Dark Pact needs a small adjustment

Dark Pact is one of a handful of chaos spells. It has a high intelligence requirement and yet, with self cast, it requires a character with very high life and life regeneration in order to be used effectively. Most characters that have the high life and life regen lack the intelligence while characters that have the intelligence lack the life and life regen- especially characters with Chaos Inoculation.

In order to make Dark Pact usable by spell casters focused on chaos skills, not minions, I suggest that the normal mana cost be removed and the 6% damage apply to energy shield or mana instead of life.

it applies to Skeletons with life being a fallback.

people not liking that and going straight for the 'from life' mechanic.. well, Vaal Pact days are (fortunately) over

skeletons are the biggest joke ever

I played with self cast dark pact last league

- AoE is utter joke for how much life you remove from yourself. only reason it could even clear is because shield charge is like the best skill in the game
- skeletons have massive delay in the chain process so your chains are going to miss half the time or...
- skeletons fall over to white monsters in white maps if you're most dark pact builds (ie not a necro) and the chains will not even reach skeletons since they just die before chains reach them. They literally died at the rate I was outputting them in any abyss cracks, like 4.5 skeletons per second.

Not to mention if you wanna skeleton at every pack you are almost playing 2012 path of exile where a player may manual curses before every pack, pop molten shell or enduring cry immortal call etc. before engaging... and skeletons follow the PoE chain rule (need at least 3 skeletons for the chains to fully play out. cannot chain back and forth between 2 skeletons) so summoning just 1 skeleton is next level inefficiency. At least maybe with new ascendency update necros can consider using dark pact on skeletons now right?

I literally played a kitava's thirst build with summoning skeletons costing over 100 mana to help me justify wasting time summoning that shit, also skeletons are 0.5 cast speed (the fastest tier aside from channels) as it would proc some damage spells in my hat and in the end i gave up and just cast using my own life and use vaal pact,

"

well, Vaal Pact days are (fortunately) over

its still the best thing for builds serious about life leech just a whole lot shittier and generic

The best self-cast Dark Pact build I've managed to develop so far is:
https://tinyurl.com/dp-scion

"

TheNightFly написал:

Dark Pact is one of a handful of chaos spells. It has a high intelligence requirement and yet, with self cast, it requires a character with very high life and life regeneration in order to be used effectively. Most characters that have the high life and life regen lack the intelligence while characters that have the intelligence lack the life and life regen- especially characters with Chaos Inoculation.

In order to make Dark Pact usable by spell casters focused on chaos skills, not minions, I suggest that the normal mana cost be removed and the 6% damage apply to energy shield or mana instead of life.

All the Chaos lives in the top right, in the int/dex region around the trickster, or in the int area around the witch. Life lives just to the left of the witch, making it quite accessible with fairly minimal traversal - through a section of life enhancing nodes - from those two classes.

I don't believe that self-cast DP life requirements are out of line to the effect of the spell.

You also have access to a variety of items that prevent chaos damage from bypassing energy shield. I would fully support, if it does not work, those being usable to move DP damage to hit ES first; that seems entirely reasonable a cost to pay for the shorter traverse to obtain ES nodes vs life nodes for those classes.

I'd still argue that CI should not be effective with DP, though I'd entertain an argument that moving the damage to ES first would make that a possible configuration ... but that you should do damage based on how much life/ES you lose, so that you can't "cast on empty" as it were with CI providing unlimited casts.

Feels like a reasonable way to make the choice in DP a valid selection between trade-offs for what is a fairly powerful skill.

Oh, and did you grab any of the minion support nodes on your non-necro skeleton based caster? Because if you didn't, I'm not surprised they died fast. Prior to this league the necro ascendency really didn't actually bring that much to the table for skeletons, which were much more supported by the on-tree passive nodes instead.