Hello! I’ve found a disappointing but while building my character.
Basically I’ve been running a DOT-focused Low-Life Lich with Spirit Plague & Drain Life.
I realized I’ve got Life’s Journey and decided to try applying Spirit Plague that way instead of casting it. Good news is: It’s a lot of fun! Bad news: Something seems to not be working quite right with the damage calculations.
Casting Spirit Plague with my current set-up on the dummy ticks for around 4.5k damage.
Applying Spirit Plague using Harvest on the same dummy ticks for around 1.8k damage.
I’m not sure what’s wrong here - whether there’s some modifier that it suddenly doesn’t benefit from or if there are bugged nodes in the tree. Regardless - I’m uploading some screenshots to get clarity on the matter!
It seems to still apply Frailty and Plague (which is through a node in the Spirit Plague tree) so I’m fairly confident it does get some bonuses from the tree. My best guess is that Spirit Plague for some reason does NOT benefit from Spell Damage since It’s applied by Harvest - but this seems to be an unintended interaction if that is so.
I can’t figure out how to upload screenshots here (first time using this forum) - I do have a few screenshots of my character sheet, skill specialization, and skill trees though at the time of this bug. If needed, I can mail them somewhere (or upload here if I figure out how)
EDIT: SOME TESTING:
*The Spirit Plague node “Plague of Eyes” definitely does NOT apply to Spirit Plague when applied through harvest.
I tried the skill on a dummy with and without this node and while casting - It brought my damage from around 4.5k/tick down to around 2.2k/tick.
The damage of spirit plague when applied by Harvest stayed the same - around 1.8k. So now they’re far closer together.
*Trying to equip&unequip an amulet with only +%increased Damage over Time and +%Necrotic Damage seemed to decrease/increase the damage of both the Harvest-applied version and the casted version appropriately.
This makes me 99% certain that when applied by Life’s Journey, Spirit Plague simply does not benefit from all sources of flat spell damage OR that it doesn’t benefit from intelligence as a whole(?)
I am not an Acolyte expert but from what I can see from the Lifes Journey Shield applying Spirit Plague on melee hit (in your case via the Harvest melee skill) should work correctly and scale as expected so if you are experiencing it differently its likely this is a bug… I will leave it to the experts to correct me but I expect there could be something to do with Harvest not having the same tags (e.g. Spell) that perhaps Spirit Plague applied this way has a problem… Be interesting to see if you just used the normal attack to see if it does something other than Harvest does…
Again, just guessing here as my experience with acolyte is limited… maybe @Heavy could chip in if he is around?
Side note: Posting screen shots is best done with Imgur and then you simply paste the direct url to the image in the thread text to show the image inline - you cannot upload images directly to the forum… Same with videos (best posted to something like youtube.) If you want to post your build, you can use Dammits Build Planner (Last Epoch Build Planner)
Ah - in my excitement of discovering a bug that concerned me and I would love to see fix ASAP - I didn’t even consider that it may have been reported previously. Should’ve probably not made a new topic I suppose - my bad!
Hopefully my testing in regards to the “Plague of Eyes” node can be of some assistance at least. Thanks for your input
