[Suggestion] New Spirit Gem: "Feast of Crows" – Bird Bleed Companions

With Patch 0.5 approaching, I would like to suggest a dexterity-based alternative to Wolf Pack that trades meat-shield utility of wolves for bleed mechanics from a flock of Crows...

Feast of Crows
Spirit Gem
Requires: Dexterity
Companion, Persistent, Physical, Bleed
Reservation: 60 Spirit

Activate to summon flock of 6 Crows. They follow and orbit, attacking enemies with chance to inflict bleeding. If enemy is already bleeding, hit aggravates bleed. Crow's can feast and consume corpses, granting you life regeneration.

Nice idea but they need to overhaul and fix bleed damage mechanics before they even think about adding companions that inflict bleed.

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Skutz123#5377 wrote:

fix bleed damage mechanics

What's wrong with bleed mechanics?

Ritualist with crows, ranger with a raptor of some sort, yea that sounds nice.

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CharlesJT#7681 wrote:

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Skutz123#5377 wrote:

fix bleed damage mechanics

What's wrong with bleed mechanics?

Bleed scales off base hit damage and puts you down the path of adding crit chance/damage to improve your bleed damage. The more crit chance/damage you add the more you notice the mobs health just goes down instantly instead of having to wait on them to bleed to death. This is even true with crimson assault, and especially true in endgame when you're getting swarmed.

Your build eventually becomes a crit hit build because you're more effective dropping bleed magnitude etc. and just adding more crit related passives and supports.

Setting up bleed with big explosions using rake/blood hunt is less effective, much more time consuming, more complex to set up, and riskier and requires more defensive investment than just doing a crit hit build that blows everything up, and its not even close.

Bleed scaling from hit damage also means bleed builds compete for the same items that everyone else does, plus damage, plus crit chance, etc.

I think its just not a great design, and would like to see bleed and other ailments untethered from instant hit damage more along the lines of what other ARPGs do.

If this is post is too long sorry, I wasted a lot of time trying out bleed builds on ritualist and blood mage.

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Skutz123#5377 wrote:

Setting up bleed with big explosions using rake/blood hunt is less effective, much more time consuming, more complex to set up, and riskier and requires more defensive investment than just doing a crit hit build that blows everything up, and its not even close.

In every game I’ve played I’ve always wondered "why dot when you can kill instead". I think PoE2 isn’t the only game that has troubles balancing dots. I believe it’s made worse by the existence of builds that instant screen clear and one tap bosses.
And yet, I still love dots.

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Kaozium#2036 wrote:

Ritualist with crows

Now we're talking!

Murder

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Berylstone#2209 wrote:

Murder

That could be a good alternative name.