Penance Brand

level 83 Hierophant,
will never play again unless boss dps is significantly improved, its way too low. the map clear is beautiful though it feels really nice, tried using complimentary dps skill but just found that the brands too under powered overall, and it needed holy conquest to even function half ok, and overal just not worth using the skill , i never used them before so dont know how good they were before, i was following Ghazzy build and some generic guide, but just could not make it work.

Does Penance brand explosion triggers if you are removing brand by creating another one over brand limit?

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loadinggood wrote:

Does Penance brand explosion triggers if you are removing brand by creating another one over brand limit?

Sort of. The new brand has to be a different target, so you can't just recast on a boss and get an explosion every time.

I played penance brand in Harvest league, and posted my feedback to the "general" thread at that time. This thread didn't exist, so now I bring it here.

I played as a Hierophant, and scaled the pulsing damage of Penance Brand. I enjoyed the skill and playstyle, until I reached boss fights with relatively high life pools. My difficulty was with the energy stacking mechanics.

Penance brand builds up energy stacks until it has reached 20 of them. At this point, it will pulse with damage until it expires, culminating in a big explosion. The explosion will remove all energy stacks. The removal of stacks makes it difficult and sometimes clunky to fight bosses with.

Consider the case that I have entered the boss room and placed my brands on the floor. The fight starts, energy starts building up, the pulsing starts, the first brand expires and blows up, all of the energy is reset, and then the second brand blows up. The first brand has 'stolen' the energy that the second brand had been making, resulting in the second brand dealing very little damage with it's final blast.

And those are only the first actions of the fight. The offset of the brand's expiration has been defined by my cast time. As the fight continues, I am not able to constantly cast the brands, and as such, this offset becomes greater and greater. In a longer fight, I will start to notice that I am no longer generating pulses at all. This is because each brand is expiring and removing the energy that the next brand is trying to build up. I will find myself casting brand recall in the corner and waiting for them all to expire, so that I can recast them onto a boss with a smaller offset between them.

It is possible to cast brand recall and get the full 20 stack explosion from both brands. The downside of this is that doing so would lend itself to ignoring half of the skill's mechanics.

Overall, it's a fun skill that would be made better if the energy stacks behaved differently, perhaps each brand has it's own energy stack counter. Maybe even give a node on the tree that reduces my max brands from 3 to 2.

if you are going to nerf penance brand next league can we at least get some brand attachment range; brands will be right in front of mods on do nothing.