I was having a bit of a play with Sigils of Hope trying to see what it would be like as a dps skill & it didn’t feel great but I think there are a few things that could be changed to improve it quite a bit as a DPS skill & general QoL changes.
It would be really nice if when you cast Sigil it refreshed the duration of all of the stacks. The duration would probably need to be reduced significantly to compensate, but if the duration were reduced by a factor of 2-3 (from 15s to somewhere between 5-10s) that would make it a lot easier to keep all the stacks up (especially if you then take the duration increasing nodes which I think most people do).
Unwavering Faith’s threshold reduction node doesn’t seem to be working.
It would be nice if it required fewer nodes to get to the Void Conversion node (Sigils of Despair).
It doesn’t have any attribute tags when you take the damage node, this isn’t a problem if you don’t take it, but is a significant one if you do.
Possibly change Last Wish (6% chance to summon a Sigil on kill) with a node that converts the skill into an aura with a mana drain equal to the average mana per second required to keep up the max number of Sigils. This would disable the Divine Flare node.
Wave of Light (+1 additional chain per point) doesn’t appear to work.
Now, on to the DPS side of things.
The current functionality for Divine Flare is that you cast Sigils once to get your single Sigil, then you cast it again to detonate it. This feels a bit clunky (it effectively halves your cast speed since you have to cast it twice per instance of damage) but most importantly it costs a lot. The base cost of Sigils of Hope is 35, 32 if you have a staff/sceptre & you have to cast it twice to get any damage, that’s 64 - 70 mana per hit of damage. Meteor costs 60, and has a 600% added damage effectiveness Sigil’s damage effectiveness is at best 100%.
So the cost need to be reduced if you have Divine Flare significantly (ideally a flat reduction rather than mana efficiency), ideally you’d halve it at the very least & potentially increase the damage effectiveness though that would depend where you want Sigils of Hope to sit, as a high cost/high damage skill or as a cheap low damage spamable skill.
Which brings me to my next point. Even though it’s fire damage, it feels less bad if you convert it to Void & use it as a Void Knight since you can get a decent amount of added damage plus the echos (up to 40%) and then you can use 4 Introspective idols (9-25% mana efficiency for void spells per idol). The downside is that it takes up 7 skill points, which mean yo ueither take fewer points in Waves of Light (+1 chain per point), Consecrating Flare (+50% hit damage per point) or forgo Renewed Hope (up to 40% chance to resummon a consumed Sigil). Maybe that number of points required would be ok since it would mean that Void Knights go to convert to void so they can benefit from Echoes & Paladins go for Renewed Hope instead.
I’d also like to see some additional ways for non-Void Knights to scale the damage. Paladins could get damage scaling based on healing effectivness (like Judgement) & Forge Guards could get damage scaling based on block chance (like Shield Bash).
TLDR:
- It’s too expensive to use as it is at the moment for the low damage it does
- Several nodes don’t appear to work (Waves of Light & Unwavering Faith)
. Mana efficiency and refreshing stacks (or make creating stacks easier) would be cool.
