Seismic Trap

No one uses this skill?...

It has great potential. I managed to clear a ~40 level strongbox with 3x no-link level 1 Seismic Trap... The cooldown is long, but which makes it feel more like a "trap" than, say, the very notorious Arc trap spam...

It can be a good complementary skill to any physical spell builds, like Bladefall, Ethereal Knives and Bear Trap...

I think no one will want to use this trap.

You have cool down which is very immersion breaking and very dangerous to your fighting rhythm.

As a trapper or miner, you typically need to stutter step a little, skill a little, stutter step a little, skill a little, and repeat and repeat.

One wrong move and you may get killed by the enemies.

There are too many things to keep track off and on top of that, if you even have to keep track of the trap cool down, after a while, you just get fatigue and you don't want to play anymore.

I can see why people don't want to play this gem.

You need to aim.

On top of that you need to keep track of cool down.

You only have 8 active skill slots, out of which only a few slots is really useful for fast clicking.

Do you really want to give up a precious skill slot for a skill which has a cool down and on top of that you might miss your aim and trap doesn't activate, and then your cool down screws you over.

Doesn't make sense to play this type of game to me.

On top of an insane cooldown, the reliability and consistency of this skill is awful. Can't hit anything reliably. When you 2/3 stack it, it feels like that's what it should be doing normally, maybe with less damage.

I would recommend like 10-15 waves per release just to increase the consistency, maybe reduce damage to compensate but honestly the cooldown more than takes care of the damage...

It does scale with skill duration though

can Seismic Trap No longer has a cooldown? please and a bigger area of effect, for thet it can be a clear trap skill?

thankyou
JeckNoTree

While increasing the damage of the trap in 3.13 was a nice touch, it did little to nothing to make the trap viable.

Depending on how GGG sees the role of this trap it has to be changed in one of two ways:

- As a long-cooldown high-damage boss killer: add an increase to burst radius as the skill gem gains levels while keeping the mechanic of not increasing the wave distance with increases to area of effect, to allow for overlapping bursts with large investment in AoE. Propably also needs to add one or two waves, and make the labyrinth enchantment add two additional waves rather than one and the delay between waves has to be reduced.

- As an area clear skill for frequent use: drastically reduce the cooldown, reliability has to be improved some way - such as waves firing in the direction of monsters or increasing the wave count.

Regardless of above changes, the delay between triggering and firing the first set of waves has to go, be removed, abolish that shit. There's already the trap throw time, arming time and this trap for some mindboggling reason also has a long delay (equal to the delay between waves I presume) before firing the first set of waves. REMOVE IT! It makes the trap unreasonably hard to damage fast-moving enemies, leaves the player vulnerable to incoming damage because enemies are still alive long after they're supposed to not be, and it makes playing the trap feel exceptionally slow, clunky and overall unfun.

I tried a lot to make it work after the buffs in 3.13, but it still ends outdamage by flamethrower trap on anything that isn't the size of kitava/arakali.
Both lvl 20 gems and flamethrower trap on a 5link does vastly more damage than a seismic 6link(with 46% phys as extra fire on the character) on anything that isn't absolutely gigantic

It rarely(or at least feels) overlaps the AoE when the target is around the trap epicentre, and feels like never if the target is dead on in the center of it.


While bigger and bigger numbers can brute force the skill into being "viable" it still wont feel great if it doesn't change how it deals it's damage currently.

It being more like Earth Shatter with very generous aoe overlaps even in the center, or having the cracks deal instances of damage(wich shotgun at dead center) with a big burst on the explosions are some ideas.


And finally, on cast speed scaling the cooldown traps, there's a big issue in that seismic and lightning spire trap need cast speed to scale up, while flamethrower trap deals the maximum damage possible regardless of cast speed if the enemy stays in it's center, wich most enemies(namely bosses wich are what these traps are most used for) don't really move around much while doing their attacks and mechanics.

The idea to bridge this gap is to let trap throwing speed also be a "cast speed" scalling option for cooldown traps, wich is a dead damage stat for them unlike regular traps wich is a direct dps multiplier.

It's a garbage skill.

Even if the cooldown was removed, it wouldn't be particularly powerful. With the cooldown, it's just downright garbage.