Mine skill suggestion: Prismatic Munitions

Mines really need a primary offensive skill. Leveling using freeze trap is awful.

Mines offer a really interesting play experience of letting you set an extensive trap before hand, or triggering a single target skill in a way that can deal with hords of monsters more effectively. They're the mechanic in the game that (in my opinion) most strongly rewards good mobility and positioning.

PoE's full of homages to older games. Prismatic spray is a DnD spell which hit opponents with seven different types of damage, which is in itself pretty awesome. That said, for PoE, it's kind of a boring way to handle a cool idea. We don't really need more point-and-blast skills.

So, it occurred to me that prismatic mines could be an excellent way to implement the skill into PoE, as well as play with normal mine mechanics a bit.

Rather than delivering a prismatic payload all at once, each laid mine would pick a damage type, and the damage type wouldn't overlap with that of already laid mines (so if a fire mine had been laid, it could lay anything but a fire mine). The base number of mines handily matches the number of base damages in PoE: physical, cold, fire, lightning, and chaos.

And rather than dealing all their payloads simultaneously (like normal mines), they would cycle, each mine firing shortly after the prior mine had. I think it would be most interesting if this trigger cycle repeated in relation to the number of laid mines (such as 1 cycle per 2-3 deployed mines), and accelerated as it went. If the player lays 6 or 7 mines, these could trigger a prismatic bang at the averaged position of all laid mines (the eye of the storm), or just cause a simultaneous discharge of the prior mines.

I'm imagining the actual damage being dealt through a flame surge like AoE, although it could vary between payload types, to make passively supporting with gems more or less effective. It could be dealt via a projectile that travels from one mine to the next, which would be hard to use, but cool (prismatic tornado). Lots of options.

This would allow you to just spit out a random mine here or there for trash mobs, but significantly stronger traps could be set rare/boss monsters, highly rewarding knowledge of movement, positioning, maps, etc. The sequential aspect of the damage dealing allows for sustained damage while the player lays the next set of mines (which current mines lack), or baits/keeps a boss in the center of the trap. It also allows for the use of elemental equilibrium (which could use some love since spell echo), although if it proves too strong, the skill could be balanced in various ways to dampen this synergy (randomly selected elements which could overlap, more prismatic/multi-element bangs, more chaos/phys, etc). It's prismatic element also takes advantage of mine scaling and passives, using mine nodes, rather than the rather limited amount of raw spell damage nodes a self-cast version of the skill would use, allowing for better support of the numerous damage types. It also gives an incentive to actually lay the full number of mines, instead of treating mines as just an off-set casting method.

Bit long, but hopefully someone found the idea interesting.