I’m leveling a vit/chaos/bleed Conjurer and I have a question/rant about a damage type: Vitality Decay - where the hell do you get it from? Does Vit dmg have a chance to proc Vit decay?
From farming legendaries on my 85 Warder and leveling the 34 Conjurer, a large amount of items have +% Vitality Decay to go along with the +%Vitality Damage. However, apart from the craftable Omen sword (with it’s Reaper’s Cascade proc) and Affliction constellation (660 Vit decay retal), I have not found any item with flat Vit decay on it. And Affliction is vit/poison so sinking points into it just to make use of the Vit decay is pointless.
I’m sorry, but it seems to be bad design to include %Vit Decay on almost all Vit dmg items (except for the random affixes e.g. Demonic, Spellweaving) when no use can be made of it unless you are making a vit/poison Witch Hunter. For example, the weapon I have waiting for my Conjurer at 75 is Fang of Ch’thon; 133% Vit damage, 166% Chaos damage then for some reason 139% Vit decay. The %Vit decay is literally useless I waste Devotion points on Affliction to gain 660 Vit decay retal. Rant over.
Vitality Decay is its own damage type. It is resisted by Vitality resistance, but you need to find individual sources of Vitality Decay in order to use it.
It’s pretty obnoxious how often you see the %vitality decay modifier on items and how rare actually finding this time of damage is on skills, devotions, or items. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve pointed this out or complained about it.
Exactly. My Fang of Ch’thon increases Vit Decay by 139%, however 139% of 0 is 0. And I’m not about to waste Devotion points on Affliction or use a sub-par weapon with a 5% proc chance; Omen.
It’s perfectly fine to completely ignore vitality decay. The only time it shows up on items is in retaliation, for which vitality decay damage increases don’t work anyway (oh the irony).
Decay kind of became redundant when most of the vit skills also deal damage over time, it should have been entirely removed or some vit skills should have been made standard DOTs.
?? Dot’s Proc. Devouring swarm and Bloody pox are amazing for proccing x% skills.
Flat dmg over X duration is good because it stacks with itself.
On Topic, Yes… there is way too much %Vitality Decay dmg compared to Flat sources of Vitality Decay. Is there even one skill that provides Flat Vitality Decay? The splitting of Dmg types into Flat/DoT is one of the more puzzling things about Grim dawn. I feel it just needlessly further dilutes the item stats pool but meh, i still enjoy the game.
One thing i have learned about grim dawn is that you dont need every single stat modifier on items or skills to be used or scaled. A easy example of course would be the Vulnerability. You dont necessarily need to use all the dmg types listed on the skill for it to have value, 1 or 2 is fine. In this case it would be extremely niche to actually have a build that uses all the dmg types listed.
The only item, be it weapon, armour or accessory, that I’ve seen that has flat Vit Decay on is a Granted Skill (Reaper’s Cascade) from a level 25 craftable sword called Omen. And that is only a 5% proc chance.
The Bat constellation has a 15% chance of Vit Decay, however, that is only for weapon attacks or skills with a %Weapon Damage component (iirc), so a caster gets boned (Devouring Swarm, Sigil of Consumption, the 2 totems etc. for Conjurer have no %WD so they do not benefit from it).
And there’s 660 Vit Decay Retaliation available in the Affliction constellation. Problem is that’s classed as Retaliation damage and is increased by %Retaliation Damage NOT %Vit Decay. So yeah…a rather superfluous and useless stat tbh, unless you are a Witch Hunter. 1 out of 32 (if you count pure builds) possible Mastery combos.
So unless you make a Witch Hunter (to make use of the Affliction constellation) or Witchblade you can’t really make use of it due to most Vit spells not having a %WD component.
And even then, WH and WB builds have better things to prioritise than Vit Decay considering the miniscule amounts of flat Vit Decay available (Poison WH with Nidalla’s Justifiable Ends, for example). Caster builds can’t use it unless they run up and twat things in the face, which is quite often a silly thing to do.
Devouring Swarm and Bloody Pox deal flat damage each second, they are not “true” dots. Compare the wording: on Devouring Swarm, it says “x Vitality damage”, which is a flat damage dealt every second of the skill’s duration. True DoTs, for example Demo’s Blackwater Cocktail, say “x Burn damage over 3 seconds”. In this case the damage type is also different. Burn is the DoT equivalent of Fire damage, but DS deals Vitalty damage, not its DoT version Vitality decay. Which is why it procs things while being a DoT.