I’m a bit late on the Vines train, but I have a suggestion to make the skill better outside of Wildblood, the idea being to make them better while levelling and perhaps at endgame outside Wildblood, without changing the set too much.
To cut short, here’s the idea : a (very) small amount of %weapon damage on the second node.
Now let me develop :
My first observation is that, it is impossible to make the Vines deal pierce damage because of how armour piercing works, it’s not exactly similar to regular conversion as it relies on your weapon’s piercing ratio and the target skill needs the slightest amount of %weapon damage to be converted. Vines only get %wd with Wildblood currently, and you can’t make pierce Vines with it. This change would allow it.
While levelling, their damage is underwhelming, as many small physical hits just get absorbed by enemy armour, which is sad for such an expensive skill. You can convert like ~60% of it to vitality with a good 2H weapon, rip your energy then. The bleed part is ok but not that impressive, a conjurer for example has Sigil of Consumption that has way more damage, duration, built-in leech, and costs a lot less energy per second while having to be cast less often. The change would give it more damage to be competitive, and make the second node worth maxing.
What would that imply ?
New builds, like pierce Vines (for pure caster trickster or even vindicators, that would be possible while levelling, and synergizes well at endgame with Rancor and the pierce Swarm conduit), or even chaos vines (crazy idea from Baka, don’t ask me).
Weapon damage builds like auto-attackers can’t really abuse it, it wouldn’t be a large amount of %weapon damage and the skill could be too expensive for them, both in energy and skill points.
Wildblood ? That’s the tricky part that has to be mentioned. The set’s bonus would have to be “nerfed” to compensate, but unlike a skill modifier, the stats of a skill node vary with rank. The amount of %wd at softcap could be chosen so that the total amount with Wildblood is equal to the current amount the set grants (35%), and at hardcap the same amount as before the nerf (40%). Getting to softcap isn’t too hard and expensive (so it’s not a nerf), and those builds would have the chance to get the pre-nerf amount with more skill points and skill bonuses to Entangling Vines.
But remember, the goal is to make it a good skill to level with, so your favourite Wildblood build could potentially be levelled with its final central skill.
Keep in mind my primary concern is not Wildblood but Vines’ viability outside of the set. I don’t know enough about its balance to make a more advanced analysis, don’t hesitate to say what you think to avoid butchering the skill, while remaining polite and objective. And most importantly, to tell what you think about that idea, its possibilities and the potential power creeps it could result in, and is it even enough to make the skill better in general.
It’s not just this either. At 12/12, it only deals 71 base Physical twice a second and has a 1.2 second cooldown to deal with. And that’s just one skill node, similar-style skills like Sigil of Consumption or Blackwater Cocktail get Destruction or Demon Fire/Agonizing Flames for more damage or ones that largely just rely on the base node like Ravenous Earth or Inquisitor’s Runes spit out between 5 to 10 projectiles multiplying their tooltip damage. The direct damage potential on Grasping Vines without any skill modifiers like the ones Wildblood offers frankly just comes off as bad. For the same reason as Sigils or BWC, having some additional direct damage on Entangling Vines would be a great help.
As to my experience playing with it end game on a non-Wildblood/Retaliation character. I played this Conjurer way back in 1.1.4 and used it to farm roguelikes and nemeses at end game. Before I say anything on my experience with it though, I want to make a point that a lot has changed since then and I’ve grown even more as a player and builder so if I were to revisit the concept, I would heavily revamp it (it was before Morgoneth if anyone wonders why there are no Shuroth rings for example). That said, I do not think any amount of finetuning on a player’s end will address the core issue it has in situations like this.
Back then, I found the character fun to play - the huge AoE clearance was great, Vines was an insane proc machine and visually, the poison and plants theme was nice. However, since then, I’ve played all sorts of characters that consist of some melee, many casters, a few summoners, some ranged gunners and looking back on it now, the damage on the Vines Conjurer was painfully underwhelming.
I agree that the skill could use a buff and agree with putting it on Entangling Vines because as you’ve noticed above, I had no reason to max it and still have no reason to. The Retaliation damage is low-to-non-existent and the Vitality Decay isn’t a high source of DoT and doesn’t scale up with multiple instances of Grasping Vines placed down.
Elaborating on my thought process here, it’d give the +2 to Entangling Vines on this ring an unintended but memey interesting use .
Going back to this since as mentioned, my last feedback on Acid Grasping Vines with Misery was in 1.1.4.1. I got curious again so I slapped a new vision for the concept together and shifted the old Conjurer over to it, have tested it for the past few days and want to update myself with new thoughts. Worthy note, it did involve swapping the character combo over to Archon.
This is my current setup, I didn’t spend long on gear affixes so they’re not great. This is what I’d consider best due to the affixes adding in more damage, DA and some Slow resistance (though it still has glaring weaknesses that I’ll get to).
For starters, it’s able to facetank and kill Lokarr in decent time so it’s proven itself in some regard:
AoE damage clearance on Grasping Vines is surprisingly really good. It even melts Heroes and Bosses pretty fast with a couple out.
It’s really squishy when Ascension is on cooldown, even trash put holes in it while clearing until it starts getting things going. If it weren’t for all of the life steal/heals from Righteous Fervor, Guardian’s Gaze and Wendigo Totem, I’m almost certain that it would be dying repeatedly. I somewhat expected this with the only damage absorption/enemy damage reduction it has being Black Blood and Ascension and the 15% physical resistance.
Similarly, it has basically no CC resistances outside of Ascension. If it gets locked by Freeze, Stun, Petrify etc., it’s reliant on Guardian’s Gaze/Wendigo Totem to keep it alive, but most of the time it’s going to die.
I’m considering moving over and trying a devotion setup next that takes Hourglass for more uptime on Ascension and combining it with Korvaak to make up for lost damage (as no route I could put together would allow for Manticore/Revenant, Guardian’s Gaze, Rumor, Yugol/Abomination and Hourglass) to improve on defense and CC, though losing Yugol’s defense is still a concern. Something like this.
That said though, this goes against my earlier feedback that Acid Grasping Vines with Misery is weak. With some more finetuning and better gloves/boots, I feel confident that it should be in a good enough position. I still do share @Monceaux’s notion that it’d be great to see Grasping Vines become more appealing to level with though. To that end, perhaps some damage could be shifted out of it’s end game gear and skill modifiers into the skill specifically on Entangling Vines.
I found Retaliation grasping vines archon to be one of the strongest characters ive made. heres a rough of what i was using https://www.grimtools.com/calc/62am6y32
Grasping vines would tick for 100K, aegis would crit for 600k+.
I’d be surprised if going a non-retaliation route for grasping vines would produce more damage. and if it did would it be worth the defensive trade off.
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