Soulrend

Character: L91 Trickster with a 5-link Cane of Unravelling and otherwise completely garbage gear. Bane with two curses was used for tankier targets, and Wither totems come out for bosses and whatnot. Standard chaos meta these days.

Soulrend is insane for clearing. As far as I'm concerned, it *completely* obsoletes Essence Drain + Contagion for map clears.

It's much less fiddly and fussy, it has infinite pierce, it auto-targets, it applies DoTs in an AoE, GMP doesn't reduce its damage, and it does higher base DoT damage than ED -- 1944.3 vs. 1503.2 at L20. *And* it goes through proximity shields which is a huge boon in memory fragments! Like, what?! How many benefits does one skill need?

Yes, ED + C can clear a larger swath of enemies if several packs are grouped up nicely, but that hardly matters when you can just run behind the occasional Soulrend cast as it murders everything.

It does have a higher base cast speed than ED, but ED + C is a combined 1.4 seconds vs. Soulrend's 0.8. If there's any gap between mob packs, you gotta cast both, so Soulrend ends up much nicer to clear with. Too nice, even.

Soulrend seems better balanced in its single-target damage* since it needs constant reapplication and doesn't do much hit damage. And because there's no great green-gem swap for GMP if you're already using Swift Affliction. ED is better here (in theory) because it needs reapplying, like, 10x less often. But even then you still need pierce since it can so easily be blocked by the wrong mob without it. Not even Voidwalker ED can hope to compete with Soulrend on clear.

*Barring those people getting +9 staffs/bows, but that's a general balance issue with the game (Cyclone nerf when?) than this skill.

I'm leaning toward making Soulrend a DoT skill being a mistake. That allows it to scale too easily given how easy it is to play. It does so much damage so quickly, and in a literally screens-wide AoE to boot, that it's basically DoN -- "damage over now" to borrow a ZiggyD phrase. Seems like it should be more like Frostbolt but for chaos damage.

But it's not just ED that Soulrend knocks down a few notches. Play it for awhile and then try to go play any normal AoE skill. It'll feel quite a bit slower since you aren't afforded easy two-screen clears of trash mobs per cast. I mean, imagine actually having to stop and deal with every single pack. What pleb nonsense. Soulrend might be the most ridiculous skill released to date. It makes a whole lotta skills feel like crap at clearing maps.

TL;DR: Soulrend is cheap and brainless and needs a nerf -- at least for clearing. It's mechanically too strong for the damage it does.

SOULREND SEEMS TO BE NOT LEECHING ES?

Okay I've done some tests and I positively think that Soulrend is not leeching ES.

Currently, I'm using Soulrend with an Occultist with Vile Bastion and Ghost Reaver. My ES is currently 4710. I checked on POB and see that my maximum ES leech rate is 942/sec. My Soulrend damage on hit is about 7000 chaos damage. I don't have any source of ES generation other than Recharge and Leech.

Theoretically, when I hit an enemy with Soulrend, it should give me 4%*7000 = 280 ES to leech, right. If that is true, then my ES should start to increase, but IT DOESN'T. I checked on the Defense tab of the Character window, it does not show any Energy Shield Regeneration per second either.

Further more, when I kill 10 enemies with Soulrend, Vile Bastion gives me 10% of my max ES, which is 470/sec to leech. The Energy Shield Regeneration per second on Defense tab also show 470/sec, but Soulrend's ES leech is nowhere to be seen.

Is it a bug of this league, or am I missing something about Soulrend and/or leeching mechanics? Please explain!

Thank you.

The skill does a good amount of damage but the projectile is extremely slow.

Soulrend is really awful with its own gem's duration and damage. It rely items with cast speed to feel good casting it around without unleash and especially against bosses. On .6 second, it's really bad at bossing and killing nasty rares. I don't think there's anything wrong with its damage at this moment but would be nice to get some damage buff but it's unnecessary. It does definitely need buff to duration from 0.6 second to 1 second and cast speed time from 0.8 to 0.5 or perhaps 0.6. This cast speed suggestion may seem too much if duration is buffed so I will leave that up to your discretion. Please definitely buff duration since it's doable to get more cast speed but not duration as it's mostly from tree. I do not want to go longer and pointless path to get duration nodes for it!

Soulrend like another chaos spell gems are in need of buffs to make them feel good again. Look at top builds, they all dominate over everything else because they have better and insane damage and slightly slower but yet good clear speed.

Soulrend of Reaping (SoR) feedback.

I wanted to make a poison caster with this. I thought it would be mostly like Soulrend (SR) but poison scaling.

The problems are:
1. The projectiles of SoR do not turn. This should not have surprised me, because the skill description doesn't mention turning, while the description of SR does. However, this feels like such an integral part of the gem that I didn't bother to check. Why is SoR even a SR variant instead of a variant of Essence Drain? This feels wrong thematically, and feels bad to play.

2. The projectiles' of SoR spread when supported by LMP does not scale with the distance of the cursor to the character. They alway shoot out over about an 80° arc. That means when a pack appears at the edge of the screen, I cannot hit it with more than one projectile wit SoR + LMP. This feels bad to play. My guess is that this might have been the desired spread behaviour for SR, because otherwise the turning would have made the spread too narrow. Without the turning on SoR however this just feels stupid.