I don’t know if it’s just me, but Disintegrate feels a bit underwhelming. I’ve been using Elemental Nova with the channelling node & that feels pretty good, it hits pretty hard (with a staff), you can tweak it to use any elemental nova (I went with all 3), it works really well with Dragon’s Breath/Dragon Mage & it can have a massive AoE. Disintegrate on the other hand does not.
It’s a dot so it can’t hit & therefore can’t crit or proc ailments outside of it’s own skill tree (Elemental Nova can get up to 200% ignite chance with 8 points in 1 node, Disintegrate’s ignite chance up to 90% with 6 points in 2 different nodes)
It’s base damage seems significantly lower than Elemental Nova with a lower tick rate (at least from the numbers coming off the training dummy, though since Ele Nova has ignite up the wazoo plus spark charge that’s probably confusing matters)
Disintegrate’s base range is better, but it’s got a relatively thin hit box, compared to Ele Nova hitting in a circle & Disintegrate doesn’t do significantly more damage to offset this reduced area coverage, and Ele Nova can get up to 150% area from 5 points in 1 node plus Overcharge which is an area increase of 75% (not sure if they both stack though)
I’ve tried using Culnivar’s Claim (90% increased spell lightning damage, 90% increased spell lightning crit chance, 20% increased mana regen) & Ignivar’s Head (40-60% increased fire damage, 50-150% chance to ignite on hit while channelling & disintegrate deals more damage equal to your spell crit chance) and Ele Nova still feels better than Disintegrate as those items both work for Ele Nova as well.
Ele Nova also has a nice interaction with Teleport which allows you to get up to 3 Ele Novas cast while teleporting which makes it decent at clearing packs of trash.
Some ideas on how to improve Disintegrate:
Remove the DoT tag so it can crit (or at least it’ll get yellow damage numbers)
Give it a damage buff due to it having a significantly lower area of effect compared to Ele nova
Change the Cascade node such that while it doesn’t pierce, it will chain to nearby mobs, that would give it much improved effectiveness at short range as well as better clear at long range
Lower the build up time for Backfire to 3 seconds, that will give it an additionally improved AoE as it would be reduced to 1s with Catalyst
Give Disintegrate interactions with other spells, such as being able to cast Meteor/Volcanic Orb/Static Orb while channelling (maybe on 4x1 idols, or the off-hand slot like Ignivar’s Head does with Fire Aura)
Edit: And don’t get me started on being able to convert Focus into a more effective damage spell, it can do good dps (if you stack mana), never runs out of mana and can get some improved defences as well. Though I do like being able to make Focus a dps spell, it’s just disappointing that it’s also more effective than Disintegrate…
The problem woth ignivars head is that it was meant as a item for disinigrate but since disingrste is DoT and doesnt hit whata the point of the ignite chance in hit while channeling. Lol.
Several of Disintegrate’s issues could be either fixed or at the very least ameliorated by removing the dot tag. then it would hit so it could crit (more damage) & shock/ignite/chill (more damage) as well as use more leech affixes.
Desintegrate indeed doesn’t feel that powerfull. It drains a lot of mana compared to the damage output. I tried to maximize damage with my Lightning mage. But at the end elemental nova is the main damage skill and desintegrate can’t compete.
Right now I skilled desintegrate to regen mana while channeling to get back the mana when oom after channeling lighning nova.
Skills should hit harder the fewer enemies they can hit. But comparing elemental nova and designate it is the opposite. Nova hits enemies in a significantly larger area and hits much much harder.
so i manged to get a disintegrate build that sort of works but its not easy. I took arcane ascendance to turn it into a proper turret but its still really struggles.
Disintegrate forces you into a turret mode because you cant move and cast it but it really lacks defences that a turret build needs, there is Galvanised defence but its position on the tree is the wrong way for other like minded abilities so its hard to take it and have points to spend to make the damage stand up.
Next problem is the range, at stock the range is terrible and it leaves you horribly exposed to anything with a range attack. You get shot by stuff you cant see on the screen let alone hit so going for the +range node is a must but that up the top and you have to spend 3 points just to get to the node and another 3 to buy the range
then you get into the problems @llama speaks about…
personally i’d like to see the default range longer and for it to have a better set of defence skills that take into account the fact that you have to be still in order to cast it.
Make it cheaper to get to Intensify as 3 points to unlock it is expensive in comparison to other abilities
I had another thought, the Tendrils node gives a (25-100)% chance per second to cast Lightning Blast, how about have the cooldown on that (1 second) be modified by cast speed so if you had 100% increased cast speed then it would have a chance to cast Lightning Blast every 0.5 seconds.
