Essence Drain/Contagion mechanics still need work

1)
Contagion still has wonky targeting. It seems to have some degree of prioritization, and will not always target the mob under your cursor. For instance, it seems to prioritize enemies with chaos dot on them. However, it also seems to prioritize enemies of higher rarity (at a higher priority than chaos dot).

Monsters of higher rarity are usually surrounded by monsters of lower rarity. This results in a scenario where your ED is likely to hit a lower-rarity mob, while your Contagion is likely to prioritize the higher-rarity mob. This interferes with your ability to start your chain, and makes the combo almost non-functional in certain monster/room groupings.

2)
Against packs of white monsters, the single-target nature of Contagion makes it harder and harder to start your chain, the higher your ED damage goes.

In PoE1, you can cast your ED, and while the projectile flies, apply Contagion to the entire front-facing section of an enemy pack. This ensures that, whichever monster ED hits (which happens after Contagion is applied), the chain will start.

In PoE2, you either need to predict which enemy will be hit (this is almost impossible in many cases), and then accurately target your Contagion on that enemy before ED hits. OR, you wait for ED to hit, then apply Contagion; with the prioritization of Contagion, it will target the correct mob (assuming it is not a mixed-rarity pack).

However, white mobs on the squishier side die faster from ED than the cast time of Contagion, and this makes it impossible to cast Contagion after ED to start your chain. In the campaign, this will affect the most squishiest enemies such as packs of flies, rats, and such, but the more you scale ED, the more enemies will die faster than you can cast Contagion.

---

I can understand the want to differentiate the PoE2 version from PoE1, but I think it is significantly detracting from the skill combo.

A couple of solutions:
1. Prioritize DoT=yes above rarity in the auto-targeting
2. Introduce a support gem that backloads the damage of DoTs, so you have time to cast Contagion
3. Simply make Contagion AoE again

Contagion, first support gem choice should be Unleash. Contagion is not spammed and it needs to be applied to a front row of targets. POE2's suggested supports for the skill are complete garbage.

Suggested supports for skills is one of my many pet peeves with POE2. If the game is going to spoon feed us, it needs to be right. When the game is wrong, which it most often is, the terrible support gem UI requires too many clicks to get access to the "good" supports for a skill.

Both ED and Contagion have some weird rng targeting that feels bad enough to ask "am I supposed to be stacking accuracy for this?"

I feel like most skills ignore the actual placement of the cursor, especially ED. It would feel way better if what we see is what we get when aiming.

ED+ Contagion currently incentivizes lowering ED damage to be able to land contagion after.

There's an incredibly simple solution - make Contagion "instant" cast time. Decaying Hex isn't enough damage on its own to demand a cast time there versus the absolutely awful feeling of not being able to combo a skill because it's either doing too much damage or is itself too slow to cast vs monster speed. Doesn't need to be AoE to start but it definitely needs to be a possible combo.

That's before we discuss the wildly confusing contagion targeting, or that for NO APPARENT REASON essence drain looks like it's doing the curved arrow thing around monsters.

Part of the problem is in general with ranged targeting needing to aim at the feet even if you have the monster highlighted.

Yes, ED misses a lot more than I feel it should. In the heat of battle with multiple enemies on the screen, one can argue I miss-clicked. But when there is only a single target, and I, without any doubt, clicked on said target, and ED misses as if I aimed somewhere else, the ED targeting is messed up. ED is spell, if I clicked the target, ED should not miss.

Contagion completely misses at times too. It's annoying when I click a target and Contagion targets the ground in front of the enemy, does the whole animation, uses my mana, and ultimately does nothing because it completely missed.

So, both skills targeting needs looked at.

I am about to respec because it is just not fun on controller.
But we don't have many workable Chaos skills...

"

RaleonNightShado#3282 wrote:

ED+ Contagion currently incentivizes lowering ED damage to be able to land contagion after.

There's an incredibly simple solution - make Contagion "instant" cast time. Decaying Hex isn't enough damage on its own to demand a cast time there versus the absolutely awful feeling of not being able to combo a skill because it's either doing too much damage or is itself too slow to cast vs monster speed. Doesn't need to be AoE to start but it definitely needs to be a possible combo.

That's before we discuss the wildly confusing contagion targeting, or that for NO APPARENT REASON essence drain looks like it's doing the curved arrow thing around monsters.

Part of the problem is in general with ranged targeting needing to aim at the feet even if you have the monster highlighted.

GGG's vision of using combo skills needs work. First of all, the monsters are too fast for many combos. Second, and probably my biggest gripe, the game a lot of times refuses to execute the combos. It's infuriating to execute two skills in succession, one after the other by pressing one skill button after the other skill button, and having the game ignore/not execute one or the other clicks/key-presses. Sure, there may be times where I get hit, interrupted, or maybe pressed the wrong key in the heat of battle, but there are many, many, many times where I'm 110% sure neither happened, and the game doesn't do the combo. This needs to be be fixed. Where everything is performed correctly, there should not be any scenario where activating two skills, one after the other in quick succession should not execute both skills in order, especially when the "vision" is that we are supposed to perform skill combos.