Add +% lightning damage support to Mogdrogen constellation.
Goal
It is understandable that as Devotion system gets more polish it can also become pretty stagnant. That’s not the case for every damage type, because e.g. I believe fire and cold possess quite good variety in terms of devotion setups, and sometimes small additions can lead to emergence of new setups. Lightning on the other hand has it rough – since the release of AoM the Spear of the Heaven + Ultos became the staple for lightning, and it’s really difficult to invent your own wheel here.
Why this solution
It is fairly lore friendly. Mogdrogen uses lightning in-game.
Currently Mogdrogen's only damage type is bleed. Most constellations try to fit in two damage types and I believe it's a reasonable design. You can see it as Mogdrogen having an empty slot for something else.
Bleeding builds are a bit niche, which I believe leads to Mogdrogen being an underused constellation.
There are currently no lightning/bleeding constellations in the game even though that's a damage type pair somewhat ingrained into Shaman's skills – Savagery and Primal Strike. Some non-shaman skills like Lightning Cadence, Lightning Forcewave, Lightning Counter Strike, Lightning Vire's Might also end up with that damage type pairing.
Plenty of lightning constellations are affiliated with purple affinity. Tempest, Wraith, also well aligned with elemental constellations like Rhowan's Crown.
Possible counter-arguments
Mogdrogen is also a pet contellation. Absolutely non-issue, because Dying God is a pet constellation as well, while still housing two damage types nevertheless. Moreover, that bumps memey pet hybrid concepts too!
It can be a bit OP. That would be perfect because then it would be thoroughly tested and balanced in the long run.
Very enticing suggestion, lightning/bleed hybrids are something I want to see, perhaps that would make the bleed part of Primal Strike useful, and a few items currently support the split. You could go even further and replace the %phys on Ultos pieces by %bleed to make bleed PS a thing, but that may be too much.
Anyway that would make Mogdrogen a better T3 goal thanks to its attack speed, 2H builds love that. Would it be OP ? I don’t think so, not much more than a Spear path and its massive OA. Weirdly, the only recent Ultos build is a warder (poor Ed) and it’s a 5min build which is not in OP territory and other combos like elementalist shouldn’t be too much faster, if anything that would motivate builders to assemble those combos, giving beginners some comparison of the Primal Strike classes. The repercussions look good to me.
Adding another combo to Bleeding seems interesting, most bleeding builds I see floating around seem to be Physical/Bleeding or Pierce/Bleeding rather than pure Bleeding, probably because it’s the one damage type that cannot be converted, so it benefits from having a complementary damage type much more than the others.
It can go both ways. Quite often bleed is used as a secondary damage for physical and pierce because it’s very easy to pick up Huntress for these damage types.
EDIT: pure bleeding builds do exist, but they are quite niche.
Lies! Pure Bleeding builds cannot exist since you can’t convert Bleeding, mouhahahahaha! No, seriously, I get what you’re saying, I"m leveling a Bleeding-focused Trickster. =D
I also forgot Vitality/Bleeding combo wich is a thing in Shaman, and in itemization. And interestingly enough, there is Cold/Bleeding and Lightning/Bleeding gear support (Korba set, Stormrend, Evoker of Elgoloth…), kinda, sorta.
But if the core issue is the Lightning devotion path lacking variation, then I think it’s more Constellation like Tsunami and Tempest that needs to be made more interesting rather than looking into Bleeding constellations. Even though Lightning in Modgroden would be super thematic.
Tsunami is decent, it’s just a mainly cold constellation so lightning builds don’t take it unless you can convert, which isn’t that common.
Tempest I agree though, with all the buffs there can be some potential yet to be tapped. But I believe Mogdrogen having +% lightning would push people to experiment with Tempest more.
Pretty sure some constellations is underwhelming, for example Ulo or Crane (mediocre bonuses, and yellow investment always end up at 8 points), Gallows (vs Sailor or Eel), Affliction… Oleron has bleed but noone picks it for bleed build. So unless the boss decides to buff them, they are rarely picked. Would be nice if Fire and Pierce have other routes, though.
Crane is good for resists, I pick it from time to time. Ulo is used in some pet builds that go for Ishtak/Tree of Life if I’m not mistaken.
I agree about Gallows, it needs something, anything. Probably supporting something else than Vitality, it’s thematic, but Vitality is already so fixed in Red, doesn’t make sense to go into Blue for mediocre bonuses. I’d argue it could actually use Adcth in one node, probably a tiny Physical resistance bonus too to make it competitive with Sailor, Eel, or even Lizard!
Affliction is awesome in Acid Retaliation builds. Like, really really good, it’s the sudo Acid Retal ultimate constellation.
Oleron is fine imho, it’s not really a Bleeding constellation, more a Physical one with some bleeding spice.
I like it. I recall a few items that support both damage types like Stormrend, Feralmane pants, the Farseer medal. And the recent Abomination change to support Vitality is working out great.
I would also make it be more electrocute than lightning. Currently all the options in the devotion tree are focused more on the non-DoT variant of damage. Plus yeah, it’s already a DoT devotion.
LoL I missed this thread… Definitely +1 There are enough gears that support that combo and it’s surely thematic. Wouldn’t be too op since it’s impossible to take all ultos, spear, tempest and mogdrogen.
Quite on contrary I hope for flat lightning instead to help DW lightning builds, because according to @banana_peel it’s a rather underpowered playstyle. Thing is, Ultos and SotH already have electrocute. And it has a history of nerfs.
It’s better be OP, because last time when Abomination got %vitality bumped it didn’t shake up the vitality devotions much…even though I hoped for DW vitality melee to finally become meta with that change…
Well I’m working on one right now, looks good on paper but the biggest problem of melee vitality builds that they have no gloves with AS. A gloves with pierce>vitality conversion that supports wps’s and maybe even convert one of their unrelated damage to vitality with a modifier could change things. And Abomination doesn’t quite works perfectly with melee vit builds that has no chaos>vitality conversion and especially all one handed vitality weapons are based physical damage, with %50 phys>chaos it has a possibility to reduce the flat vitality damage too in it’s duration. Also Vitality builds mostly lack DA so green blue path with Dying God is kinda better. Though this is not the topic
But mogdrogen with lightning support is really fits. Lightning builds definitely use the DA shred too.
And definitely, DW lightning builds needs damage boost. I already asked for Stormserpent and Stormheart boost earlier though haven’t got much attention.
