Blackflame Covenant?

I'm trying out the new Blackflame Covenant keystone and was fully expecting to be able to scale it with fire damage nodes in the tree. But I can't? It literally just replaces all fire damage as base chaos damage? Well that's kind of... meh since all the chaos damage nodes are pretty spread out. I also can't tell if minions that use fire spells get converted to chaos.

As far as I know all damage conversion works like this. The % modifiers only work for the final damage type, you cannot double dip by first buffing fire damage and then adding +chaos% on top of that.

As for Chaos having fewer nodes, it makes sense, since Chaos is the least resisted damage type by far.

It doesn't look like Minions that use fire damage scale to Chaos damage, which I think is an oversight. They should for theme's sake. Even if most of their modifiers are separate +minion damage modifiers anyway.

It doesn't seem to add chaos spell tags to fire spells, which is the biggest problem here, meaning there is no actual synergy for using fire spells in a chaos build. Specifically adding a chaos tag to ignite would go a long way to making this worth anything, so you could play with contagion. As it currently stands it really just makes your fire spells look cool. It would be much better for build creativity if they added chaos spell tags to all fire spells when using this.

Yup it's extremely unintuitive. They tried to make it easier to understand, but this way makes less sense than PoE1. I've got a ton of fire spells, why wouldn't I be able to beef them up to big fireballs and convert them after?

I know they're also trying to limit exponential scaling, but they should suck it up. That's a big key of why PpE1 was so fun and had so much freedom in the tree and builds. Now Blackflame characters just grab 90% the same nodes as anyone else doing chaos damage. There's so little freedom between how scaling works and how everything is tied to specific weapons.

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MolokoNoir#2943 wrote:

As far as I know all damage conversion works like this. The % modifiers only work for the final damage type, you cannot double dip by first buffing fire damage and then adding +chaos% on top of that.

This is correct.

Blackflame makes you scale with % chaos damage, because you deal chaos damage, and + to level of fire skills, because the skill gems themselves are fire tagged skills.

and that's another problem, what equipment can you make/find with +level to fire spells and % chaos damage? that sort of stuff just doesn't exist. so any build with this just isn't going to be supported by equipment. the tags HAVE to change to chaos.

What about having a fire and a chaos weapon set?

I suppose the whole idea of that keystone is to give chaos builds additional spells they can use without having to invest in +x% to fire damage nodes or gear affixes.
My Lich is not that far yet, but I'm certainly going to experiment with that eventually.

you still can't get +level to fire spells with +chaos damage on equipment so the build is a non-starter no matter what you do.

It slightly reduces the total pool of modifiers that can scale your damage on a single item.

Your position that this makes the build a "non-starter" is laughable. 4% of builds on poe2.ninja are using Blackflame Covenant.

It isn't a no-brainer, but it can certainly be made to work.