What We're Working On

I appreciate your hard work, loving the league mechanic so far!

Unfortunately less pleased with my Hexblast league starter, the following is my feedback:

Targeting is probably the biggest mechanical issue. When there is a mix of hexed and un-hexed enemies stacked on top of each other there is a serious risk of accidentally hitting an un-hexed enemy and wasting your cast. Would seriously appreciate it if the skill would auto-target hexed enemies that are near the cursor or had a moderate base area of effect so that you can guarantee hitting one of the hexed enemies in the pile.

The hex-and-blast mechanic is very punishing in any situation where there is a wave of spawning enemies. (Abysses, monster-spawning portals, srs-summoning monsters and so on) Hexing-and-blasting as they spawn requires excessive back-and-forth casting and risks accidentally wasting casts on an un-hexed enemy that spawned after your hex. Waiting until all enemies are spawned before hexing-and-blasting risks them overwhelming you.

Would also appreciate a more obvious indicator when a hex is at maximum doom. Correctly timing the blast at maximum doom is very difficult in the chaos of combat, resulting in lost damage either due to casting too early or too late.

On a more positive note, Hexblast's unique interactions with inflicting ailments and enemy resistances are very interesting and provide a lot of avenues for creative builds. Unfortunately it seems that because of this the base damage and critical strike chance were tuned to a rather low level. From my experience the result is that it feels like Hexblast requires too much specialized support from unique items, ascendancy class mechanics and other skills, and even with this support it only functions at an adequate level. Chaos spell hit damage doesn't scale very well by itself even with the doom damage multiplier; passive tree support is lacking for this damage type and there is also a lack of complimentary support gems. So you're kind of forced to chase specialized builds like multi-curse negative resistance stacking, archmage, ignites or extreeme base critical strike chance scaling. I get that stacking the resistance curses and/or using Assassin's Mark to raise the base crit were probably meant to be major synergies for Hexblast, and this is fine. The problem is that the amount of effort required doesn't justify the 'just adequate' end result

Finally I would just like to add that you guys did a great job on the audio and visual effects. The blast feels amazing and I like the spooky new curse sound effects.

Feedback regarding Hexblast:

- make it prioritise cursed enemies, hitting the one noncursed enemy in a pack feels really bad and has led to deaths. Especially relevant with staggered spawning/summoning of enemies.

- the hit dmg variant has scaling problems:
not enough chaos hit damage in the tree.
not enough (good) support options. maybe if concentrated effect worked, it would be fine. but now you need at least one of arcane surge / energy leech / hypothermia with skitterbots / other weird stuff.
4% base crit. even more so since controlled destruction is one of the few supports that are an option. crit scaling is necessary for decend boss damage with this skill imo, also with crits one can make a bit use of the three ailments on the side. pushing it to 5% base crit would make crit scaling way more manageable.

- a noticable max doom indicator maybe, but this may be difficult to get right, and should not go too far in the other direction of it being annoying.

Honestly, this is an extremely good post as far as "what we're working on" posts go.

For crackling Lance I feel like spell echo should at least count as a stack of intensify per repeat to smooth thing, I think you make this mechanic with spell echo to avoid giving it too much power but compare with the rest of mechanic, letting spell echo work with intensify will at least give it a much more reliable way to maintain stack and get to
Them without standing still for too long and will give the skill a chance to compete with the rest of mechanic in the game that are not even consider op

I've been using Blazing Salvo with Flame Wall, so far it feels good with the fact that you can position BS so that you hit a large group of enemies, or closer to hit tougher enemies multiple times. However I cannot tell if all projectiles could hit the same enemy, and thus I dont know the actual dps, kinda like the old Firestorm where it's hard to calculate unless you only count one hit average damage.

Skill Feedback:

Crackling Lance- I think this would feel a whole lot better to use if the main beam was present on every cast, rather than just max intensity casts. Without the beam the vfx feels weak to use.

Doomsday- I expected the keystone effect to be scaled by skill effect duration modifiers since it seemed to add an additional effect to hex skills. I ended my hexblast character when this wasn't the case. Monsters would too often be able to walk out of the zone before it expired.

Marks- Targeting radius seems a little small, why can they be cast with no target anyways? Also the cast time feels long for attack based builds.

Hexblast- I love the unique mechanics to this skill, using the lowest resistance and letting all damage count towards ailments really grabs me. I wish it wasn't so heavily tied to the curse/doom mechanic, or that there was a way for me to sacrifice all curse effectiveness to build doom much faster. Much more a how the playstyle feels issue than a power level one.

Tried the new Hexblast skill, and while I like the general one big boom mechanic, it is very very clunky with the current Doomsday keystone.

The cast Hex, wait one second for Doomsday then cast Hexblast murders clearspeed and overall damageoutput, and makes the player seriously vulnerable in the meantime. Not worth it for not-horrible but mediocre damage.

I have been playing splitting steel and lancing steel. I think the area indicator for splitting steel's explosions could use some more clarity. Additionally, lancing steel seems like it could be a bit larger/brighter to see where your projectiles are targetting.

Probably a long shot but I just wanna copy and paste what I've posted on reddit about hexblast and its hex priority to consume curses.

"

I want to atleast say this just incase it hasn't been said or the team don't know about it yet.

What's the deal with hexblast consuming a random (from what i've observed) curse when multiple are at max doom.

My sequence of button pushes are Despair -> flammability...*wait for doom*... Hexblast (consumes despair since it was the first applied and both are at max doom) -> re-cast despair... *wait for doom*... Hexblast ... Now this Hexblast I'm expecting it to remove flammability, both flammability and despair are at max doom but now flammabillity is the oldest curse on the target. But despair gets consumed instead. I don't know if this is intended or not.

It would be a big QoL buff if it took the curse with the least amount of duration left on the curse. I have to acknowledge which curse has been consumed and from there reapply the missing one everytime. I can't systematically apply and consume curses with hexblast.

Also I just want to add, It seems like it might not be "random" but if i constantly hexblast with both despair and flam at max doom, it almost always consumes despair.

Crackling lance used with spell echo feels like a DPS decrease, and takes longer to get to the intensity you want to be at. Also getting extra levels of intensity makes the skill feel unrewarding as you do not get the Laser visual going off until the final stack. Overall the skill feels very underwhelming,