Vortex

Playing a chaos vortex occultist in breach league. The skill is actually not so bad. It's a semi short range skill depending on if you want to use frost bolt or not. The biggest issue is of course that you have to drop the vortex where you are standing instead of where your mouse cursor is. A pity, but it's a different kind of caster to play at least. As mentioned can be used at range with frostbolt but i don't do that.

I haven't tried using either frostbolt or vortex with a spell totem. Could be an interesting combo. It's probably been done already but i didn't see any info on this in this thread.

I use these items for the conversion:


+ Hit and run
+ Decent aoe radius and damage
+ Damage + degen in one
+ Can be a ranged skill with frostbolt

- Have to be close to monsters
- Reflect can be an issue (not for me though)
- Vortex is placed where you stand not where you target
- Is a bit slow to cast

I give this skill a 4 out of 5 rating. If the skill would activate on mouse cursor i'd give it a top rating. But it was obviously not intended to do so.

The Vortex definitely deserve increase base area per X gem's levels. I love this skill especialy with MTX effect, but base area is really small.

Considering Conc. effect support to be one of the best support options for the Vortex, there should be way how to counter its drawback. Right now I feel that grabbing all of the area passive nodes from witch and templar area together with Increased Area support gem makes Vortex's AoE decent enough to be playable with self cast character. But going any lower is just pain.

As for the Frost Bolt + Vortex combo it takes just too long. How about add to Frost Bolt something like "Increase casting speed by 20% if the spell was casted from the Frost Bolt recently"?

Please remove "spell damage applied to created dots" from the game.



Damage high enough to point that using proliferation just for higher clear speed on white mobs

I played rf hrimburn (now nerfed for elemental equilibrium, but the new dyadus...) vortex in breach and with like total of like 100% increased damage on tree and 0% increased damage on gear I was oneshotting most map bosses ... and I would get more damage nodes later if I played this character more

shit is fucking retarded. It makes even essence drain impact damage poison possible to be insane.

If not remove that mod then remove impact damage from all active dot gems.

It seems to me that Vortex's AOE isn't quite as good as it should be. The most obvious thing to compare self-cast Vortex to is RF, but right now RF gets at least as big--bigger I'm fairly certain--and has the added advantage of never having to stop and cast anything.

I am playing a self-cast Vortex build, and while I gather that may have been quite good in Breach, apparently the 2.6 changes to the way AOE works caused Vortex to take a big hit in how big it could potentially be.

I have 122% increased AOE on Vortex presently, and I was planning to get the Elementalist's Pendelum of Destruction and use Dying Sun with the Alchemist cluster for additional AOE, but at the current rate of efficacy, it seems the difference from the additional 64% AOE would hardly be noticeable, despite that being a huge amount of a difficult-to-attain stat.

Is it possible that this escaped the notice of GGG devs? Or was Vortex intended to cap out at a fairly small size, greatly limiting its viability compared to the somewhat similar RF at endgame?

Perhaps I'm a bit late to the party with this feedback, but I joined the league not long ago after not having played since Perandus, and I feel pretty disheartened by the way this seems to limit the potential of a skill that is new to me which I was excited to build a character around.

Not only AoE is very small, the damage of the skill is also underwhelming. Yes, you could get 40% more dps by casting it on the Frostbolt, but quess what - even then, a Frostbolt is still doing pretty much the same amount of damage on its own, with the added benefit of not having to use 2 separate skills.
I don't know if the design idea of the skill was to concentrate on hit dps or DoT dps, but as it is now, scaling DoT damage isn't worth it, at best you are getting 1/3 dps of Vortex itself, that is with Swift Affliction, Efficiacy Supports and Elemental Overload, so no crit that would push hit damage too far ahead.

The skill might have been broken in double dipping era due to its "Modifiers to Spell Damage apply to this Skill's Damage Over Time effect" which was OP with poison or burning, but as it stands now, the skill is very underwhelming. To compete with Frostbolt or other similar skills, it needs at least 150% more DoT damage or 40% more damage overall (both hit and dot). Or, rework DoT part to deal not set amount of damage, but 50% of original hit's damage per second.

I'll say it again - even if you are using its unique mechanic of casting it on Frostbolt, you are dealing less dps then if you were just casting Frostbolt only and ignored Vortex.

Does the "40% more damage when cast on Frostbolt" modifier affect both the hit and the DOT ground?
Also I noticed that the DOT ground effect is a little bit smaller than the AOE of the initial explosion, is this intended?

Could it possibly be a good change to make vortex move along WITH frostbolt when cast on it, instead of destroying it?

It'd make its mediocre range a bit better by allowing a single cast to hit a pack of mobs instead of only what walks into it, it'd look pretty dope, and it could provide a reason to link the frostbolt gem with something like slower projectiles to make it tick more.

Or at least just make it not consume the frostbolt, and instead drop where it was at the time? That way we can cast 1 bolt and actually use vortex a couple times.

It still needs a damage boost to the DoT portion regardless of what you do with it though. Consuming the frostbolt that does more damage than the vortex just feels bad and takes even more sockets up to accomplish.

Really needs a buff to the base damage, it does half of what other spells does at level 20.

The 40% more damage when used on frost bolt is barely worth it, so clunky to use. Such a shame, it has really nice mtx but it is nothing more than a chill application with such shit damage.

As I posted elsewhere (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2046648), the cast on frostbolt mechanism is only available when both the vortex and the frostbolt are selfcast: totems, traps, and mines do not work with this mechanic, despite the wording of the vortex skill having no mention of this. At present, I've wasted time making 2 characters for mines and totems which turned out to not even be playable since the cast-on-frostbolt mechanic is non-viable.

The cast on frostbolt mechanic feels bad and works poorly. Using normal speed frostbolt, the mechanic is unusable if enemies are anywhere near you since the frostbolt moves past them before you can complete a vortex cast. Similarly the mechanic is unusable in any case where the caster has to move (literally all boss fights) since the time to stand and cast two consecutive spells, especially considering the base cast time of those spells, means you're dead.

Using slower projectiles makes the mechanic slightly better, except then it becomes easy to see that it doesn't even function as expected. The vortex doesn't appear where the frostbolt was, nor does it appear where the player clicked--it's basically random.

Overall, the only use I can see for this skill is with traps--where it's outclassed by many, many other skills--or as a companion skill in a RF build as an above poster commented, in which case there's no point in having it since RF doesn't need a companion skill.

I don't understand why this skill is in the game other than to bait people into trying to use the non-functional, non-viable cast-on-frostbolt mechanic.

EDIT: If the skill was not always centered on the caster, and could be placed on the cursor without using frostbolt, I think this skill would have vastly increased usability and fun.

Hi, any plans/rumors to revamp Vortex ? It would be nice to play it again...