Make Volatility usefull

Hi, my name is Eugene and I'm gamedesigner with experience in gamedevelopment and balancing game mechanics. You can not believe me but I know a bit what I'm talking about.

Volatility was introdused in patch 0.2 and since then was a very niche and hardly usefull mechanic to build around. (or maybe I'm too stupid to understand its use and purpose)

Why it's bad right now:

From my experience we are able to gain volatility in accaptable amounts only clearing packs of monsters. Gaining it on bosses is a huge pain in the ass (even with new Chayula monk ascendancy notable) and is nearly impossible.
So it is for clearing maps, right? Wrong.

What stats are we aiming for when we want a fast mapclear?
Movement speed, area of effect, explosions on death.
What do we get from Volatility? More damage. More damage for what? We are already clearing packs.
More damage is the stat we take for killing bosses.
Even if we would need more damage for clearing, we will have to wait for 3-4 seconds between packs.
We are looking for FAST clear. We don't want to invest in movement and clearing speed to wait 3-4 between those packs of monsters we just made as dence as possible by juicing our maps.


Maybe Volatility is for gameplay like "We killed all map, got 400 volatility, came to boss and oneshoted him"? And die if you are not Chalupa or CI
Yes and no.
All of bosses that really need that 400% more damage boost will have 10+ sec starting bossfight animation (and you need time to reach that boss too) and all your stacks will just dissapear during that period. Example: Xesht

What about "Volatility" support that grants volatility on crit for bossfights?
It's good and bad due to how volatility works now. You have to have nearly 100% crit chance to make it usefull to stack it on bosses and gain +/- 30 stacks between phases.
So I waste a skill gem that will work only if I have a lot of crit chance, will give me bonus only AFTER a phase and if in 10 sec I will not be able to damage the boss (avoiding boss mechanics + phase change animation) it will be completely useless.
Taking "Supercritical" support will be much more usefull here.

So volatility is not for clearing and can't be used properly on bosses. So what is it good for?
For taking down rares and uniques during map clear if you can wait 3-4 sec and don't have enough damage to kill them in that period of time. And for map bosses with no starting animation.

Is it worth investing now? In my opinion: definately not.

What am I proposing to make it worth but still balanced:

1.If the "More damage" stat is used mostly for bossing then let us generate Volatile charges more consistantly on bosses:
Replace all "3% on kill" with "3% on hit".
2. Make a 30 Volatility cap by default and make it explode upon reaching maximum
It will be a chaos analog of rage with a powerspike istead of gradually increasing power. This way it becomes much more controllable for balancing and making new mechanics around.
3. For those who still want to make builds with unlimited Volatility make a keystone with "Volatility has no maximum. Maximum energy shield is 0". It will not let the CI builds abuse the comfortable volatility generation and make Chayula monk finally usefull by letting them doing so until GGG will remake him again.



This way GGG will be able to build around it with new uniques with something like "Increased leech efficiency per Volatility" or "Gain onsluaght on reaching maximum Volatility".