Paquate's Pact lineage support feedback

It's presently bugged, since it is possible to apply stacks to non-monster entities (see this thread in the bug forum https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3848498)

But even if it were working normally, it's hard to envision a case for this support. It's impossible to use for clear, because any more than 10 mobs on screen will kill you, and in a boss fight, it's trivial to keep your stacks up using the normal support.

I guess it's potential use case would be playing a corrupted blood build, for bosses only, as an ascendancy other than Warbringer. I don't think this is a good enough case for keeping it in its current state, however.

I think tuning it down to 2-3 stacks per application at a flat cost of 2% life per skill use would make it unambiguously better than Corrupted Cry II. It would be possible to sustain with investment into either the life gain on warcry notable or sufficient amount of life regen.

If testing reveals that's too overpowered, then I'd rework it to do something unique with the corruption, like apply armour break or intimidate.

Effectively, you spend like 2-100% of your max health per use to cause corrupted blood damage scaled of your strengh (1\4 of Str per second), i.e. to do around 30-50 DPS as physical damage, I think it's multiplied by stacks (i.e. 5 per use), hut still who cares about 250 DPS over monsters having 20K in endgame, bosses having millions? It's not bleed, so no effects from bleed magnitude nodes, it's physical DPS, so probably also affected by physical reductions.

And if you use it in presence of 50 enemies (breach, Simulacrum arena, Abyssal wave spawn is about this scale sometimes) - you insta kill yourself. Absolute garbage at this iteration.

It would be cool support if scaled of max health instead (something like 5-10% of max health), needs some limits to protect yourself from instakills on random mob spawn. Maybe, something like: cost in life - 2% of ML per enemy in AOE, but not more than 10-20% and DPS is 10-20% of ML (i.e. your blood spent into damage magnitude, the more enemies affected the higher the scale, so no boss exploiting possible). It still will be something like 600 DPS at 3K life on life-stacking builds, but at least usable for clearing on Herald of Blood builds (because it's physical DPS, it should count towards the Blood Loss).

P.S. Description on it like "it does massive damage" is probably a trolling...

Currently, most corrupt blood builds are using corrupt blood II since Paquate's pact isn't appealing in terms of damage scaling (stacks still cap at 10), or ignore it fully because the downside is way off balance compared to its actual usefulness

Corrupt blood builds alone are hard to scale since it's not an ailment, only scales with generic damage, war cry damage, and phys damage, capped at only 10 stacks, and lacks support gem or a gem level to scale its damage besides min-maxing str at around 1k-1.3k with 25% effectiveness.
Adding a downside to Paquate pact not only makes it less appealing but also contributes nothing toward actually bossing scenarios.

My take is that to make Paquate's pact strength ratio to 30-35% of the player's strength, and keep its downside. Uncapped the limit of 10 stacks so players can find ways to avoid taking % life for every stack inflicted on enemies

I was going to use this on my Spearfield Bleed Sorc build, but it is completely unusable.

I thought it would take 10% of my health every time I used it, but instead it either insta kills me or wipes out half my health, which can be just as bad. Using it with the Effiency support gem doesn't move the needle here because 1) you can still kill yourself and 2) you lose a valuable support gem slot.

There is no way the devs intended for it to work this way, right? Why in the world would there be any sort of ability that makes you insta kill yourself in a game where dying makes you lose this much experience?

In its current state, it is only usable for bosses, but there are better options. I can apply more blood loss with an ancestrally boosted Rake. Paquate's Pact is just a waste of a skill gem slot.