As far as I know, conventional wisdom for pretty much the entire beta has been that Doom Bolt is too weak to be worth using. Is this still the case post release? I’d really love to use this ability on my chaos/vitality Pyromancer build, but if it’s bad it’s bad, and I’ll put my 12 points elsewhere. Thanks! 
It’s worth a point as soon as you can use it, to one shot things in normal, but beyond that I fail to see any reason to put points in there. It might be worth that point all the way through ultimate but only to attach a devotion ability to.
Yup, still sucks. Unless the enemies use it. Then its phenomenal.
Doom Bolt has a 10sec CD, I’d rather use pets to proc Devotion skills.
I’m trying this perhaps silly idea of using it to proc the dying god devotion skill. Might be a terrible idea, character is barely level 50 now, but they seem tailor made for each other.
Yeah you’re right, with a 100% chance on attack that looks reasonable.
Still waiting for it to get a modifier that makes it release a chaos nova on impact… :eek:
Right??
It’s freakin’ unbelievable when used ON me – rips my health bar in half on ultimate…but when I use it? womp womp…then 10 seconds later…womp womp
Still bad damage, still easy to miss, still not worth more than one point.
Hm. I like it. 
I have put all points in it on what used to be my main character which is a chaos/vitality Occultist mainly using SoC and DB.
I like to use it to one shot big enemies or at least take a big chunk of their HP.
Boo. 
Hopefully the devs give this skill some love, then.
Ok so I don’t listen all that well and I had to try the skill out for myself. With only 7 points into Doom Bolt and 6 into Possession I’m doing upwards of 15k damage per Doom Bolt on certain enemies. Now, I’m only on Veteran, so I’m guessing that later on enemies will resist the hell out of it and reduce the damage massively? That plus the cooldown would make it lackluster for sure, but where I am at the moment I don’t see how the skill is so awful.
If i had more points to spend on my vit conjurer perhaps, however its ALWAYS worth at least 1 point… even with r1 the damage is nice and the health% reduction is amazing
Tried to use it as a secondary skill on DEE caster, with 400% chaos and 700% vitality damage, 17/12 rank. Respecced these 12 points to vendigos in the end, at least they have some utility.
Damage wise it can be solid but between the retarded 10 second cooldown and the fact that it just misses its target sometimes. Makes it quite underwhelming. It should have the same cooldown as Grenado or they need to change the way it works. Keep the 10 second cooldown but have it shoot 3 Bolts down instead of 1.
I was thinking kinda the same thing - a modifier called “Doom Storm” that causes additional bolts to strike the ground after the initial bolt, starting from the center and spreading outwards in a random fashion.
i autoattack for more than 15k on my saboteur, its dualwielding 1handers and hits like 6x a sec =\
the only other skill to compare it to is devastation, and devastation is just better. not much else to say 
yes, it does
My current toon has 20/12 doom bolt, because he is poison and could use some secondary damage type, and most importantly, he doesn’t have other places to spend skill points. (already have 18/12 SoC)
Guess what, the 20/12 doom bolt with 400-500% chaos/vitality sometimes cannot one shot a white mob in ultimate.
I am thinking to take the 12 points out and invest in bloody pox, but I don’t like the %reduction health tick when the pox jumps to a reflective mob.
So, on a side note, how do you handle reflective mob when using bloody pox?
It shouldn’t be the problem unless you’re running a ton of -resists. Bloody Pox damage scales with mob HP so the damage you receive should lessen over time.
CD is a bad indicator of skill effectiveness because there are a lot of good skills with zero/high CD. Mana cost is a much better indicator of skill effectiveness, and mana/energy-wise Doom Bolt is ridiculously bad. At level 12 a single Doom Bolt cast costs about as much mana as 13 or so Greater Fireblast casts (yes, the skill from the item) and between procs/buffs/debuffs those Greater Fireblast casts will be dealing a lot more damage.