Everything wrong with Acolyte of Chayula

To start off, I haven't had much experience with PoE 1, haven't even reached endgame, but I have played PoE 2 so far for ~1000 hours, each league so far and have played Chayula only since start.

1st league I got to 96, 2nd 95 and currently I'm quarter into level 97.

Even lacking in the 1st league, compared to Invoker, Chayula, I'm my opinion was underrated by many and I have managed to drop T4 Xesht within 3 seconds (check it on shorts on my youtube channel BOG Gaming where I also make build guides for Chayula and livestream playing them). At that time I really had basic knowledge of what's in the game and have basically slapped together all the busted things into the build and it worked out great, but I have been mostly spending time learnings about all the vast mechanics of the game due to the lack of previous knowledge.

2nd league brought us leech from elemental damage which was very nicely welcomed by the Chayula community (there is a few of us lunatics on the official POE discord channel under build help -> Church of Acolyte of Chayula), but the thing that has annoyed us is taking away instant leech which solved one problem, but created a different one.

With the 3rd and current league I have a feeling Chayula has been massacred. Conceptually the rework is great on paper and I have made a hype video regarding volatility only to be disappointed by it once the actual patch came out.

Let's start off with Inner Turmoil which gives volatility on inflicting elemental ailments and ability to not take damage from volatility. There is an inner cooldown on gaining volatility stacks of 0.1 sec per stack, actually it's at 0.135 which limits you to 7 stacks per second. The inner cooldown is really messing up the ability to passively stack volatility. (I will come back to the volatility down the line)

Following up on the tree, we come to Unraveling which allows us to inflict elemental ailments with chaos damage, switching between ailments every 2 seconds which is mainly obsolete due to monk's toolkit which gives great emphasis on elemental damage, while the physical abilities are lackluster compared to their elemental counterparts, also to mention that for some of them like Ice Strike and Tempest Flurry, there is no physical equivalent. My suggestion here would be to instead alter the ability to keep the chaos damage inflicting elemental ailments, but make it random on hit, for example chaos damage from each hit can either contribute to freeze, ignite or shock. Keep the gamba, we have it from the start and it makes it chaotic.

Next we are coming to the Chayula's Gift node, giving us chaos resistance node which in my opinion is the only good node to pick and likely why it was the only one that hasn't been thrown out or reworked.

Then, new Sap of Nightmares allows us to leech life/mana/energy shield from chaos damage we are dealing, but we have lost ability to leech energy shield unless we are either running Sanguis unique gloves or Soul Tether, forcing us to reserve one item slot for either, where those slots could be used with much more useful items.

We are coming to the Flames which have been reworked, main complaint was playing pacman to gather them, but instead of that issue being worked on, we get halved effect and halved duration which has raised a lot of question marks within the community.

Combining volatility and flames in order to get chaos damage is very conditional because flames will force you to go out of your way in order to collect them, especially if playing melee, also volatility is rendered obsolete as most encounters are finished by the time volatility is going to be making a big impact on your damage, you can't carry it into bosses and stacking them on pinnacles is not relevant either as by the time I'm on 40 stacks, boss is already dead and getting looted.

The main way that most Chayulas currently play is with Original Sin and Sanguis gloves making you take two unique items just to enable your ascendancy nodes to actually function.

Grasp of the Void and Void Illusion has found some use with some builds, but in my opinion if you need to use void illusion to deal damage, your build has something wrong with it, not to mention 4 sec cooldown.

Darkness = bad, no spirit, removed damage aspect, plus a few people in the community came to say how great it is, but after asking them a few questions, it came to my realization that they are relaying on high evasion rating and deflection, which raises the question, is darkness good or eva/deflection combo?

The answer is eva/deflection as I'm running it on my build without any energy shield leech (Hollow Palm with Thunderfist gloves) and I very rarely die, while being able to dish out great damage.

Bottom line is that, most of the ascendancy simply doesn't function well and is too conditional, while the benefits of those conditions are heavily restricted to matter. Funnily, the biggest use for volatility I have found is in triggering Ghost Dance with Catharsis support on my QStaff attack in order to restore my energy shield.

I'm more than happy to continue discussion of specific points or any other down below so make sure to leave your input and if you are looking for a good laugh, here is a meme video I have made about Chayula rework.

https://youtu.be/KsVVpfxB0Lw?si=vUBbc3aTbPFZbDt7

+1

Agreed. I stopped playing my chonk after reaching endgame and realizing that everything acolyte does invoker does better and with less hassle...

I also stop playing Chayula.

also 2 of my friends and 2 youtuber stopped playing Chayula.



It's simply not worth it.