Pulsing shard is a major way to get leech for AAR. Adding elemental to aether conversion to AAR on a pulsing shard seems to nerf cold AAR (conduit), lightning AAR (weapon / amulet) and fire AAR (Hexflame). You either give up a source of sustain or lose at least some of the damage in question from each source. Curious what the reasoning behind this particular change is as it seems at first glance to materially reduce the variety of viable AAR builds.
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Unless Zantai puts ADCTH to AAR in the cold and lightning AAR mods, that pulsing shard change should be reverted.
Very much doubt people will want to play AAR with no sustain, at least cold and lightning since they are blocked off from Grim Dawn amulet.
Yeah, it’d be fine if the leech got added back to an item you are going to use for the conversion. If that happened, you actually might improve build diversity by freeing up the offhand slot. But no mention of that in these notes.
I imagine it wasn’t done with the desire to hurt Cold and Lightning aars, probably just an oversight that will be (easily) fixed soon.
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also affects chaos aar levelling btw
only AAR version it doesn’t impact is endgame phys, but it actually also affects phys during levelling (not that i think many are doing that these days) 
pierce conduit mention seems missing from the OP
and tho nobody cares about it acid global conversion meme too
3 Likes
How about giving AAR some ADCtH to the skill itself and removing it from the items? 
3 Likes
I’ll just copy here my post from another topic…
Conversion on Pulsing Shard is stupid and kills many AAR builds. Few can work without it. Only those with no conduit or Stormseer Sapphire that can use leech amulet.
With this change aether could use it and leech amulet as well. So great leech on aether, some on chaos and physical and no leech on everything else…
It would be best for AAR to have some leech straight out for more off-hand diversity. If this was done for off-hand diversity it will just kill too many builds… Only phys, chaos and aether will be good and everything else will be meme tier.
And everythig else is sub chaos, physical and aether anyway pre this change… So a nerf to already weaker AAR variations… Does not make sense at all…
It either needs to be reverted or AAR given leech to skill itself and then we have more off-hand diverstiy…
Such a bad change just when AAR started to be fun again…
removing vitality affinity also makes it harder to get “offbrand” matches that still fits into that, like vit/chaos, vit/acid, vit/cold
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Whatever. They still have a pretty low drop chance.
I went into the item database to see if this change was to give leech to another AAR item, and I was really surprised at how many items emphasize Aether (I mean, it is called “Aether Ray,” but I was expecting a few arcanists to experiment with the Ray for other damage types) and very little for any other type. The only other item where a leech mod to AAR could conceivably work is Covenant of the Three - Items - Grim Dawn Item Database
Maybe a weapon or two that doesn’t specifically buff the Ray but gives +Arcanist skills can receive a nice modifier for it. I definitely cannot stand the core concept of “if this skill doesn’t leech then it’s useless” mentality, but it definitely makes little sense to give damage modifiers to an item (like making it Cold or Fire) and then cut off the main thing that makes the skill function in a build in the first place. This definitely feels like something is missing from the equation.
looks like conversion on Pulsing Shard was indeed a typo 
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