How can we fix Hierophant?

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Tsokushin написал:

It just seems this Ascendancy is either far too narrow in scope or far too weak to be any good.

It seems to me that a lot of this is going on right now. I am confident in my hope that Ascendancies will be improved upon.

I haven't played a hierophant yet, so I can't comment directly to your suggestions.

I think hierophant is fine if you use it the way it was meant to be used. Trying to turn it into a different ascendency takes away all the flavor. I made an Es based RF build and it works great. RF in gloves gives me 20% AoE. Haven't needed it yet but planned on putting a skill maybe triggered in boots to keep my life up (not a shavs build). The mini MoM helps reduce the amount of chaos damage hits. The extra ES from Mana is pretty great. I think instead of trying to change hierophant, maybe just use an ascendency that works better for what you are trying to do.

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mark1030 написал:

I think hierophant is fine if you use it the way it was meant to be used. Trying to turn it into a different ascendency takes away all the flavor. I made an Es based RF build and it works great. RF in gloves gives me 20% AoE. Haven't needed it yet but planned on putting a skill maybe triggered in boots to keep my life up (not a shavs build). The mini MoM helps reduce the amount of chaos damage hits. The extra ES from Mana is pretty great. I think instead of trying to change hierophant, maybe just use an ascendency that works better for what you are trying to do.

What particular flavor are you referring to?

Guardians have much higher ES based RF builds. This is on top of having room for extra damage or extra defenses from the blocking tree or 30% life regen in 1 second from Time of Need.

Inquisitors can have amazing RF based builds with tons of damage with ES shield regen on Consecrated Ground, or just massive amounts of life regen on life based ones. There's also faster casting/more damage on attacks/spells.

You made a huge aoe RF probably for survivability wherein Guardians can just tank the hits with more damage from more ES and Inquisitors can burst down from more damage or have the bonus attack/cast speed to dodge hits.

And your life is not ES based if without Shavronnes, you have enough life to take a chaos damage hit. 10% is not enough to mitigate 1 shots unless you're explicitly stacking life in which case you're not ES, you're hybrid. And if you are Hybrid, how exactly are you sustaining RF burn on your ES without either Zealot's Oath or Ghost Reave?

So far, in this comparison, it just seems you want Hierophant to be mediocre in what it does when in a #'s breakdown, just the other 2 Templar Ascendancies far outstrip it in the very build you are trying.

I'd like Hierophant to be a tree about either Totems or utilizing Mana as Defense via Sanctuary of Thought. That boosts in Mana help your survivability.

Instant Totem placement sounds like an exploit waiting to happen. Scale it down to, say, 40% increased Totem placement speed (so 80% for all four nodes), or some similar, and I'd be inclined to agree.

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Nykken написал:

Completely redesign Ritual of Awakening or add more utility totems. A totem keystone that punishes you for using totems is stupid (you can even get to the point where this keystone is an overall damage loss) and there aren't enough good utility totems to justify taking the keystone in a build that doesn't use totems for damage.

There are a lot of utility totems; you're just not using enough imagination.
You are just thinking of the obvious ones - decoy, rejuvenation, devouring.
You're forgetting that the other totems can be utility as well - ancestral protector and warchief give you a buff, and any totem (even any ranged skill with ranged attack totem, or any spell with spell totem) can be used to proc on-hit effects such as chance to flee, knockback, etc...
But if you think that's all, you're forgetting that you can use auras on totems, or curses (or even curse auras?) on totems as well. Ritual of Awakening lets you have 3 different aura totems up at once. 3 free auras is pretty insane.
That's not all - a lot of other utility skills can be put on a totem as well. Detonate dead, detonate mines, Vortex, Offerings (for corpse clearing), desecrate, summon skeletons, etc...
And then that's not even mentioning the fact that "8% less Totem Damage" doesn't affect minion damage of minions summoned from the totems.

The real problem is that utility totems of the same type don't stack, so you need a separate hotkey and socket/link set for each one. 3 aura totems sounds great for making boss fights easy, until you realise it needs 3 different hotkey slots (and the extra set-up time that creates), and a 4L at minimum.

It's fine. Hierophant is very flexible, it is meant for players that like to experiment and try fun things.

Illuminated devotion and conviction of power are great and open up a ton of options.

Ritual of awakening still lets you do damage yourself, it isn't meant for pure totem users like ancestral bond is. You can also use it with utility totems or summoning totems with no penalty. Stop trying to make it the same as something else that we already can do another way.

Sanctuary of thought isn't for all builds but neither are eb or mom in general.

Having tons of possibilities is what makes poe great, just because something doesn't have a mainstream use doesn't mean they need to change. The game is better off if there are rare, intersting, non-obvious builds for the players that want to try them.

And you can't say heirophant is too narrow in scope and be ok with chieftain.

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Tsokushin написал:

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mark1030 написал:

I think hierophant is fine if you use it the way it was meant to be used. Trying to turn it into a different ascendency takes away all the flavor. I made an Es based RF build and it works great. RF in gloves gives me 20% AoE. Haven't needed it yet but planned on putting a skill maybe triggered in boots to keep my life up (not a shavs build). The mini MoM helps reduce the amount of chaos damage hits. The extra ES from Mana is pretty great. I think instead of trying to change hierophant, maybe just use an ascendency that works better for what you are trying to do.

What particular flavor are you referring to?

Guardians have much higher ES based RF builds. This is on top of having room for extra damage or extra defenses from the blocking tree or 30% life regen in 1 second from Time of Need.

Inquisitors can have amazing RF based builds with tons of damage with ES shield regen on Consecrated Ground, or just massive amounts of life regen on life based ones. There's also faster casting/more damage on attacks/spells.

You made a huge aoe RF probably for survivability wherein Guardians can just tank the hits with more damage from more ES and Inquisitors can burst down from more damage or have the bonus attack/cast speed to dodge hits.

And your life is not ES based if without Shavronnes, you have enough life to take a chaos damage hit. 10% is not enough to mitigate 1 shots unless you're explicitly stacking life in which case you're not ES, you're hybrid. And if you are Hybrid, how exactly are you sustaining RF burn on your ES without either Zealot's Oath or Ghost Reave?

So far, in this comparison, it just seems you want Hierophant to be mediocre in what it does when in a #'s breakdown, just the other 2 Templar Ascendancies far outstrip it in the very build you are trying.

I'd like Hierophant to be a tree about either Totems or utilizing Mana as Defense via Sanctuary of Thought. That boosts in Mana help your survivability.

I've been playing several characters, but you saying anything without a shavronnes is hybrid makes no sense unless you think CI is the only ES based build. All other builds have some life. I think you are confusing an RF build with a spell build that uses RF. My damage will be primarily RF damage. I'm not playing like Blade Vortex that uses RF for the spell damage boost. And why do you think you need to invest in life to play a hybrid build? Max chaos resists give you time to react. My boots make me immune to desecrated ground. Again it seems like you're talking about a blade vortex build that face tanks everything and doesn't care about mitigationg or avoiding chaos damage. Also, why do you think I don't have Zealot's Oath? The whole point of the build is to get ES regen to be able to sustain RF.

Like I was trying to say, if you want Inquisitor's damage, use inquisitor. Hierophant has other uses. Character is UncleRico on account https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/zmark1030z/characters. It's only 83 at the moment because i've been splitting time with several characters. The chest gives me a 140% multiplier to my ES regen so sustaining RF even with the 1200 or whatever life adding to the degen is not an issue. I have like 20% regen not using Vitality. Gloves give my RF +20% AoE and a 30% More multiplier to damage. Seems pretty good and the build isn't even close to being finished.

I also think he does not realise how MoM actualy worck.
Im curently having 44% MoM and i have 46% damage taken as mana.
This worck on all sorces of non DoT damage acting like Resistance or aditional life if you will.

So having 4k life, 44% MoM and 1700 ES i got just from mana/int and nothing else.
Thats total of 7K+ effective life to be one shoted not including resistances.
If i just use cople of ES nodes i can get drasticly more ES for example, MoM is life, its even better then life when you have damage taken as mana.

So you see how flexible ascendancy is actualy, you got benefits in all departments.

MoM kicks in only when the hits you're taking would've reduced your life

As for synergy between Divine Guidance and Sanctuary of Thought, it seems like it wants to be a hybrid build that takes MoM (as a backup defense mechanism against chaos damage or when your ES is at 0) for a 40% damage taken from mana before life.

Not to mention, your skills cost nothing when you're at full ES. I can see this being good for setting up before the actual fight 3 aura totems as others have suggested (which would've cost a lot of mana). And if you don't want to rely on being at full ES, you can get 50% reduced mana cost of skills from the passive tree and essentially get 100% reduced mana cost of skills with 100% uptime.

The ES and MoM nodes do interact, for EB MoM ZO characters anyway. Reserve all your mana and cover it with ES then let the life regen>ES regen from ZO take care of skill costs.

That seems to be the only viable way both Divine Guidance and Sanctuary of Thought can work together well. ES protecting life does not interact at all with MoM since only life gets its damage split to mana, which means it's either an EB build or it's some sort of weird hybrid build where you have decent ES protecting life and then use both life and mana as the ohshit cushion or something. The investment needed to get that build going would almost certainly not be worth it.

If MoM worked with ES through a unique or whatever that allowed splitting damage between ES and mana, then the combination of the two nodes would actually feel useful beyond an EB MoM ZO build.

As for the reduced mana cost while at full ES... Fuck that. Mana cost reductions need to be reliable and thanks to the MoM on Divine Guidance it is rarely possible to reliably have full ES on either life or mana.

Something really needs to be done with Divine Guidance and Sanctuary of Thought, though at the moment I don't really have good ideas since it requires a mechanics change, not a numbers change.


Illuminated Devotion... Could actually be very powerful, but it's limited by the extra links helms, gloves, and boots can get. If the corrupted Essences get rolled into the core game that would definitely expand the items Illuminated Devotion can work meaningfully with beyond a few oddball uniques.

Except for the boots. No unique or Essence-crafted boots offer any extra link options to make the leech worthwhile. The -only- pair of boots that grants an extra link or any kind of extra power to socketed gems is Deerstalker, which gives the Trap support and is thus useless. Also, the only two corruptions that give a bonus of any sort to gems in boots are the +1 or 2 levels to socketed Vaal gems, and +1 level to socketed gems. Maybe one of those corruptions could work out well enough to have the boot bonus on Illuminated Devotion actually be worthwhile, but I'm doubtful.

Yes, a 4-link can still be useful, but either there needs to be a way to get a 5-link on boots that's useful with ID or ID needs to provide mana leech as well as life leech.



Ritual of Awakening's math is:
1 totem: 92% damage
2 totems: 168% damage, 84% each
3 totems: 228% damage, 76% each
4 totems: 272% damage, 68% each
5 totems: 300% damage, 60% each
6 totems: 312% damage, 52% each
7 totems: 308% damage, 44% each

So the breakpoint is 6 totems, yet Build of the Week showed off a build that could have 10 totems out. If GGG is going to celebrate having 10 totems out, then this node needs adjustment.