Disciple of Varashta feels absolutely terrible

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Torguish#3533 wrote:

Okay, i think i'm starting to believe. I might've been too harsh and guess i'll need to change my opinion a bit... :|

I kind of went into varashta as a minion-caster hybrid and that stunk. But if full-on djinn is actually doable then that's awesome.

HOWEVER!

I STILL think Ruzhan needs so much love. :D The autocast ability needs to happen also on commands.


Ps. Lightning Orb + Living Lightning orb = some zappy minions. Dunno, maybe they suck but it's "passive" damage with shock.

I can definitely see Ruzhan working too, he's clearly intended for some sort of ignite build if you look at his skills.. damage doesn't look half bad either. Could even possibly do some proliferate bs with it and make it much better for clear then Kelari perhaps, who knows.

But the most straight forward is definitely Kelari

Living lightning minions aren't too bad (you can use them with the new rain too)... the problem with them is that they inherit the level of the skill you're using them with so that's.. not that great.

At first I tried playing with frost mages , rain, Navira and lightning minions, at lower levels ... and it was going pretty well actually! Frost mages were freezing (more frequently with rain) and creating chilled ground via support gems, which in turn I could easily fracture with Navira. It's just that I saw more potential in Kelari in the end with the crit buffs.

I'm playing Disciple of Varashta, and to me the only thing bothering me is the Djinn targeting

In narrow areas and maps with a lot of obstacles the Djinns can get the targeting wrong, if you have clear vision of the enemy, because they spawn a little bit to your side (and the skill is cast by them) they end up tageting some wall, tree or door, sometime the skill that makes the exploding runes end up doing a single rune instead of the usual 7

Tried improving my positioning but realized these problems still happens with you or enemies near obstacles that other skill would clearly hit

Please improve the Djinns targeting

I think I'm going to do a varashta arc build literally just for the ability to wield a staff and a focus at the same time. I think this would be more powerful than arcane surge on storm weaver which really the only value is from more mana regen since casting spells with mana is ridiculously expensive.

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Weaver#3527 wrote:

I think I'm going to do a varashta arc build literally just for the ability to wield a staff and a focus at the same time. I think this would be more powerful than arcane surge on storm weaver which really the only value is from more mana regen since casting spells with mana is ridiculously expensive.

I think Stormweaver's benefit is really having arcane surge up all the time.

It makes it stand out for low-crit chance builds that want lots of cast speed, and/or for builds that might not be of the "rapid fire" casting playstyle (thinking of something like flameblast).

The accessibility of the nodes in the tree which give you arcane surge when you crit make it very easy to maintain arcane surge as long as you are using a fast-hitting spell with minimal investment into crit chance, which makes Stormweaver's ascendancy feel like wasted points since you'd be able to keep arcane surge up often enough anyways.

So I agree that in these scenarios, Varashta offers something that seems much more beneficial.

Double posted for some reason. I only clicked it once I swear. Just ignore this.

I wanna add more technical feedback here since my post is probably buried
- weapon swap nonexistant
- kurgals leash doesent work with Ruzhan, but works with Navira
- Entropic incarnation gain damage as chaos doesn't work
- Kelaris malediction - is cool concept (collect bugs then unload) but abbysmal execution! visuals and feel nonexistant. And why is it has sepparete gems unlike others?
- Naviras embrace - the shield almost never breakes (because never takes damage), and as result almost never leaves chill ground witch is needed for other Navira spells. It should be more powerfull or create chilled ground by default or something
- There is a mess in tooltip, and it fails sometimes to show correct damage in the small preview
- Spell cascade doesn't work on Ruzhans runes (doesn't give more runes) but lowers its damage (it ether should give more runnes or not lower the damage)

I played as Sand Djnn, gosh it is so powerful i melt everything easily, because you only need to invest everything on minion's damage, cooldown and area of effect nodes, i end up have so much free nodes that i just became a tank myself.
Cooldown is never a problem where you keep using all those skills alternatively, unless you are like others, just want it to be some one button smashing meta, sorry then Djnn is not for you, because Djnn is all about combos.
Also, it so easy to boost Djnn damage to the max with minion level, and you have so many free skill slot you just fill them up with different type of minion just to boost Djnn damage, and also Pain Offering benefit Djnn too.
People always complains something but never think outside of box, because you cant build every class with same play style, because you are using minion doesnt mean they should be tank for you, just because Djnn is minion doesnt mean they need to do auto attack for you as well.

I've said it before:These should have been unique minions similar to the hound that were up at all times instead of weird "command skills".

If we didn't need to activate them but they just acted naturally it would've flowed much better.You can't have a gimmick like this without a way to fix its issues.

I think the whole idea of adding "special" skills to ascendancies (and items too) is terrible. Skills must be skills. Passives must be passives. Items must be items.

If you want to add super interesting "unique" skills - make them as outcomes of corrupting gems or maybe combining gems together (like Larian did it in their 'Divinity Original Sin 2' game). But they should be detached from passives/supports/items.

As for supports, btw, it seems with the last patch GGG started to incorporate skills even into support gems. Omg.. One thing I hated in POE1 is complexity for the sake of complexity. And now it crawls into POE2 too. Bad, very bad.

I think too many people are focusing on the djinn element, the kit outside of the djinns is actually very good when you have solid gear, I’m ssf I’m lvl 97 and I have cleared all the content in the game. Once I get my gear fully where I want it it’ll be a very strong defensive ascendancy I mean it already is but there is a breakpoint where you want to hit for it to fully come online. Also there are builds that do the djinn stuff that do decent but we will see where they want to go with that in the future but I’d argue it’s one of the best defensive ascendancies in the game. Also this is coming from someone who hit lvl 94 in Poe 1 gauntlet the first time I played in it and if you look me up last season in Poe ninja for ssf I had the number one ehp on the ladder and I’m pretty sure I was like 12th if you compared me to trade players. I generally play tankier characters as a preference and I usually make my own builds. I hope they give the djinn side more love but please don’t sleep on this ascendancy from a defensive standpoint, it doesn’t stand entirely on its own and takes a combination of gear and passive point investment but it does come together quite nicely once you get there.