Flameblast

This desperately needs a buff to AOE. Damage is fine, but the aoe is kind of awful. Honestly, people said to me, use divine ire if you're going elementalist or use stormfire, it's basically a better version of this skill.

Flameblast is great when it actually hits an enemy and at full stacks, it just can't clear to save its life and even worse, this same problem manifests itself even while bossing.

Usually either 1) The boss is constantly moving so you can't really target the boss when he goes to literally the other side of the arena via teleport

2) The boss like Baran is constantly attacking with such a huge area that you literally can't stay still long enough to deal damage without dying.

The idea's good, but either it needs a massive AOE boost or you need some way to deal damage to surrounding mobs while channeling.

I was inspired to think about this due to the new Blood Sacrament skill.

The problem? It's flame blast, if it were centered on yourself. Flame blast is outdated mechanically, and so is this. Except due to being centered on yourself, you put yourself at even greater danger of death. Almost guaranteed at that.

But there could be a minimally invasive way to rework the two skills. Give them a toggle. On first toggle, it actives the casting. The second, it erupts.

Rather than sitting there casting, and just generally feeling terrible (and/or dying), you get to move around, and corral enemies into the AoE while it charges up.

I think such a simple change would change these two skills into something akin to Discharge in terms of explosive pay off for building up, while having their own little quirks.

Is there a reason the Anomalous version of this skill (damage converted to chaos) does not have the chaos tag? It seems that it would be appropriate given normal conventions for gem tags and would open up new opportunities.

Needs a bit more AOE and base stage gain rate and it will be fine, could also have ignites with it roll lucky since it is sort of a cast it once and dodge sort of skill.

Possible rework required to make this a fun gem when compared to the other "Hard-hitting" Channeling ability DI.

I would suggest either give it a burning ground effect after explosion because currently when compared to DI which does damage while charging this can't compare and should have a unique perk to make it stand apart.

That, or create an "ultimate fire spell" that both hits hard and creates burning ground. Like a single huge charged "Lobbed" spell which burning effect would be influenced by spell damage.

Regarding Flameblast of Contraction's damage. Why is a level 20 gem's base damage only as strong as a lvl 10 normal flameblast? At max stages the downside is actually hitting anything with the tiny aoe, as targets move so quickly especially w/map mods.

This gem desperately needs it's base damage back. It's only good for on hit clearing so the extra stage damage barely matters anyway, you will almost never land a full channeled contracted flameblast on a mobile enemy (90% of poe mobs).

Also, you have to stand still to cast! The biggest downside of all. I've been playing flameblast since the gem came out with totems and self cast. It needs to hit way harder to be viable, to compare to meta skills.

Alright! I finally got back to playing Flameblast, one of my favourite quite-bad-numerically PoE skills (second only to my beloved Wild Strike), and even though it doesn't feel like it works out to play for anything other than ignite or totems I feel like I've found my way back to an old friend.

Flameblast of Contraction is honestly what Flameblast should've always been and it is a joy to use! However, there has always been a major issue with Flameblast that became extremely prominent with the advent of Flameblast of Contraction and the darkness of Affliction league and that is the absolutely eye-searing flashbanginess of playing this skill. Normal Flameblast has an escalating flashbang level which makes it relatively fine, but Flameblast of Contraction gives max flashbang level with a stage 1 cast which makes this skill seriously painful at times, especially playing with HDR like I am. (tiny edit:) This painful for me even when Bloom has been reduced to 25%, which it was when I wrote this post, and I had forgotten how borderline unplayable it was before I figured that out and Bloom was at 100%.

What I would like, and I think this is an incredibly easy solution, is to have the center of the explosion to start out having the same colour as the runes and then go toward being more white and "explodey" the more stages it gains. This would let the skill be much less headache-inducing at lower stages and maybe also feel more impactful at high stages.

Thank you!

EDIT: Also, for some reason this skill (both normal Flameblast and of Contraction) is particularly resource-demanding with my fps dropping a staggering 15-20 with a single cast (pretty much exactly the same amount of frames dropped every time) from 100-ish to 85 at the highest settings at a 3.4m radius. Considering that no setting changes this (even with GI disabled I can cause the frame-dropping effect by using the skill several times) it might be the case where someone simply cannot afford the frames this spell costs to use. I do not know what causes this behavior but it might be worth looking into.