Some spirit nodes apply to it: more spirit frequency affects whips frequency (Stygian Current) and losing spirits for +25% dmg also removes the whips (Deepest Ravine).
Some fissure nodes don’t apply to whips: Valley of Defilement makes whips convert to poison dmg, but fire whips icon still has the tags “fire, spell” and the dmg is so low that im not sure its correct.
This is very problematic, because you can’t play poison crit whip builds while Deepest Ravine and Valley of Defilement don’t work as intended with the unique, since the whips will be criting based on a low base fire damage.
I hope this is fixed soon, because the unique has a high potential to be great.
While Spine of Malatros is definitely bugged and the whips do comically low damage, I feel like it works as intended in the cases you mention.
Spirits are transformed into whips, so it seems logical that if you have more spirit frequency you should get more whips. Actually at the moment this is the main way of scaling the damage from this item, if it’s removed we’ll lose most of our damage when using this item.
It also makes sense that if you remove the spirits you don’t get any whips because there are no spirits to transform.
That’s my interpretation of it anyway.
Same goes for the conversion, it makes sense to me that if the fissure is converted it doesn’t convert the whips, the whips are a different spell that is triggered. If you convert the fissure to poison or physical the spirits stay the same and are not converted, and still apply Torment. So if the spirits - which are not converted - are replaced by whips, the whips won’t get converted.
The only thing that should also apply to the whips from my understanding is the damage increases to the fissure (and maybe ailments it inflicts, but it seems not to atm)
Still think it’d be cool if you could convert the whips, but that does seem to work as intended imo.
