spells. One problem with the previous system is that if we balanced it to make triggering happen in boss fights then the triggering would happen far too often during clearing. In order to address this we are now making "Monster Power" part of the calculation for energy gain. This means that it's far easier to trigger skills from Unique Monsters than it is from normal monsters, but you also hit many more normal monsters when fighting. Another issue was using low level skills with unconditional ailment applications such as Flame Wall to ignite enemies for triggering. In order to make the source of the ignite matter we are making the energy gain be dependent on the strength of the ignite. We have also rebalanced all energy gain across the board.

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0.1.0d Hotfix 1

We missed one! Cast on Critical Strike now also cares about the Damage of the hit when determining how much energy to gain to prevent the use of high-crit low level skills, this should mean using lower hit frequency skills that hit harder are also now much stronger for this.

This hotfix made it so that skills like Eye of Winter could not effortlessly generate hundreds of energy rapidly against basic white mobs. However, actual energy generation works quite differently across difficulties and map tiers.
'Punchier' harder-hitting spells certainly generate a good degree of energy with full investment, but the basic interactions of additional sources of energy generation do not appear to be working. Let us walk through some mechanics.

In testing, there is an error in how energy is generated for Cast on Crit regarding 0.1.0d Hotfix 1 and sources of 'increased' energy generation and 'more' energy generation. The invoker's ascendancy The Soul Springs Eternal provides "Meta Skills gain 35% more Energy." The tree provides nodes totalling 55% increased energy gain. Using 5 jewels each with 15% increased meta energy gain provides 75%. The support gem Impetus provides 40% increased meta energy gain. The Cast on Critical meta skill, based on tier, provides increased energy gain -- a level 17 CoC provides 48% increased energy gained. In total, this is 218% increased energy gained and 35% more gained.

A skill, such as Eye of Winter, when it crits, would generate a baseline energy of 1 against a basic white monster. But with full investment in an Invoker, 1 with a 218% increase is 3.18, multiplied by an extra 35%, should result in 4.293 energy generated. However, in higher tier maps, such as 14 and 15, still only 1 energy is generated off of basic white mobs, rather than the 4 (rounded down) that should be generated.

To make matters more odd, if you take that same character and go back into the campaign, such as Act 3 Cruel, the same spell generates significantly more energy off of all white mobs. So it isn't just a matter of 'monster power', or a matter of how hard the spell hits such as what the hotfix claims "now also cares about the Damage of the hit when determining how much energy to gain" (I am testing with a L88 Invoker with lots of crit and damage investment), but how hard the spell hits relative to the mob's HP pool. This, fundamentally, seems quite wonky, unintuitive, and frankly, makes building around such skills rather lackluster when you are trying to max investment into a niche to get it 'online'.

I understand why the prior patch and hotfix was made. Energy generation, broadly, was far too easy to achieve on basically any class with little investment. The nerfs prevented zero-investment strategies. However, I do hope that the POE2 team revisits testing CoC to better evaluate the interactions of the skills and degrees of character investment and takes a more nuanced approach to revising the calculations.

I would love any all feedback from other players testing these types of interactions and hope to hear from GGG on evaluating the math as well. Thanks for reading.

Check the tooltip for power. White/Magic/Rare mobs aren't always 1/2/5, its based on how difficult that mob type is and then multiplied by 1/2/5. You may have hit a very slow zombie in maps which have 0.25 base power but a relatively strong monster in act 3 which had 1 or 2 base power.