Shockwave Support

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Jess_GGG wrote:

Post your feedback for this support here.

Make sure you concisely state your character build, level, and other complimenting abilities you have when you talk about a support.

Personally I have problems seeing the Shockwave effect when its happening. Maybe it would feel stronger:)

Playing and supporting EQuack

I like this gem a lot functionality-wise but you can barely see it in action. The animation is very quick, which is fine, but it's very dark red color, like a Blood skill, even if you don't use Blood Stance.

My suggestion is to make it brighter and change the color since it's not tied to Blood mechanics. Maybe white-ish blue? Blue is probably the most neutral color in PoE right now.

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Jess_GGG wrote:

Post your feedback for this support here.

Make sure you concisely state your character build, level, and other complimenting abilities you have when you talk about a support.

Sweep, GS with typical physical build (with Pulverize) lvl85

I gave this support skill a try. I find its cooldown being useless since it can only trigger from 1 monster at a time, meaning it can't shotgun from an aoe skill hitting multiple mobs. Also I though it would help me clear stuff a bit further away but it just overlaped with Ice crash aoe.

Using it with Chain Hook was ok since when you pull yourself towards the mobs you "explode" on hit, but chain hook is a bit awkward to use when there's few mobs around.

The only skill that I found that can "abuse" this support by having it activate further from you is Frost Blades.

I haven't tested extensively and only on my Ice Crash character with the gear that it has (crashcrashbaby in standard).

The downside of the skill can be the base damage, it is not converted so in my case being immune to ele reflect but not physical reflect could potentially kill me, but I did not test this.

And as mentioned by previous commenters, the visuals are something to be desired. If we go with the chain hook "explosion" example I'd like to see the molten shell orange colour as it is more vibrant and goes well against all the dark theme backgrounds.

Does the shockwave hit the target of the skill, or only other enemies?

edit: To answer my own question, yes the target takes damage from both the initial hit and the triggered shockwave.

Full disclaimer: I love melee staff builds. My first was a Pillar of the Caged God and I have always enjoyed the flexibility.

This gem is great and makes staves and maces feel great, I use it on both my primary skill (cyclone) and my movement skill (leap slam). I have been happy with integrating it into my build.

However, keeping an eye on progress due to the fact that it has no direct influence on the primary skill, I would like to see an upgrade to the gem as it levels such as a bigger aoe radius or +1 shockwaves generated, as it sits now it only can generate a singe shockwave per hit (when it’s off cool down). This can be pretty underwhelming when using it on huge aoe skills, where you only hit a small corner of the pack with the secondary shockwave. In order for it to be a meaningful contributor it must be used when the enemies are tightly grouped together (using something like cyclone) which feels counter intuitive.

First of all, I am so glad that this shows up in the character sheet as "shockwave" with all damage information displayed. Makes testing much easier. I almost want it to show up in the tooltip DPS for the skill it is supporting when plausible, but forcing the entire text into there would be pretty rough and probably misleading.

I've been using this on my clearing skill (tectonic slam), but it's tricky to apply it to a DPS skill. If I understand it correctly, the supported attack also needs to have an attack time that is slightly longer than shockwave's cooldown for maximum effectiveness (having it proc on every hit). Failing that, you want to aim for the attack time to be a clean ratio of the cooldown. (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc) with a little buffer for safety.

Where this is currently cramping my build is that gaining onslaught from a silver flask will actually lower my total DPS if I need to use tectonic slam multiple times in a row. The increased attack speed makes the shockwave proc substantially less frequently, because now the timing is off. This probably isn't as big of an issue for builds that use it to support occasional-usage skills, or builds that are already planning on lower activation ratios, but it's something to consider while building.

tl;dr - This damage support adds a soft cooldown to the supported skill, where using it early reduces the damage output.

Still can't find full stats of the Shockwave =(

To better support skills that don't hit often (like Earthquake or Vengeance), perhaps Shockwave could store multiple charges which are all spent at once to deal X% more damage with Shockwave when it is triggered.

This reduces the need to sync up hits with Shockwave's cooldown to make full use of it.

When I realized that the effect from this support is affected by other supports linked to the active skill, my mind was blown. I've been using shockwave linked to Leap Slam on my jugger while playing staff earthquake and later staff ground slam. I think it's absolutely amazing in such a build (slow but powerful two-hander), because it enables to 1-shot every white pack and most blue packs while simply jumping throughout a map.
I'm not entirely sure about its viability in a main skill setup, because I haven't tried that by myself, but I can totally see it working beautifully with Consecrated Path or Sweep, especially in a 7L setup.
The only complaint I have is that the visual effect is basically non-existent.

Also, because there's little information available on the wiki:

Character panel shows 0.71s cooldown.