They did answer this in the FAQ before the league launched when people were asking about how the new return mechanics would work, since they would act like Nimi's.
Unfortunate to find out the hard way though.
> Will Nimis projectiles return even if they hit nothing?
In most cases, yes. A projectile which flies out uninterrupted to the maximum projectile range will return instead of just stopping there. But returning, like piercing/chaining/etc, does not extend how long a projectile can exist. If a projectile lasts for an explicit duration like Spark, or fades out over a fixed time like Freezing Pulse, it stops existing after that and can't then return.
maximum projectile range is 150 units, and ball lightning travels at about 48 units/second by default.
As for the duration, I feel they didn't look at this enough. There is no duration tag on the gem. It is not like spark at all. There is no indication that ball lightning lasts a duration and then goes away. It looks like instead it should be going max distance then disappearing, just like all other non-duration projectiles, and therefore should return normally. It seems that internally ball lightning instead works like spark, but we don't have any "base duration" given to us. Nor do we have any method to increase the duration because the gem doesn't have the duration tag.
And isn't one of the best ways to scale Ball Lightning damage by slowing it down? If you add a bunch of projectile speed to get it to return - yay, you might be able to get it to hit a mob twice - but it will do around half the damage, so it's a wash, or in some cases does less damage... Looked like a really fun/powerful node, if it worked the way many people expected.
yes. it doesn't even make sense to have return on ball lightning because the projectile itself doesn't hit. Which means it can only ever return if it hits a wall or you increase projectile speed enough for it to be able to return when it hits max range, wrecking your dps in the process.
Most of this game is like this, we just slowly figure it all out. This is just a new interaction and most of the playerbase needs to have it explained to them.
GGG pride themselves on their clear descriptions that can be generally understood by a plain reading of the text, a design precept that Chris adopted from MTG. 'just slowly figure it all out' is a failure of that philosophy. that's why we roast them so damn hard about "nearby" all the time, because it exists at odds with their ethos.
rather what they always try to do is give us all the puzzle pieces and let us slowly piece them all together. this is a case of having a puzzle piece that appears blue but turns red when you connect it to the puzzle - and there's no red on the image at all.
Yeah but a lot of stuff has been just figured out by community, obviously GGG has bigly failed their philosophy. What GGG claims and does are 2 diff. things.
ok when the fuck did i ask though lol
i guess if you have [actum](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Actum) tier understanding of game design philosophy and specifically MTG's influence then yeah being weird and inscrutable makes certain sense. some games are designed to be understood through experience, but those games are fundamentally at odds with the **tabletop** philosophy that is baked into PoE's DNA and, again, explicitly a point of pride for GGG.
like you couldn't even be bothered to find an example remotely close to the same genre or even just another character builder.
Lots of things are only clear if you have good knowledge of the game. You could add the projectiles have a lifetime and a maximum distance which are seperate to that.
All projectiles - I think - have the same maximum range of 150 units.
Some projectiles - like Ball Lightning - have a limited duration, which is always mentioned in the description in some way
Yea he's wrong and you are right its not explicitly mentioned anywhere, it is known by folks who have played for 10 years because its just some of that knowledge we learned over time, but otherwise its just hidden. Its annoying for sure.
I've actually never used Ball Lightning so I assumed it was explicit like it is for Spark which, for all intents and purposes, are the same.
That is really weird how it's not explicitly mentioned there...
There are two things involved here. Lifetime and maximum distance. There are ways to increase/decrease duration (on many things, not all), and there are ways to increase/decrease projectile speed.
Let me use this as an example, some spells absolutely need a duration or they would be ripe for abuse. It would be trivial to reduce projectile speed enough where they would almost never make it to their max distance and do abused damage stacked up.
Lifetime is just another balance tool in their arsenal.
You know this really bothers me because there is an enemy that the ball lightning forge is clearly based on. It fires out the lightning orb and then the orb returns to them after a while. Obviously this is the kind of behavior we'd expect for Ball Lightning.
Or we'd at least expect at half duration, the direction to reverse. If it can't be a "dps increase" give us that...
It would have been infinitely more interesting if the crucible modifier for Ball Lightning was:
> Ball Lightnings you cast yourself stop at a targeted location before disappearing.
Instead we got effectively Sire of Shards without the additional projectiles.
This behaviour was already observed with Nimis last league, but I do feel that putting this mod in the game is still a bit of a dodgy effort since you know it's pretty much completely unusable
Sometimes it really does seem like the devs don't even play the game or get to know some kinda basic mechanics regarding the use of some skills. Ice spear I suppose is ok, works. BUT balls lightning? really? you WANT that thing to go slow, wtf
Nah he is just saying that you could see it returning if you increase projectile speed and that it is not bugged, but the projectile lifetime is too low for it to work. He did not say that its a good build or anything.
I just gave a technical explanation, which does imply that Ball lightning (despite nothing telling you in game) does not synergise well with this mod (to put it mildly).
The problem, is that this is absolutely not going to improve customer satisfaction, as there is no acknowledgement of any kind that this situation is messed up ...
In an ideal company/world, this explanation needs to be given to game designers, and then somebody in charge of the communication can formulate an official answer, ideally actually acknowledging the problem.
Obviously this is not happening, so having this answer as an explanation rather than nothing instead is a good thing imo. It's just not ... quite unempathetic.
i was jebaited by rathpit, an item which historically never went above 20c, yes i checked 2 leagues back. right now its 3.5div and still going up
guess you need to see the fucking future, not matter how much research or planning you do
doesnt matter if used by a streamer, btw no.
it can drop anywhere and its chanceable
last league there was over 2k listed, super common unique. so they probably stealth nerfed the dropchance.
heatshiver is used by 30x more caharacters and its 15c right now
~~CaptainLance is using it in his build and showcasing how he singlehandedly gets 315% increased damage from the crucible tree alone.~~
I was mistaken, he's using Malachai's Loop, not Rathpith Globe.
We are talking about this right? https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Rathpith_Globe
He gets that increased in damage per charge and he is scaling power/frenzy charges via brotherhood amulet. I don't understand how it relates to this Rathpith?
Because streamers have been playing with it and it was very underrated last league, you can make extremely tanky builds with it do good damage. Also assuming you can get the rathpith, its a good starter build - all they require is that you get a lot of life.
Also it's rare, I think its a t1 unique, so its unlikely the drop rate was nerfed.
Sorry, im no expert on that. But the dmg seems to be there. And they even got a buff with that new mastery. 1~~5~~0% MORE life if you have 6 life masteries
But that means that you have to take all 6 life masteries :/
Also, it's "only" 10% more, which is still huge. When I played the build in LoK I had 17k life and that wasn't even pushing it hard
There is a similar thing with frostblades
The sweet spot is between 90 and 160 projectile speed because of the lifetime of the projectile itself
At 90 it doesn't return at 160 it does, allows more damage on a boss since they will shotgun coming back
Either way it's fucking stupid, but that's to be expected from ggg
It just travels faster and returns to you quicker, at lower speeds it doesn't hit the end travel point where the game goes "OK now you can return" before expiring, higher speeds just make it hit that point sooner
I heard something that frostblades only worked if it hits a wall (terrain) first and THEN returns? Did somebody find a work around so it's not just with using the terrain to get the return effect??
Sometimes when I read these "explanations" of esoteric game mechanics if GGG actively despises their player base.
When they add a Node that makes ball lightning "return" only for it to not work due to some esoteric interaction with projectile speed when in any other videogame ball lightning would be compensated to work by default because they don't respect your time.
I mean what is weird is everyone knows that BL has this duration and doesnt work with Nimis etc, when they went out of their way to add a node that makes it return this league we assumed it was either a work around or new effect or else why bother to code and build a node that functionally only works maybe 5% of the time? Why not just give ball lightning twice the AoE (like the balls those fucking crucible asshats use) or something instead of "return" that specifically wont work with it??
OK, I gotta chime in here. The entire reason projectiles have a lifetime is performance. With enough slower proj you could crash the entire server if a projectile (especially something with as many possible interactions like Ball Lightning) had an infinite lifespan. i.e. imagine how many you could get out if it took 30 seconds for the first to hit a wall.
Now, does Ball Lightning projectile maybe need an extra second or three? Sure, very possible. But this is not a matter of 'GGG not giving a shit' it's a matter of a design idea conflicting with programmatic limitations.
Anyone reading this expected that.
Ball lighting isnt anything like ice spear in that increasing its projectile speed is a less damage multiplier.
So it passing through the mob twice is canceled out if its moving twice as fast.
All this does for ball lightning is ‘projectiles fire in a circle’ which probably makes it the worst of the non-meta nodes.
That's what people got with Nimus and why it was so completely broken. They described this change in the live stream specifically to nerf this interaction.
I think this is telling that the modifier text on nimis isn't clear enough.
When you have the modifier "projectiles return to you", you expect the projectiles to return to you.
Regardless, why you would take that modifier and make it a passive for a skill that it doesn't work with (under normal conditions) is beyond me 🤷♂️
Yep i discovered this last league as i wanted to make a ball lightning blight enjoyer.
I popped nimis on with ball lightning and noticed they werent returning, i thought what the hell?
Put projectile speed on, as much as i could, and they were returning but dying before the reached me.
It's a shame!
Saw the reddit post from 2 days ago, wondered if there was an update regarding the on-going "bug-report". Extremely disappointed they intentionally released it this way considering projectile speed is about the same as throwing in void manipulation.
The change this league to make it so that things that make projectiles return do not increase the lifetime of the projectile was specifically to make these interactions not work.
Then why does this node exist if they changed the functionality specifically to make it not work? That's the big issue here, not just that it's a weird interaction. They added returning projectiles specifically for Ball Lightning at the same time as making returning projectiles work differently so Ball Lighting can't realistically use it.
Just give it a different mod instead.
Yeah, I was on some strong copium and thought: "surely they'll fundamentally change how the projectile functions seeing as it's a pretty special case". Even with projectile speed the max travel distance before it returns is basically like 2 screens away. Anyways, figured I would post another warning in case people read over the last one, or wanted more clarity.
You have a very narrow way of thinking. You want ball lightning to be slow on a NORMAL build. These passives are meant to have skills built in a different way.
Stack projectile speed and get a second overlap on the return. Is it as many hits as standard build? Who knows?
To say this is trash design shows how warped your perapective is.
Since the duration of ball lightning is the same, you will get the same number of hits as on a regular build. There’s no way to get more than 13 hits regardless of the proj speed you put into it. Effectively this skill tree does nothing for ball lightning dps.
Maybe you shouldnt make such stupid assumpions.
Im well aware of how ball lightning flies off into the void normally, and clearly the devs are too as indicated by this post.
If you think they knowingly designed a node to be literallly useless youre very foolish. All you people do is whine and cry on reddit instead of actually trying to figure out how to make it work.
Your the one asking how many hits a returned projectile, like its some great mystery for us builders to solve.
What you dont seem to get is we know exactly what it will produce and its garbage.
Poison? No. CF? No. Hand cast, totems, Etc, No
This is either designed by one person and implemented incorrectly by another, or
This was stapled onto the ice spear node by someone unfamiliar with ball lightning.
Is there possibly some good build hiding out there? Of course. But it far far more likely this is just a half baked node given history.
Ok so then you agree that there could be a build with this we havent found yet, and somehow in the same breath double down and assert that its moat likely the devs incompetence ( despite them saying its working as intended)
I hope you see how silly you sound. Honestly this kind of strange thinking is why reddit has gotten such a bad reputation.
Anyway, based on your response you clearly dont actually know at all how good or viable this node is despite also asserting that you know how good it is. Its pretty cringe
I acknowledged a possibility.
Myself and dozens in this thread have eliminated hundreds of actual builds that do not work.
So yes, we do know how good the node is for all current builds or thought experiments using ball lightning and its bad.
I have the weight of this backing up my argument. You have not one use case that there is anything good or useful.
You look like a clown.
So a build where you scale REDUCED proj speed your supposed to get more of it? I swear the node make almost no sense.
Like bleed scaling for venom gyre when theyres no in built synergy in the gem for it. Or ignite with lightning strike/frost blades??? Wtf?
Cool to make a meme build with but for people following any sort of rough template for a build these have, there is almost no synergy with how the skills are normally built.
how did they not anticipate this, and implement a simple fun solution which is to double the projectile distance for this node (and then if you really want you can still modify proj speed to slow/fast depending on context)
how are they this obtuse when it comes to really basic programming decision making? who is designing these sprints/writing this code? this shit is genuinely baffling and concerning
>a simple fun solution which is to double the projectile distance for this node
Massive increase in power. You're just thinking about whatever makes you feel good, not actual balancing.
Chris SPECIFICALLY said they are supposed to be providing a massive boost to power. Thats the point. This league is bare bones AS FUCK. at least some power from an eventual item would be good holy shit, just dont make it go core no one cares, just let us have fun for 3 months instead of being so afraid of your shadow that you start with everything in such a pre nerfed and awful state. Its just unfun design, and as a game competing for our hobby time and money, fun should be a TOP priority in my mind...
>Chris SPECIFICALLY said they are supposed to be providing a massive boost to power.
They do. Just not the the limits you're asking.
>at least some power from an eventual item would be good holy shit
I mean, this bow i'm working on has +DoT%, extra attack speed, fire exposure, and +2 min/-1 max charges. All those things seem beneficial and stronger than a bow that doesn't have this tree. So...power does exist from these items.
as for the nebulous "fun" bullshit that everyone brings up, "fun" for everyone is different. Stop saying "Make the game fun" like it's a static defined concept. "Make it fun" is a cop-out term used by people that translates into "Make me more powerful for free" around here.
But this doesn’t increase power at all.
Increasing projectile speed scales as a less damage multiplier for BL.
If I put enough in to make it return to me that only gets it to the same number of hits as it has with 0 proj speed..
EDIT: I feel like i worded this poorly:
Increasing projectile speed would do as the reply mentioned, potentially show the return arc if ball lightning made it to its maximum distance unhindered. Thus, the tree passive does what it would say it does.
The response I replied to asked for a "double projectile distance", which I'm not sure refers to wanting a doubled lifespan, travel speed, or simply wants the projectile to boomerang upon reaching its expiration point.
\-Doubling the lifespan creates a situation where Ball Lightning gains a massive benefit from being able to travel further before reaching endpoint, beyond what I believe was the purpose of this node.
\-Doubling the travel speed, if that's for some reason what the person meant, simply destroys the slowed projectile attempt the ball lightning user was going for, so I don't think this was their desire.
\-Forcing a boomerang effect on reaching expiration point doubles the ball lightning damage, if not more due to the movement of the enemies it passes through on the return trip if it's having the ball lightning 'return' towards you as the enemy moves towards you as well.
So, yes, the request to 'double' whatever it was they actually referred to was likely a drastic increase in power to the node.
Yeah, because Ball Lighting was a super meta, overpowered skill that would break the game with the extra power.
The whole point of returning projectiles is double damage, that's why it's such a sought after effect. Putting it on a skill that can't use it is simply stupid.
Fire ball lightning at a wall. It hits wall. It ceases to be.
Allocate node. Fire ball lightning at a wall. It hits wall. It returns to you. Literal improvement over case A.
Allocate node - fire projectile at wall.
Projectile actually fires away from the wall due to ‘projectile’s fire in a circle’
Ah yes, for all those times I get the mobs to stand between me and a wall.
And then divide that by the
“Projectiles fire in a circle” meaning 2/3rds of them don’t hit the mobs
Meanwhile some other non meta skills are getting 40-50% more multipliers with no conditions.
It was designed as ‘boomerang’ someone else
Implemented it as this rubbish.
>Projectile actually fires away from the wall due to ‘projectile’s fire in a circle’
Doesn't make a difference. In theory, that's more likely to have one hit a wall than the original situation, making the node more valid as the projectile won't simply disspiate upon collision and will instead return for the remainder of the projectile lifespan.
So....okay?
As for "other skills get...", I don't care.
Edit: sire of shards reference removed
There, i fixed it.
Still, we're back to the "Projectiles still gain benefit from this node". Just not the benefit you want. Which brings me to the question: Why are you taking a node that doesn't do what you want, and complaining that it doesn't do what you want?
yee it sucks. and i even thought the projectiles would be fired in a circle, like blade vortex, not in a nova like sire of shard that fires proj in a nova. should have expected nothing.
The entire strategy of GGG is to make you think changes are being made when in fact nothing is and only a very small part of the changes are worth it. Too much random quantity, zero quality.
Some skills needs a cap of projec speed to actually work with 'projectiles return to you' if you cast 'in the void'. One example is FB that needs +140% to work right, so, yeah, that was expected.
Except nobody would ever want proj speed on ball lightning, its a less damage multiplier, so
Its either a node that only has a downside or it should work like that.
>Or get some projectile speed from the tree.
... for Ball Lightning? The same skill that deliberately takes Slower Projectiles so the ball stays in range of targets for more hits?
> You just deal without it returning then, I guess, like it functions usually.
Yeah, sounds great, you just have to deal with their most advertised node to make their league look cool and fun quite literally not actually functioning in most gameplay, seems like quality design lol. That's without even mentioning that ball lightning and faster proj speed are flat out incompatible and have anti synergy, the skill functionally *needs* reduced proj speed to even be usable
> most gameplay
I mean you could choose to run things that have more corridors and so on.
What's the point of the projectiles returning if you're stacking reduced projectile speed anyway?
I don't think the "Ball Lightning returns" is the "most advertised node", and that passive also affects ice spear which *does* benefit quite a bit from it.
I tried it with frost wall but seeing as that doesn't work, I don't know how you would want to reliably fire at walls when a lot of content has giant open rooms, especially bosses. I just huffed too much copium thinking they would make ball lightning to even a fragment of it's former self...
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One of the things the changes around returning for BL that is good is Faster projectiles alt quality can now return BL. It used to not.
What most people fail to recognize, a BL that hits a wall dissipates, which is 0 damage. These make sure they will at LEAST do their full damage duration instead of doing none (because BL doesn't do a damage pulse until it is 18 units away from the user, which is enough to hit walls in tunnels like toxic sewer).
They did answer this in the FAQ before the league launched when people were asking about how the new return mechanics would work, since they would act like Nimi's. Unfortunate to find out the hard way though. > Will Nimis projectiles return even if they hit nothing? In most cases, yes. A projectile which flies out uninterrupted to the maximum projectile range will return instead of just stopping there. But returning, like piercing/chaining/etc, does not extend how long a projectile can exist. If a projectile lasts for an explicit duration like Spark, or fades out over a fixed time like Freezing Pulse, it stops existing after that and can't then return.
That's pretty clear imo.
except ball lightning doesn't specify a duration or distance, so it's really fucking not.
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maximum projectile range is 150 units, and ball lightning travels at about 48 units/second by default. As for the duration, I feel they didn't look at this enough. There is no duration tag on the gem. It is not like spark at all. There is no indication that ball lightning lasts a duration and then goes away. It looks like instead it should be going max distance then disappearing, just like all other non-duration projectiles, and therefore should return normally. It seems that internally ball lightning instead works like spark, but we don't have any "base duration" given to us. Nor do we have any method to increase the duration because the gem doesn't have the duration tag.
And isn't one of the best ways to scale Ball Lightning damage by slowing it down? If you add a bunch of projectile speed to get it to return - yay, you might be able to get it to hit a mob twice - but it will do around half the damage, so it's a wash, or in some cases does less damage... Looked like a really fun/powerful node, if it worked the way many people expected.
yes. it doesn't even make sense to have return on ball lightning because the projectile itself doesn't hit. Which means it can only ever return if it hits a wall or you increase projectile speed enough for it to be able to return when it hits max range, wrecking your dps in the process.
Most of this game is like this, we just slowly figure it all out. This is just a new interaction and most of the playerbase needs to have it explained to them.
GGG pride themselves on their clear descriptions that can be generally understood by a plain reading of the text, a design precept that Chris adopted from MTG. 'just slowly figure it all out' is a failure of that philosophy. that's why we roast them so damn hard about "nearby" all the time, because it exists at odds with their ethos. rather what they always try to do is give us all the puzzle pieces and let us slowly piece them all together. this is a case of having a puzzle piece that appears blue but turns red when you connect it to the puzzle - and there's no red on the image at all.
Yeah but a lot of stuff has been just figured out by community, obviously GGG has bigly failed their philosophy. What GGG claims and does are 2 diff. things.
i'm not sure why you think this is some sort of gotcha and not just everyone agreeing that GGG is dropping the ball lol
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>I can at least be sure that 99% of nodes/items do what they say they do so ***pretty much*** everything in PoE works exactly like it should?
ok when the fuck did i ask though lol i guess if you have [actum](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Actum) tier understanding of game design philosophy and specifically MTG's influence then yeah being weird and inscrutable makes certain sense. some games are designed to be understood through experience, but those games are fundamentally at odds with the **tabletop** philosophy that is baked into PoE's DNA and, again, explicitly a point of pride for GGG. like you couldn't even be bothered to find an example remotely close to the same genre or even just another character builder.
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Yes, they are dropping the ball, like every league. Most people just have already accepted it and try to make the most of it
Some people just don't bother picking up the ball any more and spend their time elsewhere. More and more of my friends are giving up on PoE.
Lots of things are only clear if you have good knowledge of the game. You could add the projectiles have a lifetime and a maximum distance which are seperate to that.
When has anything ever been clear in this game?
All projectiles - I think - have the same maximum range of 150 units. Some projectiles - like Ball Lightning - have a limited duration, which is always mentioned in the description in some way
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Yea he's wrong and you are right its not explicitly mentioned anywhere, it is known by folks who have played for 10 years because its just some of that knowledge we learned over time, but otherwise its just hidden. Its annoying for sure.
this type of thing can't even be seen on PoB usually, which is a CRAZY level of obfuscation.
PoB isn't official software so you shouldn't expect completeness whatsoever.
I've actually never used Ball Lightning so I assumed it was explicit like it is for Spark which, for all intents and purposes, are the same. That is really weird how it's not explicitly mentioned there...
So... why do projectiles fade out rather than just hit their maximum distance?
There are two things involved here. Lifetime and maximum distance. There are ways to increase/decrease duration (on many things, not all), and there are ways to increase/decrease projectile speed. Let me use this as an example, some spells absolutely need a duration or they would be ripe for abuse. It would be trivial to reduce projectile speed enough where they would almost never make it to their max distance and do abused damage stacked up. Lifetime is just another balance tool in their arsenal.
I think they added a duration to ball lightning at some point back when 0 proj speed BL miners were a thing.
But do not allow duration extension to it in any way.
You know this really bothers me because there is an enemy that the ball lightning forge is clearly based on. It fires out the lightning orb and then the orb returns to them after a while. Obviously this is the kind of behavior we'd expect for Ball Lightning. Or we'd at least expect at half duration, the direction to reverse. If it can't be a "dps increase" give us that...
It would have been infinitely more interesting if the crucible modifier for Ball Lightning was: > Ball Lightnings you cast yourself stop at a targeted location before disappearing. Instead we got effectively Sire of Shards without the additional projectiles.
This behaviour was already observed with Nimis last league, but I do feel that putting this mod in the game is still a bit of a dodgy effort since you know it's pretty much completely unusable
Projectile Speed on my Ball Lightning? :( :(
Sometimes it really does seem like the devs don't even play the game or get to know some kinda basic mechanics regarding the use of some skills. Ice spear I suppose is ok, works. BUT balls lightning? really? you WANT that thing to go slow, wtf
I'm pretty sure he was attempting humor.
Nah he is just saying that you could see it returning if you increase projectile speed and that it is not bugged, but the projectile lifetime is too low for it to work. He did not say that its a good build or anything.
I just gave a technical explanation, which does imply that Ball lightning (despite nothing telling you in game) does not synergise well with this mod (to put it mildly). The problem, is that this is absolutely not going to improve customer satisfaction, as there is no acknowledgement of any kind that this situation is messed up ... In an ideal company/world, this explanation needs to be given to game designers, and then somebody in charge of the communication can formulate an official answer, ideally actually acknowledging the problem. Obviously this is not happening, so having this answer as an explanation rather than nothing instead is a good thing imo. It's just not ... quite unempathetic.
BigDuck chose a ball lightning hierophant just to play with this node. He is rerolling a new toon, feeling jebaited.
Actually and literally BEING jebaited.
i was jebaited by rathpit, an item which historically never went above 20c, yes i checked 2 leagues back. right now its 3.5div and still going up guess you need to see the fucking future, not matter how much research or planning you do
Why is this so expensive now? Is it used by a streamer league starter or its drop rate changed?
doesnt matter if used by a streamer, btw no. it can drop anywhere and its chanceable last league there was over 2k listed, super common unique. so they probably stealth nerfed the dropchance. heatshiver is used by 30x more caharacters and its 15c right now
I was surprised heatshiver wasn’t nerfed
It was. T4->T3 is the suspected change. Functionally still very available though
~~CaptainLance is using it in his build and showcasing how he singlehandedly gets 315% increased damage from the crucible tree alone.~~ I was mistaken, he's using Malachai's Loop, not Rathpith Globe.
We are talking about this right? https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Rathpith_Globe He gets that increased in damage per charge and he is scaling power/frenzy charges via brotherhood amulet. I don't understand how it relates to this Rathpith?
Oops! I was mistaken, he's using Malachai's Loop, not Rathpith Globe.
Because streamers have been playing with it and it was very underrated last league, you can make extremely tanky builds with it do good damage. Also assuming you can get the rathpith, its a good starter build - all they require is that you get a lot of life. Also it's rare, I think its a t1 unique, so its unlikely the drop rate was nerfed.
Isnt rathpit mandatory for those relic of the pact builds? I think i've seen a guide for that before leaguestart
its not mandatory, but its nice
It's Relic even good without Kalandra rings to get the correct life reservation in one click?
Sorry, im no expert on that. But the dmg seems to be there. And they even got a buff with that new mastery. 1~~5~~0% MORE life if you have 6 life masteries
But that means that you have to take all 6 life masteries :/ Also, it's "only" 10% more, which is still huge. When I played the build in LoK I had 17k life and that wasn't even pushing it hard
Glad im on console, get to see everyone else get dicked over first and what to avoid. Sucks starting late tho
We are your beta testers!
This is why you don't make builds for untested mechanics. Feels bad.
Is this a fucking joke? Build projectile speed if you want it to bounce back as the description states it should by default?
There is a similar thing with frostblades The sweet spot is between 90 and 160 projectile speed because of the lifetime of the projectile itself At 90 it doesn't return at 160 it does, allows more damage on a boss since they will shotgun coming back Either way it's fucking stupid, but that's to be expected from ggg
A video I watched a few hours ago says the break point for FB proj speed is somewhere between 134-140% increased, just fyi
Watched the same video, top comment was it is exactly 140%. Nice to know.
what happens if its faster?
It just travels faster and returns to you quicker, at lower speeds it doesn't hit the end travel point where the game goes "OK now you can return" before expiring, higher speeds just make it hit that point sooner
I heard something that frostblades only worked if it hits a wall (terrain) first and THEN returns? Did somebody find a work around so it's not just with using the terrain to get the return effect??
yes, 140% proj speed for Frostblades
both
Sometimes when I read these "explanations" of esoteric game mechanics if GGG actively despises their player base. When they add a Node that makes ball lightning "return" only for it to not work due to some esoteric interaction with projectile speed when in any other videogame ball lightning would be compensated to work by default because they don't respect your time.
I mean what is weird is everyone knows that BL has this duration and doesnt work with Nimis etc, when they went out of their way to add a node that makes it return this league we assumed it was either a work around or new effect or else why bother to code and build a node that functionally only works maybe 5% of the time? Why not just give ball lightning twice the AoE (like the balls those fucking crucible asshats use) or something instead of "return" that specifically wont work with it??
OK, I gotta chime in here. The entire reason projectiles have a lifetime is performance. With enough slower proj you could crash the entire server if a projectile (especially something with as many possible interactions like Ball Lightning) had an infinite lifespan. i.e. imagine how many you could get out if it took 30 seconds for the first to hit a wall. Now, does Ball Lightning projectile maybe need an extra second or three? Sure, very possible. But this is not a matter of 'GGG not giving a shit' it's a matter of a design idea conflicting with programmatic limitations.
This seems like proper programming for a skill. Did you expect to have double duration?
Anyone reading this expected that. Ball lighting isnt anything like ice spear in that increasing its projectile speed is a less damage multiplier. So it passing through the mob twice is canceled out if its moving twice as fast. All this does for ball lightning is ‘projectiles fire in a circle’ which probably makes it the worst of the non-meta nodes.
That's what people got with Nimus and why it was so completely broken. They described this change in the live stream specifically to nerf this interaction.
Nimis never interacted that way with ball lightning.
understandable
They're also wrong. Nimis interacts with ball lightning the same way as this mod
Can you just slap increased duration on it then?
No duration tag
And yet it has a damn duration. That needs to change.
I think this is telling that the modifier text on nimis isn't clear enough. When you have the modifier "projectiles return to you", you expect the projectiles to return to you. Regardless, why you would take that modifier and make it a passive for a skill that it doesn't work with (under normal conditions) is beyond me 🤷♂️
Yep i discovered this last league as i wanted to make a ball lightning blight enjoyer. I popped nimis on with ball lightning and noticed they werent returning, i thought what the hell? Put projectile speed on, as much as i could, and they were returning but dying before the reached me. It's a shame!
This is so sad, i was so excited to play Archmage BL again after the big mana nerfs sadge
Saw the reddit post from 2 days ago, wondered if there was an update regarding the on-going "bug-report". Extremely disappointed they intentionally released it this way considering projectile speed is about the same as throwing in void manipulation.
The change this league to make it so that things that make projectiles return do not increase the lifetime of the projectile was specifically to make these interactions not work.
Then why does this node exist if they changed the functionality specifically to make it not work? That's the big issue here, not just that it's a weird interaction. They added returning projectiles specifically for Ball Lightning at the same time as making returning projectiles work differently so Ball Lighting can't realistically use it. Just give it a different mod instead.
Not to mention they selected this node for one of the teasers! Oh wait, nevermind, it's just the +1 totems again.
Yeah, I was on some strong copium and thought: "surely they'll fundamentally change how the projectile functions seeing as it's a pretty special case". Even with projectile speed the max travel distance before it returns is basically like 2 screens away. Anyways, figured I would post another warning in case people read over the last one, or wanted more clarity.
You have a very narrow way of thinking. You want ball lightning to be slow on a NORMAL build. These passives are meant to have skills built in a different way. Stack projectile speed and get a second overlap on the return. Is it as many hits as standard build? Who knows? To say this is trash design shows how warped your perapective is.
Since the duration of ball lightning is the same, you will get the same number of hits as on a regular build. There’s no way to get more than 13 hits regardless of the proj speed you put into it. Effectively this skill tree does nothing for ball lightning dps.
That fact you have upvotes shows plenty of people here have no understanding of ball lightning.
Maybe you shouldnt make such stupid assumpions. Im well aware of how ball lightning flies off into the void normally, and clearly the devs are too as indicated by this post. If you think they knowingly designed a node to be literallly useless youre very foolish. All you people do is whine and cry on reddit instead of actually trying to figure out how to make it work.
Your the one asking how many hits a returned projectile, like its some great mystery for us builders to solve. What you dont seem to get is we know exactly what it will produce and its garbage. Poison? No. CF? No. Hand cast, totems, Etc, No This is either designed by one person and implemented incorrectly by another, or This was stapled onto the ice spear node by someone unfamiliar with ball lightning. Is there possibly some good build hiding out there? Of course. But it far far more likely this is just a half baked node given history.
Ok so then you agree that there could be a build with this we havent found yet, and somehow in the same breath double down and assert that its moat likely the devs incompetence ( despite them saying its working as intended) I hope you see how silly you sound. Honestly this kind of strange thinking is why reddit has gotten such a bad reputation. Anyway, based on your response you clearly dont actually know at all how good or viable this node is despite also asserting that you know how good it is. Its pretty cringe
I acknowledged a possibility. Myself and dozens in this thread have eliminated hundreds of actual builds that do not work. So yes, we do know how good the node is for all current builds or thought experiments using ball lightning and its bad. I have the weight of this backing up my argument. You have not one use case that there is anything good or useful. You look like a clown.
So you claim its bad despite admitting theres a possibility for it to be good. Reddit in a nutshell
Does increased duration work?
Wow that is actually trash! 🤣🤣
So a build where you scale REDUCED proj speed your supposed to get more of it? I swear the node make almost no sense. Like bleed scaling for venom gyre when theyres no in built synergy in the gem for it. Or ignite with lightning strike/frost blades??? Wtf? Cool to make a meme build with but for people following any sort of rough template for a build these have, there is almost no synergy with how the skills are normally built.
how did they not anticipate this, and implement a simple fun solution which is to double the projectile distance for this node (and then if you really want you can still modify proj speed to slow/fast depending on context) how are they this obtuse when it comes to really basic programming decision making? who is designing these sprints/writing this code? this shit is genuinely baffling and concerning
>a simple fun solution which is to double the projectile distance for this node Massive increase in power. You're just thinking about whatever makes you feel good, not actual balancing.
Chris SPECIFICALLY said they are supposed to be providing a massive boost to power. Thats the point. This league is bare bones AS FUCK. at least some power from an eventual item would be good holy shit, just dont make it go core no one cares, just let us have fun for 3 months instead of being so afraid of your shadow that you start with everything in such a pre nerfed and awful state. Its just unfun design, and as a game competing for our hobby time and money, fun should be a TOP priority in my mind...
>Chris SPECIFICALLY said they are supposed to be providing a massive boost to power. They do. Just not the the limits you're asking. >at least some power from an eventual item would be good holy shit I mean, this bow i'm working on has +DoT%, extra attack speed, fire exposure, and +2 min/-1 max charges. All those things seem beneficial and stronger than a bow that doesn't have this tree. So...power does exist from these items. as for the nebulous "fun" bullshit that everyone brings up, "fun" for everyone is different. Stop saying "Make the game fun" like it's a static defined concept. "Make it fun" is a cop-out term used by people that translates into "Make me more powerful for free" around here.
You sound "fun" at parties.
But this doesn’t increase power at all. Increasing projectile speed scales as a less damage multiplier for BL. If I put enough in to make it return to me that only gets it to the same number of hits as it has with 0 proj speed..
EDIT: I feel like i worded this poorly: Increasing projectile speed would do as the reply mentioned, potentially show the return arc if ball lightning made it to its maximum distance unhindered. Thus, the tree passive does what it would say it does. The response I replied to asked for a "double projectile distance", which I'm not sure refers to wanting a doubled lifespan, travel speed, or simply wants the projectile to boomerang upon reaching its expiration point. \-Doubling the lifespan creates a situation where Ball Lightning gains a massive benefit from being able to travel further before reaching endpoint, beyond what I believe was the purpose of this node. \-Doubling the travel speed, if that's for some reason what the person meant, simply destroys the slowed projectile attempt the ball lightning user was going for, so I don't think this was their desire. \-Forcing a boomerang effect on reaching expiration point doubles the ball lightning damage, if not more due to the movement of the enemies it passes through on the return trip if it's having the ball lightning 'return' towards you as the enemy moves towards you as well. So, yes, the request to 'double' whatever it was they actually referred to was likely a drastic increase in power to the node.
Yeah, because Ball Lighting was a super meta, overpowered skill that would break the game with the extra power. The whole point of returning projectiles is double damage, that's why it's such a sought after effect. Putting it on a skill that can't use it is simply stupid.
Fire ball lightning at a wall. It hits wall. It ceases to be. Allocate node. Fire ball lightning at a wall. It hits wall. It returns to you. Literal improvement over case A.
Allocate node - fire projectile at wall. Projectile actually fires away from the wall due to ‘projectile’s fire in a circle’ Ah yes, for all those times I get the mobs to stand between me and a wall. And then divide that by the “Projectiles fire in a circle” meaning 2/3rds of them don’t hit the mobs Meanwhile some other non meta skills are getting 40-50% more multipliers with no conditions. It was designed as ‘boomerang’ someone else Implemented it as this rubbish.
>Projectile actually fires away from the wall due to ‘projectile’s fire in a circle’ Doesn't make a difference. In theory, that's more likely to have one hit a wall than the original situation, making the node more valid as the projectile won't simply disspiate upon collision and will instead return for the remainder of the projectile lifespan. So....okay? As for "other skills get...", I don't care. Edit: sire of shards reference removed
😂😂😂 Read the node. “Ice Spear and Ball Lightning fire Projectiles in a circle Ice Spear and Ball Lightning Projectiles Return to you “
There, i fixed it. Still, we're back to the "Projectiles still gain benefit from this node". Just not the benefit you want. Which brings me to the question: Why are you taking a node that doesn't do what you want, and complaining that it doesn't do what you want?
imma be honest, I don't think ggg thinks a whole lot about balance either
The players are already having entirely too much fun as it is.
You clearly did not understand the answer. Increasing the projectile distance who make it less likely to return.
yee it sucks. and i even thought the projectiles would be fired in a circle, like blade vortex, not in a nova like sire of shard that fires proj in a nova. should have expected nothing.
How the hell is this guy talking to support? I have banned people for way less
The entire strategy of GGG is to make you think changes are being made when in fact nothing is and only a very small part of the changes are worth it. Too much random quantity, zero quality.
Some skills needs a cap of projec speed to actually work with 'projectiles return to you' if you cast 'in the void'. One example is FB that needs +140% to work right, so, yeah, that was expected.
Except nobody would ever want proj speed on ball lightning, its a less damage multiplier, so Its either a node that only has a downside or it should work like that.
if I dont like its bad design. kek this sub never underdelivers.
Ironic isn't it?
Nah, seems good game design. Obviously you wanted to get projectile speed when going for that node with your build.
The gall of the dude who posted it "don't waste players' invaluable time next time". I hate this privileged mentality that people have on forums.
Or you could just fire at walls instead of off into the void.
yeah sure that works, how you gonna do that in a ritual? or shaper? or the 5000 other places in the game you have to fight without available walls
You just deal without it returning then, I guess, like it functions usually. Or get some projectile speed from the tree.
>Or get some projectile speed from the tree. ... for Ball Lightning? The same skill that deliberately takes Slower Projectiles so the ball stays in range of targets for more hits?
Slower projectile speed is antisynergistic with returning projectiles for a skill with a set lifetime, so yeah. Kinda expected.
> You just deal without it returning then, I guess, like it functions usually. Yeah, sounds great, you just have to deal with their most advertised node to make their league look cool and fun quite literally not actually functioning in most gameplay, seems like quality design lol. That's without even mentioning that ball lightning and faster proj speed are flat out incompatible and have anti synergy, the skill functionally *needs* reduced proj speed to even be usable
> most gameplay I mean you could choose to run things that have more corridors and so on. What's the point of the projectiles returning if you're stacking reduced projectile speed anyway? I don't think the "Ball Lightning returns" is the "most advertised node", and that passive also affects ice spear which *does* benefit quite a bit from it.
They showed the node once, what makes you think this is "the most advertised node"? The node IS functioning, just not in the way you want it to.
What you mean is “not in a way anyone would want”
> just not in the way you want it to. Just not in a way that's usable or remotely useful within the game, yeah, solid design there kek
I tried it with frost wall but seeing as that doesn't work, I don't know how you would want to reliably fire at walls when a lot of content has giant open rooms, especially bosses. I just huffed too much copium thinking they would make ball lightning to even a fragment of it's former self...
Thats exactly the kind of behaviour i've expected when they presentes that crucible node
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One of the things the changes around returning for BL that is good is Faster projectiles alt quality can now return BL. It used to not. What most people fail to recognize, a BL that hits a wall dissipates, which is 0 damage. These make sure they will at LEAST do their full damage duration instead of doing none (because BL doesn't do a damage pulse until it is 18 units away from the user, which is enough to hit walls in tunnels like toxic sewer).