Mage’s preparation node requires 10 points of investment to get 200% spell increased damage, and slow chance every 3 seconds on the next elemental spell. The problem is there’s a lot of small spell effects that consume Preparation and detract from the main skills in builds preventing its proper use. Either it would need a rework or other skills not count to preparation.
For example, proccing Arcane Ascendance can consume Preparation because it activates a tiny damage over time against enemies that are directly on you. No one uses AA for this damage effect, and it’s so minor damage wise and the area so small it may as well not exist. There’s not even nodes in AA that try to improve this and make it into a build. In the end you lose out preparation because of this basically non-essential spell effect.
Another example is Lightning Aegis. When Lightning Aegis procs and expires it has an explosion that does such minor damage it may as well not exist. As a result it consumes the preparation charge.
I would make a suggestion that these minor spell effects not exist, or not count towards preparation. It’s hard to build around it otherwise and takes away the value of Preparation substantially.
I agree, but I would rather keep those “small effects” and have a change along the lines of “Your next spell that hits an enemy has […]”, or something like that.
FG’s “Fresh from the Forge” and VK’s “Patient Doom” suffer a similar bad condition, where alot of melee builds use movement skills to jump into the fray, but since most of Sentinel Movement skills are also tagged “melee”, they do consume those nodes.
For those 2 nodes i suggest a follow-up node, that prevent movement skills from consuming this passive.
Now for the original topic of yours.
I think both Patient Doom (30% increased damage per point, up to 5 points, so 150% increased damage in total) and Preperation, with it’s 200% increased damage are not really interesting in terms of investment required.
I would like to have a more multiplier or flat dase damage (similar to Fresh From The Forge, which gives 80 flat base damge) on those nodes, obviously with a smaller numeric value. This would make them still good for early/mid game, but still very usefull for very endgame/well developed characters.
The only issue here would be snapshotting channeled skills… which is a global LE issue anyway.
Hopefully we can get rid of that at some point, which would allow those situational/bursty nodes to become way more powerful.
I’d argue that Arcane Ascendance consuming Preparation is a bug since AA doesn’t have an elemental tag so it shouldn’t be considered an “elemental spell” by the game. A “simple” fix of changing Preparation to “the next elemental spell you use that hits an enemy” would remove the issue of procs consuming the buff.
The devs are also aware of the community’s general dislike of this kind of passive (though they specifically mentioned Fresh from the Forge, likely due to the upcoming Sentinel love). Hopefully they’ll just convert all of those types of passives into Lethal Cadence-like passives (every X non-channelled skill use gets a Y damage buff).
Just to add onto this it can be viewed on Last Epoch Tools
AA has lightning effect with a 1.7m radius. It’s laughably small with minimal damage output. But yeah, adds to the point Preparation is wasted on this.
Also, I agree with the more damage/additive damage rather than increased considering it’s a node in the Mage tree.
I disagree, I think that in principle more damage modifiers should only be in skill trees, or at best at the top of masteries. To do otherwise is to have power creep. If you change Preparation to a more modifier, then why not argue for other low level passives to be converted from increased to more?
I agree that a more modifers would be super strong and might be not in the appropiate spot atm (2nd row on base mage passive tree)
But for an effect that only occurs every 3 seconds at best, 200% increased damage is just not really good, even for some of the slower hard hitting spells.
And timing your rotation perfectly to always make full use of this is not worth the effort for “only” 200% increased damage.
An effect that only triggers every X amount of second, should be so strong that using it do it’s fullest should really reward a player/build.
I think it would be easier to time if it were every X spells cast, rather than every X seconds, it would also benefit faster casting skills more though IMO it should probably have a modifier that makes it benefit slower/more expensive skills more than faster/cheaper spells (though the former tend to do more damage so it’s probably not an issue).
