Changes to the Acolyte of Chayula, buff or nerf ?

From the patch note :


What do you think ?
I'm personally not super convinced.

-Pretty sure the darkness mechanic is going to remain mostly unused, speccing into it should grant some 1700-ish additional hitpoints which is nice but no more extra damage, and having to sacrifice spirit completely seems like just too much of a downside.

-New Lucid dream is a pretty solid buff IMO, getting triple the amount of purple flames and taking them up to 10% extra chaos (instead of 7) should be a pretty consistent and pretty massive damage boost.
EDIT: wait, actually no, with the existing effects of Lucid dream being removed we'll actually lose half duration and about 4% effectiveness of flames, in exchange for (theoretically) picking up 3 times as much.
This is not a all a significant buff, might actually even be a nerf)

-No more ES leech but life leech from chaos damage instead, doesn't seem super interesting unless paired with Essentia Sanguis gloves (converts life leech into ES leech)

-Void illusion skill, leaves a 1hp illusion remnant when rolling, lasts 2 seconds and explodes when attacked, 3 meter radius, 4.8 second cooldown, 410% of attack damage at level 12.
Unless we also get some support gems to boost these illusions, I'm not sold on this at all

-Volatily, gain 1 volatility stack on inflincting ele ailments, take no self damage from volatility explosion. Probably going to be the bread and butter of this class, still seems a bit clunky to use properly.
I assume we're going to get some gems and passive nodes to support this.

-Chaos damage contributes to ele ailments, swapping element every 2 seconds. Pretty nice, I hope the elements will rotate in a consistant order so you can really try to play around with it, otherwise it will probably be a grab it and forget about it type of node.

What are your impression ?
Can you already think of uniques and techs that can make Chayula boy competitive this league or is he going to stay an anbandon-tier character ?

My thoughts are that with what little I know I'm curious to finally try this Ascendency and I want to go with the new node for the unarmed quarter staff attacks.

Maybe it still sucks.. maybe not.

It's kind of hard for me at least to get much of a grasp beyond I want to try it because... have to wait and see how the changes to supports gems play into it along with node changes and there are enough changes on unique items that I just figure I'll give it a whirl. Along with whatever items they add this league and how some of those may play in.

I'm pretty sure I saw a set of gloves in the live stream that added to your unarmed attacks... as an example. At least I think it was gloves.

I experimented with invoker a bit in initial EA after I got my witch into end game. In 0.2 after my Witch was endgame... I really wanted to try an Acolyte build, but it just didn't look fun.

So this league I'm going to try it out regardless.

I'm still wondering if the volatility that you gain is effected by the 0.1 sec internal timer of gaining Volatility. If you were a Hollow Palm Storm Wave chaos acolyte monk, if you hit a whole screen of enemies and applied 25 ailments to the group would you get 25 volatility or 1. Because if it is the former I would look really forward to the zooming around getting purple orbs, volatility, and leeching so fast that you're immortal with tons of chaos damage.

I'm just worried that where is the extra 5sec time on Lucid dreaming it used to get from the talent that is supposedly "baked in" While the effect bonus seems to be halved too?