Blackflame Covenant Downside?

Hello,

I have to ask the question: what's the downside of the Blackflame Covenant node? Usually, those big nodes have some kind of upside and a downside, but this one doesn't seem to have any downside. An oversight? A change of philosophy? Did the "buff mentality" cause this?



In kind regards

The downside is that the node doesn't interact with fire spells in any way you're thinking it does. It SHOULD, but doesn't due to what's in all likelihood dev's overlooking interactions. It's an extremely poorly worded node that implies a lot, but doesn't do anything you think it does. The only thing it really does as of the time of this writing is takes the spells you manually cast and converts their base damage to Chaos. It does NOT interact with any DOTs in a meaningful way beyond the ignite damage numbers (Dark Effigy doesn't fire an extra projectile even though it IS at that time a Chaos DOT, no matter what contrarians who didn't read the skills say), it does NOT alter minion fire spells, and no +% to Fire damage scales with it. All of that 'plus' is literally just made into Fire damage that doesn't get converted. People are of a mind that it's a lack of tags being correctly adjusted when BFC is taken. Until BFC is actually paid attention to, it's a waste, and RIP your build if you (like me) thought that scaling up fire damage was going to do literally anything to help in that regard. I wish it wasn't the case, but if you're not a Gemling, you're not allowed to have fun. Nothing against Gemling players, it's just the truth. The entire rest of the game feels like redheaded stepchildren in terms of power fantasy.

For some builds, Incinerate and Ember Fusillade are somewhat useful. I use Incinerate as extra boss damage for my ED/C lich build, others prefer EF, but I don't like that spell, I think it's too clunky.

As the other guy said, it only scales with chaos/spell damage, so you need a character that is already heavily invested in that. You can't turn a fire witch into a chaos witch...