It’s been a while since I’ve made a feedback thread to whine talk about something that I’ve tested, but here I am again.
I like Callidor’s Tempest as a skill, dealing damage in a circle around and the way it feels is fun.
Mythical Agrivix is an obvious set to use if you want to play Callidor’s Tempest. I checked around the forums and found out that the set is barely being discussed anymore even though apparently it used to be one of the best during an old AoM meta and I was wondering why.
Well, finding out why wasn’t hard. It supports three weak skills that are rather unpopular as well. Callidor’s Tempest is one of the weakest Arcanist skills you can use as a main damaging ability that deserves its own feedback thread with all the elemental mediocrities you can do currently with it due to lack of good itemization and the skill’s stats being underwhelming by themselves, but that’s for another time, maybe…
Vindictive Flame and Siphon Souls are sort of the same, but Siphon Souls got buffed recently and it’s good now.
I played all of the three classes that this set supports, that obviously includes Spellbinder, Sorcerer and Defiler. Here are my results:
The clear winner is obviously Spellbinder :
It was already decent before the Siphon Soul buffs, now it’s better than before of course.
There’s not much to say about it, it supports a Callidor’s decently for a one-handed build. Average is around 4:40, fastest run was 4:20.
And now here lies the set’s biggest problem: Vindictive Flame bonuses
I am not going to lie, but these skill modifiers feel like they were put during Ashes of Malmouth and got completely forgotten.
Casting speed on classes that can easily get above 200% over the cap and increased armor % on caster armor that can’t make good use of that bonus. Burn damage on an skill that gets fully converted to aether and with rather low flat mods compared to what a set like Ember’s Calling can achieve.
Let’s move on to Defiler now
I needed to use fantasy affixes on the scepter in order to max out Vindictive Flame since no aether gear really supports it outside of the set. The damage is obviously worse overall than Spellbinder, although the Siphon Soul changes helped the build alot with single target leech. It’s still a Defiler though. Average is 5 mins.
And now the worst out of the three specs, Sorcerer. Madlee gave me his own Agrivix Sorc and upon realising that it’s an old spec ( just like him), I decided to update it. I tested two specs in fact, one with Vindictive Flame focus and one without.
A fantasy doublerare green Vindictive Flame focus version is on par if not worse with a more legit version that uses Devastation instead. Aoe sustain is fine because of Ulzuin’s Wrath, single target though is rather bad because of lack of Siphon Souls. Lack of HP hurts Sorc the most compared to Deflier and Spellbinder (all of the specs kind of struggle to get HP which can be somewhat solved with putting more points in physique, but the damage is not impressive even with spirit dump, I don’t want to imagine how much worse it would get without it).
Average is around 5:10 for both of them and breaking 5 mins is hard. Vindictive Flame is not worth focusing on and lack of sustain can be felt mostly due to Callidor’s having 60% weapon damage at 26/16 which is lower that Seal of Skies component of all things. I think Sorc is the slowest because Demolitionst side really adds nothing but RR for this build and even if you do use fantasy greens to find points for Vindictive Flame, it performs the same (arguably worse tankyness wise) than using Devastation.
So what are my suggestions? Replace casting speed, %armor and burn modifiers to Vindictive Flame with something like phys res, hp, more flat damage instead. I guess it would probably be too much to ask for attack damage converted to health modifier for it since there’s another set that already has that, but Demolitionist side of this set really needs some love. Spellbinder also has poor stats defensively, but it’s still a spellbinder and it can survive. I wouldn’t mind giving extra weapon damage to Callidor’s or extra crit damage to it though or buffing the base skill ( and Inferno) in general because I think most Callidor’s Tempest spam builds are being dragged down by supporting a weak skill.
That’s all I had to say about the set, farewell.