Acolyte of Chayula, Darkness: Underwhelming for Major Opportunity cost

While darkness does add a pretty significant buffer to 1-shots, outside of that it feels very lackluster. You are effectively giving up an enormous facet of most builds, all persistent buffs, auras, permanent minions (more on this later) and gem based Meta triggers.

In addition to this you don't even get full benefit from the "Gain 1% Damage as Chaos Damage per 20 Darkness" node unless:

1) You are not getting hit, at all, even incidental chip or DoT damage (thank you for fixing the desync bug btw <3) drains your damage output, something most other ascendencies don't have to worry about for their bonus damage nodes. It's not unreasonable for a build using Darkness to protect itself to have ~50% or less power from the node while clearing, even if they are only taking minute damage that other builds would out-regen and be full HP/ES, even with the half time for darkness (which doesn't really seem worthy of an ascendancy node, and should probably have been part of the base node if kept in it's current state).

2) You are using MoM to take mana damage instead of life. This case is a genuinely interesting synergy and has been the primary way I have experienced the Darkness mechanic. While taking MoM damage is applied to (Darkness->ES)->Mana->Darkness->HP, allowing you to effectively keep your darkness at 100% until you actually need it to keep your precious Life as long as you don't have any ES (for instance if you also take Eldritch Battery). This feels to me like it should be the default behavior of Darkness, that it remains at full power until you absolutely need it, sitting between your layers of effective health reserves (ES and Life).

3) Maybe a third scenario I can't think of and haven't encountered, I dunno I haven't tried everything, but as far as I can tell those are the only ways you can expect to be at full power from one of AoCh's only reliable damage nodes (Reality Rending is RNG and Purple Flames have to either spawn and be picked up or be acquired through the unreliable combo skill Mantra which also requires to have On Kill fodder).


Considering the general scarcity of ways to scale Chaos Damage hits compared to other damage types, and the variety of struggles that Acolyte of Chayula has in comparison to other ascendencies in my opinion (optimal playstyles seem to be either be a janker, less optimal Freeze Strike build compared to Invoker, play hotkey piano while you get run down by fast enemies trying to get some elaborate hexblast combo go off before you die, or jump ship and play Bows or something, which you also have lots of unnecessary friction in the passive tree to enable and still are probably just a worse Ranger) I genuinely think in it's current state players could get 2x (10 per lvl) Darkness and still it still be a sort of mediocre ascendancy option.

I don't really expect any buff that blatantly heavy handed, but I think it, and most of the Acolyte of Chayula ascendancy, could probably use some more time in the oven. I really like the ascendancy for the flavor, I think all of the branches of the tree are very interesting and flavorful from a design standpoint of the class identity, but whether it be Mana Leech having anti-synergy with Chaos Damage (most sources are from PHYSICAL ATTACK damage, which kinda pigeon-holes mana leech builds...and doesn't work with your ascendancy's damage nodes at all), Flames of Chayula only really becoming consistent when you've idled in one spot for a while, or Darkness having the various issues it has, our edgy Chalupa bois are feeling more like Hot-Topic knock-offs than dark-path Anti-Heros.

Edit: Just realized I forgot to mention why I feel the lack of permanent minions is a major concern going forward, if there ends up being a permanent reanimation minion (such as specters maybe) that synergies with contagion, that completely denies what would be one of the most interesting and best ways to smooth out hexblast Acolyte's ideal ways to spread curses for clearing. Three buttons every pack just to do less aoe clear dps than the average spark build when we only get a SINGLE support that makes any of those skills cast faster is pretty rough. Hopefully there will be most cast speed supports in the future, ideally ones with interesting trade-offs (less DMG, AoE, extra costs to cast, etc.).

Anyway, enjoying the game, just wish Chaos had a little more love in EA <3