I’m currently going through my first ever HC run and realised I do not have a good understanding of how defensive constellation skills work - I would appreciate any input that would help me clear things up:
Let’s take the Turtle Shell skill(?) from the Tortoise constellation. It says it has 100% chance to activate at 50% health, but I see in-game that I can/have to(?) assign a skill to it.
My initial impression was that Turtle Shell always activates at 50% health, regardless of whether I assign a skill to it or not. I now think this might be wrong.
Since I’m playing a Demolitionist, I thought about assigning Vindictive Flame to it (first skill in the bottom row of the Demolitionist tree), but I realised I do not understand the consequences of this.
Which of the following is true (NB: I might also have trouble understanding Vindictive Flame itself)?
1: Turtle Shell always activates at 50% health, regardless of whether there’s any skill assigned to it.
2: Turtle Shell does not activate at all unless I assign a skill to it. Assigning Vindictive Flame to it means it will always activate at 50% health, since VF is always active.
3: Turtle Shell does not activate at all unless I assign a skill to it. Assigning Vindictive Flame to it means it will only activate if I ever: go below 50% health and the Vindictive Flame trigger is not on cooldown (the 2.5 second recharge listed in the tooltip). If I go below 50% health and Vindictive Flame triggered less than 2.5 seconds in the past, TS will not activate.
Should be 2 far as I know. Turtle won’t activate unless attached to a skill, that’s the whole point of having skills that proc. If a skill is not assigned then the proc won’t go off.
Edit: I’m wrong, I confused the skill, I tend to think to proc health skills as passives like Arcanist Arcane Will…
I was sure that correct one was 3?
If I bind Turtle to an aura skill that is not active, the Turtle is not going to trigger, so in the same way if VF is not “on” because it’s on cool down the Turtle cannot proc.
Vinidictive flame is permament aura, you can see it doesn’t dissapear from auras list. It contains two skills actually, one grant permament regeneration, total speed and fire retaliation and the second is quite useless blast, which procs by being hitted and has CD.
As the poster below you says, Vindictive Flame is a permanent buff similar to things like Flame Touched, and as such, since Vindictive Flame is always on, Turtle will always proc when you’re under 50% assuming Turtle itself is not on cooldown.
A situation where the OP’s #3 scenario comes up is with temporary buffs, like Demo’s Blast Shield. Blast Shield is not a permanent buff, but one that has an active period and a cooldown period. In those cases, #3 is correct, you would need to be under 50% and Blast Shield to be active for Turtle to activate.
As such, in nearly all cases, you want devotions that are bound to player buffs to be bound to permanent buffs (or re-castable 100% uptime buffs like Blood of Dreeg) in order to get the most use of them. The rare exceptions would be a devotion with a heal surge like Giant’s Blood; occasionally you’ll see people bind this to a temporary buff like Blast Shield that activates under a certain health threshold so that they receive the burst heal when it’s needed and not wasted by activating while the player is already at 100% Health.
Thank you everyone for the answers! They definitely helped cleared things out for me!
I’ll keep an eye on the HUD to see when the different buffs get activated - the part about Vindictive Flame being two different skills threw me off - it wasn’t obvious to me that parts of it are permanent buffs and parts of it only trigger when hit and off-cooldown.
