Trap

Your point is moot because listing that would still require that you know game mechanics in order to know what it's specifying.

Does anyone actually regularly use traps in their late game build? They seem fairly lacking compared to any straight up DPS, and only work in very specific situations. Maybe if traps did 200% damage or something...

The ammunition system renders this useless.

After trying for an extended time, I failed to find a single skill which was better with Trap than without it, and that is ignoring the additional 40% mana cost that the ability adds.

It doesn't synergize with any aspect of any build. It can't be thrown by totems, it doesn't deal more damage, it is impossible to attack faster with, you can attack with it something like once per minute.


I understand what was being attempted with the Trap and Mine support gems, but feeling flavorful does not make the ability balanced. This is just bad.

What exactly does increased trap duration do? Does it increase the duration of e.g. Ice Wall or does it make the support last 44 seconds instead of 40? For Fire Trap, would the passives increase the scorched earth duration? And for Conversion Trap, the amount of time converted?

Is there a way to make traps be constructed faster after use? What I mean by this is, I have zero traps and I am waiting for one to be created so I can use it; is there a way to speed this up?

The duration likely increases the duration the trap remains. And there are trap setting time passives near the shadow that reduce the time for the trap to lay (also in the middle I believe)

Additionally, it bothers me quite a bit that you gain no bonus for increasing the level of the Trap gem. Instead, you get increased requirements for no reason.

This is horrible design.

I use the trap gem with ice nova on my cold witch. I have great AoE-dps with freezing pulse and lesser multiple projectiles short ranged, and can snipe mobs with ice spear easily.

However, big groups of ranged mobs can be very deadly on merciless, and now that cold snap comes with a cooldown, i simply use cold snap on my totem for additional fire support, and throw three ice-nova traps with a 30% chance to crit and an additional 5% chance to freeze on the heads of the ranged group.

They immediately go off, deal tons of damage (i have an increased cold damage support on the nova, too) and it's quite probable that the survivors get frozen, especially with elemental weakness.

I don't want to use ice nova without traps anyways, as the dps is lower than freezing pulse, and the only advantage -to fire in every direction at once- is useless, as getting surrounded by enemies on merciless as a caster is deadly.

It bugs me that there is no advantage to leveling it, though. Good that this is going to get fixed.

Edit: lvl 52, just reached act 2 merciless, this still works great!

ontop of that, ice nova traps would be a way to turn nova into cold snap, without the extra mods and with same cooldown and larger size XD

Ice nova (and maybe sparks) is probably the only spell this support is usefull to since it's a spell that you can't project where you want it otherwise as you can do with most other spells.

For any other spell, totem is way better.


How about a large increase to the damage the trap does? You get a limited amount of them per minute anyway, so I don't see any immediate balance problems with that.