I’ve tried to make a build out of Spine of Malatros, and there is a small thing that continues to bother me… By the way, I know the spines are bugged, I’m just theorycrafting.
Why is the design a two-hand sword with melee damage?
The only skill that could benefit this from the acolyte tree is Harvest, and I just can’t fit it into my build. It doesn’t scale well with other damage stats, and isn’t usefull for generating ward or health. And I wouldn’t use it as a means of DPS, as I have better skills for that.
So why choose to make this incredible item a two-hand sword, that doesn’t scale well stat-wise with anything usefull for acolytes? The other classes have plenty usefull uniques that fit their playstyle perfectly. Why couldn’t Spine of Malatros be a scepther, wand or staff that gave spelldamage, mana or something usefull?
Has anyone wondered about this? And maybe found an answer?
Yeah it does indeed give that - but it could give a heck of a lot more, when considering the amount that wands, scepters and staffs gives. The design choise just makes me ponder… Why?!
I got a good roll on one earlier, and it’s been making me curious too… Would love to run a fire spell dmg/crit build with this thing if I could make it work. Just wish we had more skill tree options to turn skills into PBAoE or a melee attack or something, for flavor lol. My first thought was take the nodes that give Fissure a ton of Ignite & direct fire damage, maybe the traversal node too. Obviously pair it with Infernal Shade somehow. I’m imagining the gear will have to have a lot of Spell Dmg, Crit, Necrotic Res, and cooldown reduction. Still brainstorming…
Well Acolythe has at least one melee skill as well. A Harvest Fissure combo might work with the sword rather well from my point of view. Just the first “I think 1 sec about it…” combo I can think of with the weapon.
I think I’ve found the way to make Acidbane work as a way to scale crit, even while the conversion nodes are still broken. Hollow Lich turns melee leech into global damage, which counts as poison damage for Acidbane. Get it on gloves and Reign of Dragons blessing and throw in the generic damage in the Lich tree and you’ve got a workable level of crit with no investment in crit mods. Slam exalted melee leech onto an LP1 Spine and you’re very close to if not capped. If you want a build that uses affixes very differently, the lure of scaling ignite chance with fire skills, melee leech and necrotic res into a crit build can be pretty strong. Soulfire is legitimately amazing here.
Downside is, it’s yet another build wanting an Exsanguinous, preferably with some LP.
I have some problems with Spine. Crit multi with flame whip? Realy? Why? Flame Whip has 5% crit chance. The ammount of hoops you need to jump through to benefit from that is crazy. I think Spine is just a bad concept for a weapon. I wait for smarter people to come up with anything meaningfull but so far I’m better of not using the spine then using it.
The weapon is 2handed so no catalyst. getting base crit is basically not possible, guess you can use the prismatic gaze, but you still are not getting a whole lot of crit…
You can get plus 3 to 9 for various skills which is extremely powerful. You can convert certain skills to get more skill points too. Plus the large flat bonuses to spell and melee damage give it flexibility. Making it a sword makes it harder to roll useful spellcaster affixes since u can’t slam it with a wand or staff. That’s a trade off you gotta make for such powerful buffs.
Something to add however is that 1.0.3 fixed a bunch of bugs with flame whips. Flame whips basically wasnt scaling with intelligence or Chthonic Fissure nodes, so it should be much more powerful for fissure builds now too.
Oh, not for a minute pretending the Torment-scaling Fissure builds aren’t stronger than the Spine ones, but if you jump through the hoops you do get a pretty good damage skill post 1.0.3
Hm I done some donky testing putting passives from a to b and relevel skills again and again and in the end to me it was a huge dmg loss. On top of it you can’t even roll spell crit on a 2handed sword for example. Flame Whip isn’t benefitting from skills crit chance if it isn’t increasing the global crit chance. The flame whips range looks like ajoke to me when spirits hit stuff offscreen.
Even with enough mana to keep up 3 double size fissures 24/7 it was always a dmg loss for me. I think this one would’ve been better when it was a staff with a crit mod instead of beeing a 2handed sword with a magic dmg mod on it.
On the other hand I’m 100% certain there are a lot of people who are far smarter then me who get this to work and if it is fun I’m all for it.
That’s the thing. You don’t scale normal crit mods at all, you just get 750% generic increased damage and Acid Skin applies 95% increased chance to be crit, capping all your skills while also scaling your fire hits.
That said, the Spine’s actual stats are pretty concentrated in the +levels and the crit multi so it’s lackluster until you get it going, while Torment is good out of the gate and scales at least as well if not better. And I’m not thrilled about a high-level item with multiple important rolls being this hungry for LP either, but I’m having fun and killing bosses. I was posting more in the vein of “here’s how to use Spine if you love the idea/visuals” than “this is the best Chthonic Fissure build out there”.
I tried to play with it today, thinking it may work with a harvest, profane veil, bone curse, transplant, fissure
My thoughts where, use transplant to teleport into enemy and fear enemies, use harvest to do damage, drop bone curse and fissure to trap enemy, profane viel for ward. Repeat. My main take aways after a few hours, i may be wrong so feel free to correct me if i am wrong.
My problems with this, is you cant stack dots with this weapon as whips do not benefif from infernal shade detonate, nor do they seem to benefit from buffs to spirit release, nor hellfire shade being on target.
They dont seem to refund mana to you, which they should, as whips replace the spirits, they should still functions the same, but they dont.
The fissure being converted to poison, [lich] and then using the weapon seems to ignore the nodes making it useless. Also seems to not target you, if you chose spirits target you [to stack spell damage for warlock]
The weapon is really bad, as for warlock, ignite as it js right now its useless. And for malee builds, does not benefit you.
The whips aren’t spirits, and thus don’t benefit from anything that affects the spirits hitting or Torment. They are initial hits, and scale with all the initial hit nodes on the right side of the tree. They also replace the spirits before the chance for Chaos Bolts nodes can apply. The detailed tooltip goes into this.
They are, however, affected by modifiers to spirit frequency.
