So, I played around with the new Symbols of Hope for a few hours last night and came to the conclusion that the devs really didn’t know how to approach the Divine Flare playstyle from Sigils of Hope and converting it to the new Passive use Symbols of Hope.
To preface this, Divine Flare is a node that activates a nova dealing heavy fire damage based on the number of symbols consumed, heavily reduces the cooldown of Symbols of Hope and removes its active damage reduction buff
So where’s the problem? Firstly, the drastically reduced cooldown of 80% (3.6 seconds) means that the active is ready far sooner than you’d have 3 symbols back without investment into the “symbol aquisition rate” node, but even capped that node still has a 50/50 chance of giving you the 3 sigils back by the time the cooldown is up to recast Divine Flare. It has a 10% chance on kill (or hitting a rare/boss) to give you a single symbol back, but in practice that’s incredibly rare. This means that if I want to use it on Cooldown, I cannot get 4+ symbols as I’ll never have more than 3 at a time when casting and will often only have 2. This brings me to the mana cost, even if I was fine with eating the chance for 2 by speccing into “you always get one symbol back” the mana cost just isn’t realistically sustainable and the only node for Symbols of Hope that affects the mana cost also improves the duration of active effects, which divine flare removes! There’s also no way to passively activate Symbols of Hope except Orian’s Sun Seal, which requires you to drop below your Endurance Threshold. This leads me to the assumption that Symbols of Hope, and Divine Flare by proxy. is meant to be an entirely passive ability that happens to work as an “oh crap!” button.
Here’s the issue, Directly activating Symbols gives you a 40% per symbol (120% with 3) to recast! but only if it hits a rare or a boss!!! That’s worthless! Why waste my points activating it directly if it’s only doing anything special against a rare or a boss? And if you spec into buffing Divine Flare for those moments you drop below your Endurance Threshold, then good luck buffing it’s passive abilities because it takes 9 (11 if you want to max the symbol acquisition rate) of the 20 base specialization points, and that’s not including the 4 points for the chance to recast on direct use or the 4 points for the ailment cleanse and chance to blind nodes (which would be 17/20 (19/20 with the maxed acquisition rate). Leaving you with 11 maximum spare points to spend on buffing it’s passive abilities.
More importantly, Divine Flare is STRONG, so it really incentivizes using it yourself, but as I said, the fact that it just doesn’t synergize with anything else in the node tree makes it feel awkward.
By way of Comparison, the equivalent playstyle with Sigils of Hope used the chance on kill to acquire a symbol with the fact that Divine Flare was activated automatically when you gained a symbol while you already had one and that it chained against even regular enemies (like Abyssal Echoes) for a mana cost, creating these really satisfying chain explosions periodically as you fought enemies. Symbols of Hope’s Divine Flare playstyle could, in my humble opinion, benefit from a second look with the thought of what the devs really want the node to be.
Is it there to passively punish enemies when using Orian’s Sun Seal? Then why lower it’s cooldown to 3.6s?
Is it there to be a powerful but rarely used nuke? Again, why lower it’s cooldown?
Is it meant to be a spammable active? Then why does it cost so much mana and not receive symbols fast enough?
Is it meant for bossing? Then why buff it’s aoe so drastically?
Is it meant for clearing packs of enemies? Then why does it only chain on rares and bosses?
It feels like it’s trying to do everything and suffering for it. I propose the following options: replace the “10% chance on kill or hitting a boss/rare to gain a symbol” with an “x% chance on kill or hitting a boss/rare to cast Symbols of Hope” and/or make the “chance to chain for free on boss/rare hit per symbol consumed” to “chance to chain on hit per symbol consumed for a portion of the mana cost” while keeping it a “when directly cast” effect.
This creates two distinct playstles of a strong but mana heavy active crowd clear ability or a passive buff that also periodically deals AoE damage
Edit:
Alternatively, I’d be happy with a rework of Orian’s Sun Seal to cast Symbols automatically every 5-10 seconds and/or letting Judgement’s Symbol of Sacrifice activate Symbols of Hope instead of just consuming the symbols. But preferrably, just adjust the nodes mentioned above, even if it requires nerfing the divine flared damage a bit (it’s REALLY Strong)