General Support Discussion

Could you please stop multistrike targets from being random
It would be a huge improvement to flicker strike.

Thank you ever-so-much for the support gem tooltip. It's a time and currency saver! I sometimes Think I've read descriptions thoroughly, but when I attempt to link a support it doesn't work, so I read again and smack my head when I see what I missed.

The tooltip prevents flat foreheads.

~ Shy

Can we please have a thread for Withering Touch Support, because I'd like a dev to clarify if the "Withered" debuff is the same as the unnamed "secondary debuff" from the Wither gem, or if you can stack both and benefit from even greater 'increased Chaos Damage taken'?

I have some problems with the way GGG handles support gems in there game. When I first started playing POE I thought that the games biggest strength was linking gems together to make abilities, but though out my time playing it appears that GGG more often than not fails to capitalize on this strength.

1: My first gripe is that support gems seem to be more focused on modifying the numbers of active gems rather than modifying there effects. If you look at the support gems on the POE wiki barely any of them significantly change the skills they are supporting.

2: It appears that all of GGG's effort goes into making the new active gems more interesting rather than the support gems (look at herald of agony and withering touch (both new gems) and the difference is pretty apparent). This should be the other way around, making more supports that can change what a skill does would not only make the new active skills just as interesting as when the focus was put on active gems, but also improve the interest in older active gems at the same time.

2.5: The new skill Toxic Rain is a good example of where GGG could have implemented a new support instead of an active. Toxic Rain is really similar to Rain of Arrows. Like really similar like you could basically get the same skill if you added in a support instead that lets say supports bow skills, reduces the number of arrows fired, reduces the damage, and has a chance to create a spore bud when the arrows from the skill stop moving. However as a support there is actually more creativity and depth to the game now because you can use it on other bow skills.

3: In general I think POE could benefit greatly from more thought and creativity being put into there support gems.

Support gems together with skill gems system is what makes this game stronger than d3/tl2/ml.
Reason: With these gems, you don't need to bother too much about picking the right class for your active skills, just get enough stats from gear or tree, and you're good to go.

Idea for Multistrike and Spell Echo that would help theme and aesthetics.

Spell echo actually echos the spell rather than just making casting faster so fireball would be like:

pew pew...pew pew...pew pew... With the character animation of the casting only showing for the first.

Same with multistrike: bam bam bam.. bam bam bam.. removing the successive animations would make it sort of like Ancestral Call but Ancestral Call's hits happen all at once.

This would make the characters not look like they are spazzing out like people mentioned on Reddit.

Since there is no dedicated thread to Cast while Channeling, I post this here. Would be nice if there is a dedicated thread :-)

How does CwC interact with cooldowns and spells that have a maximum usage storage?

I currently use Charged Dash-CWC-Desecrate-VD. My observations so far are that Desecrate and VD are casted in round robin until all Desecrate usages are gone. Then, while Desecrate is on CD, VD gets triggered each time. Is this correct?

Thank you

I also wish for a dedicated CwC thread...

I have been using Cast While Channeling pretty extensively this league and I wanted to provide some feedback about it as I think it doesn't stand up to other similar abilities. Even though I use it, I feel my characters probably have greater potential abandoning it. Sometimes I'm stubborn like this.

Main Attractions of the gem:

1. Quality of Life - Save a Hotkey and cast this automatically while you do other things too. Maybe these skills support each other somehow!

2. Don't gear for cast speed, but still cast a slow spell kinda fast - I play SSF and this works OKish. They sped up a few of the spells in 3.6 and that actually made CwC a tiny bit worse. This reason for using the gem is also the biggest reason for NOT using it.

Cons:

1. You severely limit your scaling options for one of your main abilities:
1a. If you gear/spec for cast speed, your triggered ability gets no benefit.
1b. If you don't gear for cast speed, your hand-cast ability is missing out. There are no spells in the game that are better when cast slowly.
2. There is no way to meaningfully scale the CwC gem. Getting an extra gem level casts the triggered ability .01 seconds faster. Come on!
3. You are giving up a lot to use CwC - where you could potentially have a 6-Link ability you now have two 4-Links. Is it worth it? Only with a 7 or 8-Link Shaper Staff probably.

My main suggestion is that the CwC gem have some form of scaling, preferably with Cast Speed. Cast speed is arguably the best way to scale any spell in the game, so having half of your main attack hard-capped at 2.86 casts/s kinda sucks.

Maybe the intent is something different than the way I've been using it, but if so it's very limited. Would love to see it opened up a little more without being too OP.

For reference here are some CwC builds that I have tried in 3.6:

1. Incinerate/Purifying Flames - This works pretty well, but my primary damaging ability (PF) will never scale with cast speed, which kinda sucks.

2. Wither or Blight CwC Essence Drain - I decided to try this before I found out that regen from ED is based on tooltip damage rather than actual damage done, so I think I'm gonna go back to the drawing board on it, but in general as with Purifying Flame I think the ceiling is a lot higher if I just stack Cast Speed and spam ED. My conclusion is that this is the case for almost every spell in the game.

While you're giving melee a rework, how about some supports that add a movement to a melee attack if you target an enemy outside melee range?

There could be a charge support that lets you close the distance between you and the target while knocking back and dealing lesser damage to other enemies in your path, and dealing extra damage to the primary target based on movement speed and distance traveled.

There could be a support that lets you teleport to two or three other targets, THEN the primary target, increasing critical chance and/or damage for each successful hit along the way.

Things like that would offer and option to alleviate some of the "sitting duck" problems melee characters run into, as well as a way to let single-target attacks hit multiple enemies that isn't the boring old melee splash. If it proves to be overpowered using those attacks in constant motion, then maybe give the movement a cooldown, but allow the regular attack with all its other supports during the cooldown period.

I'd also like a shielded strike support that lets you hide behind your shield and channel with increased defenses from your shield, building stages, then increasing the charged attack. It'd be like a melee Unleash. Adding a channel tag would open up some options with Cast while Channeling and Infused Channeling.

GGG should rework "Cast on Melee Kill" and make it compatible with Flicker.