Whirling Slash + Twister Combo Broken

Sometimes Whirling Slash does not produce a Whirlwind, or the Whirlwind simply disappears mid combo. This is devastating when it occurs because it completely breaks the combo by either making it impossible to produce a Whirlwind to combo into Twister, or having the Whirlwind disappear as you press Twister resulting in a low number of weakened Twisters as a result.

This happens completely at random, both in the Campaign as well as maps, but seems to happen more frequently on certain maps such as Mire and Fortress. On my last Fortress map, the entire Boss arena was bugged and I couldn't produce a single Whirlwind. So I had to do the entire fight using only Twister which was incredibly painful as it does 240% LESS damage without a Whirlwind.

On a side note: The Whirling Slash combo is already very clunky even when it does work, requiring Barrage, Frostbolt, and 3 attacks before firing off Twister. The gameplay loop of POE2 is about constantly moving and dodging attacks, which is fine, but it's counter to the play style of Whirling Slash + Twister as the combo requires you to spend 2-3 seconds (with very high attack speed) locked inside a very small aoe or it breaks the combo. It would be nice if either Whirling Slash a lower number of stages making it faster to fire off or if Whirlwind follows the player (either natively or through a support gem). Ideally I would prefer the second option which would keep the basic gameplay loop but allowing you to dodge between stages without breaking the Whirlwind. Possibly trading the infinite duration for a short duration such as 3 seconds that is refreshed by using Whirling Slash again.

I've done some more digging into the problem looking at video clips and I found a potential source of the problem.

1. If for any reason you fire off a solo cast, non-combo Twister, then attempt to build up your Whirlwind Stages with Whirling Slash, any stray normal Twisters consume the Whirlwind when they touch it and upgrade (which is normal behavior).

2. Even when the solo cast, non-combo Twisters have consumed enough Whirlwinds to fully upgrade, they keep consuming the Whirlwind anyways, effectively leaving a 5.4 second window (based on my current duration) where you simply cannot combo and have to run around randomly and wait, which feels very bad.

3. This behavior sometimes breaks Whirling Slash in an area, preventing it from building a Whirlwind even when no Twisters are present anymore. Such as it did in the Boss Arena on Fortress.

I cannot think of a single reason why someone using Whirling Slash would prefer to slowly upgrade their Twisters one at a time instead of creating a whole new combo of correctly buffed ones. Perhaps remove the behavior so Twisters do not consume the Whirlwind created by Whirling Slash and leave that behavior exclusively to Whirlwinds created by Whirlwind Lance?

I think I've discovered the crux of the problem.

Whirling Slash can be used stationary or can thrust your character forward as part of the attack animation. When moving with Whirling Slash, sometimes it cancels the previous Whirlwind instead of carrying it forward like it normally does, or doesn't upgrade to the 2nd or 3rd stage. To be clear, this is not the Whirlwind detonating, this is the Whirlwind starting over or not upgrading.

My Testing has shown:
1. Only happens when I'm moving with the attack animation.
2. Only happens When repeating the 3 Whirling Slash into Twister Combo multiple times while existing Twisters are still out.
3. It does not happen if I manually click 3 times then fire off a Twister, only when I hold down right click and allow 3+ attacks to happen in succession.
4. I'm not sure if this is because I'm attacking too fast and mismatching the internal cooldown on Whirlwind or it's simply not upgrading as it should.

This results in:
1.Twisters that are Stage 1 or Stage 2, instead of Stage 3 like you would expect when you've Whirling Slashed 3 of more times.
2. All of those Twisters (upwards of 36 depending on Frenzy Charges on Barrage) will now consume your subsequent Whirlwinds to upgrade.
3. Makes it impossible to start your combo again until the Twisters have gone away (which is 5.4 seconds at my current duration) because you have upwards of 36 Twisters consuming the Whirlwind to upgrade 1-2 times.

It’s been a week, but they still haven’t fixed this bug.

isn't this because twisters consume whirlwinds? If you cast twisters before the max 3 whirlwinds, those twisters will consume your whirlwinds when they come back around. this continually breaks your whirlwinds. yes its very frustrating but pretty sure that's the cause

This is still a massive issue 1 month later, would appreciate if you could actually fix this behavior. The build is unplayable in high level/juiced areas because when this happens you're just gonna die since you do no damage and can't recover for 5+ seconds. Impossible to continue a breach or down a boss when this happens.