Acolyte of Chayula Feedback

Hello GGG, I am Sol and I have feedback regarding the Acolyte of Chayula.

I have been playing it since day 1 and it was my 1st character that I have taken up to the point of being able to defeat Zarokh, Trialmaster and I assume all bosses aside from Arbiter since those 2 mentioned are all I fought so far (WE NEED MORE CITADELS / EASIER TO FIND CITADELS) and given that I think I got some good opinions that can help make the Acolyte a better ascendancy overall.

taking into account that Acolyte of Chayula is a character that would want you to build into Physical and Chaos damage, these points will be taking that into account as well as using only quarterstaff skills as a reference for my points. I am aware of these other builds people are doing such as Toxic Growth + Dark Effigy but most of these people are only going into such things because quarterstaff does not have any REAL chaos support build into the skills. saying that, here are my points:

1. Darkness has too many negatives to be rewarding to take.

Darkness as a concept seems really good as it is adding a defensive layer that can help protect you from damage but in practice you always have all your darkness fully reserved from 1 hit, and it will never go down. 100 base Darkness, and you are most likely only going to get to 500-575 Darkness in total

what would make this better is making anything that references Spirit add to Darkness, so a scepter giving more spirit will give more darkness, the campaign 100 spirit is 100 extra darkness, to bring darkness up to allow it to take more hits. that way we could get to maybe 2000 Darkness that will help us take less damage.

the reservation duration could come down to 5 seconds to make it easier to keep your darkness up and change Inner Silence, I would make it do this; "50% of mana leech unreserves Darkness" to create a bigger synergy with the ascendancy nodes.

if this is done then Grasp of the Void would need to be changed as well, if the goal is 2000 Darkness then perhaps making it so you could change it from 20 Unreserved Darkness to 50, so it does add more damage and feel worth taking; but isnt too overpowered (2000 Darkness would give 40% Extra chaos compared to 30% at 600 if u can even hit lvl 100)

2. Into the Breach could use some work

Into the Breach is pretty cool with being able to leech Life and Mana as well as adding chaos damage, but it does not impact your damage or sustain as much as it should.

The Red and Blue Flames should leech more than 7% at the base, as if we were building for Leech recovery you would have a lot more than 7% or 14% to sustain and you would be getting said leech every time you attack; but these flames randomly appear and you got to run over them. instead it should give you 5% Omni-Leech (leech from all damage) to your attacks for a set duration, so your attacks will leech for you while it is active and can stack up to 10

With the duration in mind, having a 5 second duration on purple flames makes it impossible to get max stacks and keep them going. if the duration was refreshed instead of each stack having its own duration then that would help but it should be a 10 second duration as a base so you get 20 seconds with the buff instead.

I don't even know what being in a breach gives me as i checked breach rings and they don't get double effect in breaches anymore. maybe there are items from Xesht that gain effects when ur in a breach? I would have to find that out but maybe as breach bases that gain bonuses for being in a breach?

3. Leeching as a quarterstaff build is painful

getting instant mana leech and letting mana leech apply to energy shield is crazy and was the reason I chose to play a Acolyte of Chayula Monk as I know instant leech is busted. however I have been realizing at this time that leeching with quarterstaff skills is insanely painful and difficult.

There is no good physical skills that allow you to benefit from the leech as all the leech affix's you can get only leech from Physical damage, so any elemental and chaos damage your doing is wasted as you cant sustain leech from the elemental damage. you do too little Phys damage on Tempest Flurry, Ice Strike, or whirling assault. Flicker Strike might work well but being able to use it consistently is hard with keeping up the power charges (I was running it with a 70% chance to now use a charge).

there is one thing that could be done to make this a lot better and feel better, almost as if it was meant to be; change Ravenous Doubts to still leech mana instantly; but add "All Damage can leech" to it. that way you can still use these skills and still leech. I have 40% leech and every leech passive and i am still running out of mana and not keeping my Energy Shield up. Whirling Assault was able to keep my mana up and somewhat protect my ES but the damage on whirling assault is so low as a base with a fixed attack time of 1.4 seconds (I got it to 1.7) and it is hard to argue cutting my damage in half to be able to leech properly.

That is the feedback I got on the Acolyte of Chayula. hopfully my feedback will give the ascendancy I was most excited for more power where it is lacking. the only thing it TRULY needs is to be able to leech from any damage type. if it can do that then it will already be 100% better