Does Embrace the Darkness Suck?
Is it me, or does the chonk's embrace the darkness just flat out suck.
It removes spirit to provide you with effectively another resource pool for taking damage. Given it doesn't convert spirit to darkness though, the only way to scale this is by raising your level, capping out at 600 at level 100.
So lets say you're level ~80 instead and have 500 darkness.
That's, not much better than just having an extra 500 life / energy shield that recovers after 10 (or 5 with another notable) seconds.
Isn't that kind of garbage?
Look at Grasp of the void, this is an, at most, 25% damage as chaos damage at level 80 if you haven't take ANY damage in the past 10 seconds and decreases to 0 if you've taken ~500 damage in the past 10 seconds (5 with the extra notable)
Reality Rending, another notable, averages ~20% damage as chaos damage, you can obtain it as early as gaining the ascendancy, and it doesn't decrease in value if you take damage.
Like, I was looking at it thinking it seems cool, but the moment you acknowledge the fact there's no way to scale darkness outside of your level (assuming items don't exist for it), it feels insanely bad for an upwards of 6 ascendancy points mechanic.
Honestly if it at-least converted spirit into darkness as well, giving 100 + 5 per level on top of it, it might be a little better. As is though, it feels incredibly expensive for very little benefit.
That or make it so each darkness mitigates more than 1 life / energy shield.
Edit: Because I'm petty, cudo's to u/AnimeJ for blocking me because I asked for an example of something he stated was possible because I can't find one.
If anyone else can answer the question of a buff that'd require spirit being shown without the spirit cost, let me know. Since that changes things.
Comments
Based on available info...yes.
Yes unless numbers change or mechanics that interact with it are yet to be discovered it looks real bad.
It does look like it will actively make your character worse, yes.
Yea the downside of losing spirit just seems like way too much
Based on available info it is garbage but there might be some good gear or tree interactions that we don't know yet.
According to others you can do MoM CI EB(or other way to get 0ES if EB gets changed), so your life/es never get damaged and Darkness never get reserved. Combine this with Reality Rending you now always have 40%ish damage as extra chaos. Though it is at the cost of 6 ascendancy points, all of your spirit and your entire life pool replaced by mana. From there you probably need to take Ravenous Doubts and play with a physical attack skill now because mana leech only works on physical attack damage. It has something going on if we get some uniques and attack skill to go with it. Too early to tell anything I guess
It's the worst node in the history of nodes. It makes you weaker in every imaginable scenario compared to reserving <50% of your available spirit, and there's basically guaranteed to be better options for reservations we haven't even seen yet. On top of costing half of an ascendancy to get any benefit out of
Even if you're be able to reserve it instead of spirit it wouldn't be very powerful, because the more you reserve, the less powerful the innate effect gets. I think you should be able to reserve it in place of spirit, because it makes zero sense to release 6 ascendancy nodes that simply make you weaker without any redeeming qualities. Invoker gets ~100-200 bonus spirit and preventing further scaling from gear from 1 passive, so IMO it's not far fetched for chauyla monk to get ~300 bonus spirit, also preventing scaling from gear. The amount seems a bit on the high side though, so I have doubts. So when I get to first trial I'm going to allocate it and see if I can actually use it for reservation, respec should be cheap
e: for context, reserving darkness equal to normal spirit pool (280) would leave you at ~300. At 300 darkness and all 6 nodes taken in perfect scenario: it's conditional 15% Dmg as extra chaos and 300 overshield + 60/sec recovery. Now that seems to strike exactly the power level of most other ascendancy nodes, honestly still on the weak side.
Best case scenario I can think for it is evasion with mom, so it doesn't get hit often and you get to take advantage of 30% as extra chaos and the darkness is just backup for 1 shot protection. But even then it's only 15% more per 2 ascendancy points unless your scaling chaos and you don't get to take advantage of archmage while scaling mana which makes it just a weird secondary hp pool. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the point in the node
As others have mentioned, it could be very good combined with MoM and the mana leech node.
One other interaction I'm seeing is that it adds chaos damage to all your attacks provided it isn't entirely drained. If that's the case, it could enable some additional freezing when combined with Chaotic Freeze support (or whatever it is named; it allows chaos damage to build freeze on a target that has a Chaos DoT). Hand of Chayula with a curse and Decaying Hex and you've got yourself some freeze buildup on every single attack you do.
Whether that's worth it or not.. well, I suppose it's up to the player, but not really for me.
It looks to suck donkey balls. CHONK's other ascendancy points are very strong, however. That is, if you are willing to play a minigame within the game.
I thought they forgot to add "Gain Darkness equals to 100% of Spirit removed" but no it's just terrible
Imagine giving up like 5 aura for 600 ES. And it's worse than that, because it's 600 Dissolution of Flesh-lite ES !
If bosses do large chunks of our hp, yes. If bosses do lots of chip damage darkness will probably provide a surprising amount of sustain. The developers have said they want it to be more chip damage, but we will have to wait to see if they have achieved that goal.
It's a pathing node, the power is pretty much always on the other side of them.