TL;DR: Picture of the proposed skill tree node.
Chaos Bolts’ skill tree offers two nodes that grant health on hit:
- Cursed Blood - 6 health gained on hit per curse on the enemy, and refreshes the duration on curses on the enemy on hit.
- Devour the Damned - 5 health and 1 mana gained on hit per point against cursed enemies, up to 10 health and 2 mana at 2 points invested.
Not only do those points provide useful benefits on top of the health gain (mana sustain and refreshing curse duration), they also have an important positioning in Chaos Bolts’ skill tree:
- Devour the Damned is required to access Seed of Chaos (chance to recast Chaos Bolt onto a nearby enemy).
- Allocating both Cursed Blood and Devour the Damned is one of the only two paths toward Another Affliction (triggering Bone Curse when hitting a cursed enemy), with the other path requiring to convert the necrotic part of Chaos Bolts to physical.
The thing is, not only is Acolyte is the class that lends itself the best to play low life, Chaos Bolts itself has a node that makes it potentially very strong on low life builds, A Grave For Two - Chaos Bolts deals 1% more damage over time per 20 missing health.
This is a problem because, when playing Chaos Bolts on a low life build, you are effectively locked out of all of the following:
- The Seed of Chaos node (chance to recast Chaos Bolts).
- The mana sustain of Devour the Damned.
- The curse duration refresh of Cursed Blood.
- The Bone Curse trigger of Another Affliction is accessible, but forces you to convert the necrotic part of Chaos Bolts to physical.
As such, the health gain from the two nodes in question end up acting like roadblocks on a low life build, locking you out of very useful effects, despite the Acolyte and Chaos Bolts specifically lending themselves to low life gameplay.
A way to remove those roadblocks and give much more freedom to low life Chaos Bolts use would be to add a new node, accessible from Devour the Damned and Cursed Blood, that would convert their health gain to ward, at a given percentage.
In my montage, I used 20% as a placeholder, but the percentage could be changed as a way to balance the node - for instance, Rip Blood’s health-to-ward conversion is done at 50%.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you all have a great day. 