I’ve tried every which way to use this ability. it’s hands down the most useless thing in the game. The damage might as well be zero, it doesn’t come with any other useful nerfs to resists etc, doesn’t return hp, is SHORT RANGE for some silly reason, does absolutely nothing to bosses, is ineffective against undead, and has a pitifully short duration. For 37 points you can nerf yourself but that’s all your getting.
My suggestions for fixing it:
moderately increased damage, remove the silly -% health and add flat vitality/bleed damage so that it could be used against more difficult mobs (currently it’s a wasted hotkey on bosses)
add a moderate -%bleed resist or -% vitality resist (or even -% chaos resist instead, to create synergy and open up more options for occultist)
increase duration to TEN SECONDS (this is critical)
increase cast range to be long range like CoF (the 20’ range is punitive and dangerous)
Fevered Rage is just bad implementation, accomplishing nothing but uber-buffing mobs; the nerf to survivability is very hard to spot, but the BUFF to their offense is instantly felt and over the top.
So it either needs a major overhaul, or we need it gone and something entirely unrelated in its place.
After trying it a few times myself I would have to agree.
Only thing I thought of using it for was some kind of gimmicky damage reflection warlock where one would use fevered rage and MoE to reflect the increased damage. Don’t think it would really work in practice (would likely die instantly when mirror went down), but I might try anyway at some point.
I think it would be simply and greatly buffed just by having CoF style targeting. Let it hit an area all at once and tick for a duration based on rank. Then replace the -%hp with some kind of -resist or -OA or -DA effect, because -%hp is so useless it should be purged from the entire game. The only mobs it actually does anything to are mobs that are gonna die in 3 seconds or less just from incidental damage alone, why would I care about knocking 13% off of a few thousand?
This is what happens when you take a great ability (Plague from the Nature mastery in Titan Quest) and remove everything that made it great (-%speed, -%damage, -%resist).
The core problem of the Bloody Pox in Grim Dawn is the Curse of Frailty: as long as this ability will have to have -%speed and -%resist, the Bloody Pox is doomed to uselessness or at best weirdness, because the designers won’t create a redundant or competitor skill in the same tree. The more the Bloody Pox starts doing what most feel it is supposed to do and the less the Curse of Frailty will make sense, and since the COF is very popular at the moment, the devs will make sure not to affect it in any way.
Now the question is: are you ready to have your Curse of Frailty possibly reworked?
No.
So you’re OK with the useless BP.
You cannot extract the sense out of something and expect that thing to still make sense.
I would settle for having the damage on the base skill significantly buffed, and possibly having it do a nonstackable form of RR (but make the RR contingent upon having the Black Death modifier, which is currently tits-on-a-bull useless).
If by the damage, you mean vitality, you will then create a competitor to the Sigil And the Doom Bolt. Who is going to want a weaker and non-healing version of the Sigil?
If you mean bleeding, that’s a start: this would make it a kind of competitor to the Grasping Vines and Blade Spirit as a mass bleeding ability. But are you really sure that you want that ability to do bleeding? Bleeding means “going to be effective 50% of the time at best”. I have no problem with that, most players won’t expect to kill skeletons and crystal junkies with a disease attack.
But is this really the best that can be expected from such ability?
If it feels useless, let just make it do more damage. That’s it?
Aren’t there already enough direct attack abilities out there?
In most RPGs, the disease attacks are more about debuffs, debilitating, spreading on and on and possibly turning the targets into something else than direct killing. For direct killing, you generally rely more on your sword and fireball.
Now, if we really are into killing and nothing else, there would be another possibility: a poison cloud. And Grim Dawn is pretty limited into options to play real poison-based ranged builds…
To what I already said there I’ll add that I have this skill on both my chars that have occultist in it, but actually invested points only in “wasting” part of it.
Bleeding was what I had in mind, though it would be kind of nice to have the Vitality and Poison elements from the Wasting and Black Death modifiers not be utter garbage as well.
And having more choices about how you want to inflict damage is not really a bad thing, IMO. Bleed damage is nice when you pair it with appropriate resist debuffs.
Wasting isn’t half bad, Fevered Rage is one the most fun effects in the game, even if the risk/reward ratio is horrible imo. And then you have the base skill and the last modifier that manage the feat of making Doom Bolt look great in comparison even with the two of them put together…
I have not brought my Fevered Rage Witch Hunter into Ultimate, but so far it has been excellent. When playing with the transmuter you need to prioritize your DA and can mostly neglect OA.
an increase of 150% mob attack speed and 50% mob OA has no effect on you? lol…
trade those for a paltry -50% mob DA (which allows you to crit more on trash you can already erase by the millions, but not bosses). the ability makes no sense.
In fact just the simple change of increasing duration to say 15s would be a HUGE change that could really incentivize this ability- it would allow it ample time to proc other duration effects. 5 seconds duration only works on skills that do something real during those 5s. BP does not. The debuffs are small and don’t hit mobs where we need them- and the tradeoff on Fevered Rage is just silly.
Fevered Rage still seems like an oddball choice for this- i mean i thought about trying it to greatly amp retaliation hits lol (they’d kill themselves much faster) but either way ranged mobs would still be a pain, they aren’t going to bum rush you they’re just going to mow you down from range faster with much greater damage.
grasping vines in my experience very rarely affects movement. i thought combing CoF and Grasping Vines would be a colossal movement nerf. nope. they seem to have a 10% chance to stop moving for a second or two, but other than that the slow doesn’t stack so it’s a waste.
CoF is VASTLY superior due to the duration being triple that of Grasping Vines and Bloody Pox lol. imo both of those skills need a duration increase badly. Though GV is a lot less useless than Bloody Pox (still pretty terrible, but better)
