Viper Strike

Because it's not as effective as old Viperstrike. By a long stretch.
Wish they atleast changed it's level bonus to a fixed chaos damage boost to add to the degen.
Sure it might have scaled badly in the end, but now it just doesn't have a niche no matter the difficulty.

Scales better with +phys dmg than with +chaos/dot dmg and then I might as well just go with some other skill which does more damage.

What's the point of viper strike again ?

I do like the removal of charges though. I don't even mind it being yet another skill which scales by weapon, but it should truly build around chaos/dot damage - e.g. convert a big chunk into chaos and the subsequent dot.

Also, where is the chaos penetration support gem ? ;)

Linking added chaos dmg to Molten Strike does a better job at dealing chaos dmg than Viper strike does. You want high dmg hits for the chaos dmg and dot to be useful, but when you deal high dmg to begin with there is no point in using viper....

The only way I can think of making it work would be the Edge of madness unique and some sort of "melee ele buzzaw" build. The sword has +1% chaos and ele dmg per char lvl, and VS uses the combined damage for the % chaos dmg. Grab lots of auras, attackspeed and +ele dmg...and probably be still worse off than just using MS or ST.

VS was used to kill Uber-Atziri on Rampage 3 weeks into the league as a pure Melee character. Seems to be balanced right I guess.

Any crit high damage build can do that safe, no matter the skill used.
The question is, why to use VS, but not [insert any weapon dependent/high elemental skill] ?

VS got no face anymore.

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Vincendra wrote:

VS was used to kill Uber-Atziri on Rampage 3 weeks into the league as a pure Melee character. Seems to be balanced right I guess.

This tells us everything about rampage, and nothing about VS.

If you got a specific VS build that is efficient, by all means post it. You know, one that uses VS because of VS mechanics, and is better at what it does than using another melee skill.

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Unhold wrote:

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Vincendra wrote:

VS was used to kill Uber-Atziri on Rampage 3 weeks into the league as a pure Melee character. Seems to be balanced right I guess.

This tells us everything about rampage, and nothing about VS.

If you got a specific VS build that is efficient, by all means post it. You know, one that uses VS because of VS mechanics, and is better at what it does than using another melee skill.

At least, it's more useful than Sweep.

Wasn't sweep used in the latest BoTW? That looked more efficient than Viper Strike. -.-

What was wrong with older version?

* Path of Exile's socket system puts an extreme upper cap on the number of attack skills you can use. Most people don't even bother with a single target skill by the endgame. All the other sockets just go toward passive force multipliers. Who has room for an accessory single target skill that works together with basically no other skill backbone?

* Poison Arrow was (and arguably still is) better.

Current Viper Strike is a hundred times better, it works with what Path of Exile is. You can spam the skill, you can use Increased Physical% to scale it, it can be your primary attack, and therefore your entire stat tree can be selected toward maximizing it.

It's not in an altogether bad place now. Around >250% base effectiveness against chaos resistant monsters, around >400% against no resist monsters. At the cost of having to wait for the hits to eat away at the guy.