Searing Bond

What support gems will work with Searing Bond these days besides Increased Burning Damage?

the new damage over time passives added in 1.0.3 patch

Can anyone confirm that all the increased fire damage nodes will also increase the Searing Bond's damage?

I have a question about how Searing Bond interacts with the Blood Dance, Sharkskin Boots. I noticed that kills made by it don't seem to grant frenzy charges so I was curious if that is working as intended. With a 28% chance to grant a frenzy charge on kill I should definitely be seeing some charges from the kills I get with my totems.

Unless the caveat is that the totem is getting the kill and not me, which would be a bummer. Using Fire Trap, for example, is granting me frenzy charges on kills by the initial explosion and by the burning ground. It doesn't really make sense to me that a trap kill counts as me getting a kill but a totem kill doesn't.

I've tried searing bond a couple different ways, both on dual totem templar fire build (level 50ish) and now with my(level 30ish) viper strike / damage over time ranger. Both times I remained unimpressed with the skill. Keeping enemies in the beam without either the totem or myself dying is a pain and to me not a fun gameplay mechanic. Most builds and enemies in POE are pretty mobile and positioning matters. I find that searing bond is counter-intuitive to the mobility POE requires. Either you put yourself in danger just to line up enemies or they all run out of the beam. The lack of useful supports is another big downside to this skill.

Here is a proposed solution that would make for fun gameplay and keep the essence of what I think searing bond is supposed to be:

Make it so when you pass the beam through an enemy it treats them as an additional searing bond attachment point and creates another searing bond beam to connect them to the turret and possibly your character. The enemy that is bonded will take damage from 1 beam and other enemies will be damaged as the new beam is passed over them. Obviously this has to be capped or there would be a whole screen of beams. Let's just say it starts out with base of 2 additional beams to attach to enemies and beams stay attached to enemies for 3 seconds.

This would open up new support gem combos. Chain is underused in the current meta, so this could be a good opportunity to give it a new use. With this mechanic chain could increase the number of searing bond links to enemies by 2 giving a total of 4 enemies that can be linked to the totem and/or each other. Also, Increased duration could be used to increase the time enemies stay bonded to the turret.

(disclaimer: I don't code so I don't know if any of this is feasible on that end, but I hope it is.)

I think the changes I've outlined would make searing bond a much more fun and interesting skill to use. Please feel free to let me know if you like the ideas I've outlined or not. If you don't please explain why and perhaps offer an alternative you think would improve the skill.

Thanks!

So I read (somewhere, perhaps on the wiki) that Searing Bond damage stacks. IE, if you have more than one beam passing over an enemy, he will take damage from all the beams.

Is this correct?

I'm considering retrofitting my Righteous Fire totem guy to as Searing Bond guy: the same passives/gear will apply (all the +HP/ES gear and passives are never really "wasted" on any build, after all). I also have a Soul Mantle laying around, so I figure 3 totems = 9 beams, so 9X damage to a guy standing in the middle of three tightly clustered totems, right? The tooltip says my Searing Bond does 1451.4 damage by itself, so standing in the middle of all three should deal 13062.6 damage per second.

That SHOULD be excellent damage. In testing, however, the build, while effective, does not appear to be getting the expected results. The damage DID appear to improve with each successive beam, but not to the extent expected. Anything I'm missing here?

'Burn' is a status ailment --> i don't think the new damage over time nodes will work.

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Vipermagi wrote:

Burn is not a Status ailment, Burn is a damage type. Specifically, Burn is Fire Damage over Time.

Ignite is a Status ailment, and it inflicts Burn damage.

Ah ok, now its clear:

- Shock (status), inflicts increased dmg taken
- Chill (status), inflicts slow
- Freeze (status), inflicts stun
- Ignite (status), inflicts DoT

am i right?