Please Make Feast of Bones Node for Ghostflame Scalable

Acolyte
1

First off: love the game. If a team member is reading this, I appreciate you folks. Anyway, onto the topic.

There is a possible Marrow Shards Lich build that uses Ghostflame with the Spirit of Dread (movement speed) and Feast of Bones (shoot Marrow Shards) nodes to rip around shooting Marrow Shards everywhere. This is both 1. a fun alternative to scaling damage-over-time with Ghostflame and 2. one of the only ways to play Marrow Shards where you don’t run Bone Splinters and scale those instead of the shards.

The problem is that the limit of 2 per second and 1 per target per second is abysmal damage after a certain point, leaving you having to either just cast Marrow Shards instead of Ghostflame (at which point, you would just go Death Seal) or switch to a damage-over-time variant (at which point, you’re probably better off being a Warlock than a Lich).

An easy solution might be just buffing this node so it can shoot more Marrow Shards, but I’d propose that it would be much better to instead have the number of shots scale off of Cast Speed or Intelligence (I would prefer cast speed). That way, you could scale this into the endgame, still probably doing less damage than a Marrow Shards caster, but gaining the “fun” and survivability of “driving the Blood Bus around.”

I’d love EHG forever if this was a reality as I find the build super fun and interesting. It’s just BARELY not able to work because of the node limitations.

Thanks for reading. Have a good one.

2

I can concur. Been trying to find a way to scale the shards high enough for it to work, but haven’t found one yet.

It’s great for zooming around the map and getting some damage in, but it’s not good enough to be your primary source of damage.

Necrotic DoT is just much much stronger as it has many more synergies through the tree and Uniques to scale the damage.

3

If you care, there are some options involving adding more bleed to the build (since marrow shards can bleed and cares about bleed existing on the target) but it’s still not awesome, since you’re splitting your scaling a bit. There’s just not really any other choice if you want to try to get more damage while still running the marrow shards node because eventually you just run out of ways to scale marrow shards (because cast speed is irrelevant).

You run Occult Embers (now that it’s unbugged) and Decrepit Mortals alongside 5 Spiteful Decay and 5 Cauldron of Blood so you can get the blood overload. Then you just play low-life, high mana build with Aura of Decay and Health Loss → Ward on a piece of gear. Then you make sure you shred/penetrate physical res and you can kinda do some extra damage with the bleeding and decrepify curse.

Defensively, the build works just fine, it just has to resort to stuff like this to try to stay relevant damage-wise in higher corruption levels (even like 150 you start falling off).