Feedback on Acolyte of Chayula

Yosh,

So i've been playing a lot of characters this league, and i really wanted to try to make a cool Chayula monk.

And now i have some feedback with things that are kind of problematic with the class design, and a bug.

So, the main problem is : Darkness.

The idea is very cool, specially if you play a full evasion build ( 80+ % and you can also have block if you play spear with a buckler), making Evasion a lot better.

BUT :
A - The Darkness is actually kinda buged right now.
I am 95% sure that darkness doesnt take your resistances into account when you get hit, so it basicly get destroyed for no reason.
For exemple, if i take a chaos volatile, i lose my 1000+ darkness instantly, but right after, if i take another one in my HP, i lose like 100 max (because very high chaos res). So it's not normal, and it's the same with all elements.
Also, if you walk into a Burning or Toxic Ground, your darkness is instantly destroyed, probably because of the same reason, but that make Grounds ultra painful since we cant Evade them.

- Now, what happen when you actually play Darkness ? You have no spirit.
At first, it seems fine, because darkness is cool, but right now, it's actually not.
Because without Spirit you can't play any aura, which means :
- Can't really play poison without plage bearer and herald of plague
- can't play bleed without Herald of blood (or your clear is rippy)
- you can't play Combat Frenzy, so you basicly can't really generate charges proprely in the current state of the game, and then you can't play any of the skills that Consume a type of charge, which is actually a lot of skills.
- you are encouraged to play Chaos, but you can't use Withering Presence
- you can't play any type of 'Cast on" setup, reducing Again your possibilities.
At the end, you have almost nothing interesting to play if you go Darkness build.

B - So, you can try to go Into the Breach, for flames of chayula.
But, actually, it's almost unplayable right now, for a simple reason : each flame of chayula has it's own timer.
Because of that, it feels terrible to play, you'll almost never be able to reach a correct amount of flames.
It should be like the other charges, all same timer, when you get 1, global timer reset, done.
We can't even generate them proprely, it's RnG, so why would you give each flame a timer, that's crazy.

That makes Into the breach basicly unplayable right now. Put global timer.

Since we can't play that, we have to go around Darkness but we get back to point A.

So, last option would be to play around Mana leech and play full ES leech, which means you play a lot of Intel for ES gear, that's a complete different gameplay, and during big boss it's kinda Bad because if they hit you during phases/mecaniques, while being intouchable/invuln, you can't Leech mana, so you can't leech ES, neither Recharge your ES.
So you have to play Eternal Youth, and lot of flask :P.
But playing Int would suggest Spell, but Mana leech is "On hit" so again, you lose a part of the spells (DoT), which are basicly the chaos ones, or AoE.


So yeah, i'm not sure how to fix the Darkness, but we can easily with the Flames of Chayula, which would already be a good start.
Maybe we just need to wait for Daggers (Int Dex weapons, right?) and some other weapon type to actually unlock something cool as Chayula ?

"

KurauPM#6519 wrote:

So, last option would be to play around Mana leech and play full ES leech, which means you play a lot of Intel for ES gear, that's a complete different gameplay, and during big boss it's kinda Bad because if they hit you during phases/mecaniques, while being intouchable/invuln, you can't Leech mana, so you can't leech ES, neither Recharge your ES.

I agree with all your points, but I wanted to elaborate on this one. It's actually worse than you describe because the ES leech does not occur if your mana is full. You'll start a fight with full mana, the mana drops due to skill but quickly stops when your mana pops up to full -- at this point your ES leech also immediately stops.

In essence, the ES leech portion is useless unless you find a way to keep your mana from topping off. So no mana regen on your passives/gear, no skill cost reduction passives/gear, no Inspiration support gem, etc.. Also need to get a very large mana pool to maximize your leech rate and therefore get good ES recovery.

ALSO... you have no ES regeneration at all. It's all leech baby, but conditional on mana as described above.

Overall it feels absolutely horrible -- probably as bad as darkness not using player resistances.

OP, are you certain Darkness is not being affected by elemental and chaos resistance? That's a pretty big bug if it is true.

Do you have Energy Shield? Since chaos does double damage to your ES, maybe that's why such a massive chunk of Darkness is being removed. I don't run Darkness but I have 84 chaos res, and I believe one volatile eats my entire ES pool of 1.2 to 1.4k and then the next one takes about...200 HP. The numbers aren't accurate but that's the best explanation I ca come up with.

Repost to boost visibility of the numerous problems plaguing Acolytes of Chayula:

Investing 4 ascendancy points into the AoC's Flames gimmick rewards you with

Lucid Dreaming:
Effect and Duration of Flames of Chayula on You is Doubled

This bumps the measly 5s duration of the purple remnants to a passable 10 second damage buff that does not auto refresh upon gathering more stacks of purple flames.

Perhaps its design intent or simply an oversight but the duration of Purple Flames granted from a Mantra of Destruction-Empowered kill is not affected by this ascendancy node. I expected the 8 seconds to become 16, but was disappointed upon discovering that wasn't the case. If the duration of these Mantra-sourced flames isn't modified by the ascendancy, what about the bonus damage? Is it only the base 7% per stack instead of Lucid Dreaming's expected 14%?

Another inconsistency is that Flames generated by Into the Breach are not affected by Effect Duration modifiers. They are always either 5s or the 10 w/ Lucid Dreaming. Mantra-sourced flames ARE affected by changes to skill effect duration.

It appears the game has made two separate buffs and identically labeled them both "Purple Flames of Chayula" yet they function differently and independant of each other. Are 10 stacks of Mantra's purple flames weaker than 10 picked up as remnants? Does scoring kills with Mantra of Destruction paradoxically worsen an Acolyte of Chayula by overrwriting their Lucid Dreaming-boosted flames with an inferior buff?

"

drafaelf26#3396 wrote:

Do you have Energy Shield? Since chaos does double damage to your ES, maybe that's why such a massive chunk of Darkness is being removed. I don't run Darkness but I have 84 chaos res, and I believe one volatile eats my entire ES pool of 1.2 to 1.4k and then the next one takes about...200 HP. The numbers aren't accurate but that's the best explanation I ca come up with.

I thought about that, so i removed my ES, cause there is no uses to it with my build anyway.

I could Re-test more specificly tho, just in case.
But, The fact that you are losing that much ES with 84 chaos res, and only a few HP without ES, kinda proove there is a problem somewhere anyway.
Because Chaos only deals x2 dmg to ES, so it shouldnt remove all your ES.

Now, is the problem coming from Volatile ? Not sure.

i'll try to test all the elements today when i can.

I never really tried Mantra of destruction, so i can't really say about it.

It's insane that two major patches in chonk is still kinda unplayable, and people are still trying to make it work.

Is there some secret tech no build-maker has figured out yet, cause if not I think chonk deserves at least one patch being top dog, along with equally sad witchhunter and chronomancer. At least stormweaver has joined their camp and can tell them what it's like to once be the most popular.

As it stands it seems that anything that just pumps dependable stats *without* rng will always be best.

So go wild next patch I say...
into the breach auto-pickup
darkness half spirit allowed
chaos res doubled, chaos res 90% max
mana leech can overflow max mana

for chrono
50% more cast speed all the time (seriously, isn't what stormweavers had?)
instead of 33% not consume cooldowns, 50% more cooldown reduction

for witchhunter
culling strike check made before hit
sorcery ward no evasion penalty

Came back after some tests :

I had 0 ES so no weird hidden synergy.
Darkness doesnt use my Chaos res, but seems to use my others elem Res.

I've tried with 3 Chaos sources, volatile (affix from rares), a projectile, and an AoE chaos snake (in utzaal).
Everytime my darkness take super high dmg even with high chaos res, and my hp doesnt take much.

And yeah the "Grounds" are still broken, burning ground, toxic ground (tested on act 3 Chimera), and poison clouds, instantly remove all my darkness.

Chayula doesnt really need a "Buff", it needs to work as intended, with a fixed Darkness, and a commun timer on Flames of Chayula.
With those 2 fixes, the class can actually deals a tons of damages.

Chronomancer doesnt need a buff, it can already break the game with a full Recoup setup, and giga time stop.
It's just that people try to play her has a pure mage instead of abuse of her mecanics.

Darkness should replace ES, not spirit, but gain all the benefits of everything affecting ES like scaling, es as stun threshold, etc. Darkness would need to be gigabuffedx10 to be worth losing spirit. Spirit enables too many things like you described. It literally just needs to be an ES that scales damage and doesn’t take double chaos damage.

I also played Chayula these last few days.

Can confirm that Darkness gets buggy when paired with Energy Shield.

In my case, I had instances where ES took damage before Darkness.

I can also confirm Darkness respects Elemental Resistances, because I was able to beat Jamanra on first try and never felt punished when failing mechanics.

This was on a lvl 31 Chayula vs Jamanra on Normal, for further details.