#buffFoI2019
The warlock in the above link is incredibly tanky (I’m able to facetank 2x reapers in in the enemy spawn zone in (4 + 0) crucible), has 0 energy issues, sustain for dayz, and a dummy killtime of 17s.
4 + 0 clear with warlock - 8:30, 100% success
4 + 1 clear with deceiver - 9:30, ~80% success.
agree that FoI needs serious buffs. Or even a bit of reworking. My suggestions are:
Actually, there’re items that support FoI but they’re mostly non-set and weak on their own. Imo, FoI is more about dot-damage, and speaking about chaos/aether variants, they need big flat and also some -% manacost.
Another variant - cold- suffers from lacking cast speed and glassyness of Mageslayer’s set.
Haven’t seen any aether version so far.
^This.
FoI range is just inadequate, especially when the attack animation is longer than the actual attack range. (This is why it’s called a deceiver).
Energy cost is prohibitive. Skill point investment is exorbitant for what you get in exchange. Damage types for aether and chaos FoI are all over the place. etc. etc.
I’ve tried a deceiver very similar to yours but didn’t got satisfied. Seems like FoI, mana regen and chaos damage can’t be combined successfully.
And to justify its manacost and invested points, it should hit like a truck.
You should look at the amount of flat damage on the baseskill of 26/16 FoI and compare it to the base flat on a seal granted skill.
EDIT: Seal of blight + blood orb of chthon does more damage than 26/16 FoI + softcaps in the rest of its 3 skill nodes.
seems like I’d prefer taking the Acid Purge for almost free. it’s even ridiculous that the skill from a component is better than 26/16 profile skill.
Assuming you could convert all damage types on FoI to the same damage type (which is impossible), seal of blight still outperforms…: 26/16 FoI + 12/12 intensify + 12/12 infernal purge + 12/12 endless flame.
It also costs like 25% of FoI’s energy cost
Literally the same animation for both. If you mean visually, that has no bearing on how it deals damage.
One is a cone, the other a line. It would be ridiculous to have FoI have a comparable distance to AAR.
It’s not, it’s exactly the same.
And if it wasn’t, you’d never use Acid Spray for anything.
FoI gets skill modifiers from gear, Acid Spray does not. It’s also available as early as level 5, compared to a level 75 Component skill.
Although FoI gets modifiers from gear, all builds that I know suffer from various matters I’ve mentioned ahead. Maybe buff some FoI-related gear then?
EDIT: still seems not healthy that a granted skill outperforms a mastery skill with 50+ invested points.
And maybe at least buff the range with 1-2 meters?
Acid purge, the first time I hear it’s good. 
Cold FoI with Mageslayer have great sheet DPS and it’s still not great. And FoI have problems, the most apparent is lack of enough direct damage. If you go chaos or aether you can’t even convert it to something useful. Bi damage type builds are unpleasant usually. FoI is better than Acid purge in my mind, but not by a lot and it costs so many points and energy.
Cold FoI infil lacks cast speed and has ridiculous 7% of phys res (Mageslayer …).
So, here we come up with the problem of gear too.
And actually, I haven’t seen any burn version of it.
@afanasenkov26 I tried cold Mage Hunter. Yup cast speed it’s still not great, but half of my damage is DoT and dots aren’t affected by it. Physical resistance is major problem. Considering you can’t really stack armor to infinity.
Sheet DPS is a beauty, almost 200k. But you pay price for going Arcanist. No cold RR except on OFF.
I remember myself trying cold FoI MH in Malmouth. Wasn’t impressed much.
And now FoI still looks like the worst channeling skill, reaching the enemy years after you cast it. And also slow when turning.
Maybe that’s a problem. FoI is closer to DE in terms of visual and effect. Even DPS is similar. But DE have direct damage and better sustain, despite lack of WD. On FoI I used Ghoul for physical resistance mainly, cause you can’t fully utilized the AdctH.
This is a strawman argument, sir. Even if acid spray doesn’t get used by anything, doesn’t mean it’s worse/better/equal to FoI.
Sure. Load up a skill with sufficient modifiers, and it becomes better than seal-granted skills. I’m talking about the opportunity cost here though. 102 skill points is needed to hard cap all nodes in FoI, and you’d probably need to dedicate 4 - 5…maybe even 6 item slots to FoI. And even then, it just doesn’t work that great? Compared to a seal of blight which, coincidentally, I’ve made a build around - https://www.grimtools.com/calc/m2334kQ2. The damage on it is surprisingly potent.
EDIT: Acid purge demonstration.
If you want, I can also upload a demonstration of the deceiver’s dummy kill time.
I also agree that FoI range feels very lackluster, cone feels barely relevant at such range. Activation delay is also annoying and makes getting hard cc resists a huge deal I’ve found.
Voidsoul Purifier worked surprisingly much better than I expected despite those issues, but I’d still really like to see some stun res added to the set, Bloodlord belt or Wretch constellation.
Set fixes some issues on the base skill such as sustain and physical defenses when you need to be in what essentially feels like melee range. Also enough reduction to the skill cost to make energy leech mostly able to sustain with enough added %WD.
Regardless, here’s a video demonstrating what I mean by the attack range/attack animation mismatch.
The lightning bolt/end of FoI looks like it’s hitting the dummy, but it really isn’t.
The target literally needs to be engulfed by FoI for it to take damage.
I tried leveling a deceiver with FoI. It was tedious even in Normal difficulty. It should hit harder for the amount of points that get invested in it. AAR range is too much but how about giving it drain essence range?
No. Buff the weak skill, don’t nerf the good one. 