djinn sorceress ascendency - first impressions and longer feedback

Hello.
I was excited to try out the new Djinn sorceress ascendency.
What made me excited: the unique theme (it feels thematic for sure!) and the large amount of active skills - finally an ascendency that changes up my active gameplay instead of offering mainly passive benefits and it offers a lot of beautiful visuals.
Since I don't have a fully build a character for this ascendency, I will comment more on how skills feel and how they are mechanically designed and not so much on number balance which likely needs to be adjusted.
Here are my first impressions:

1) active defenses
I like the idea of pure energy shield having a more active playstyle for their defense: be it recharging it via convalescence, perfectly evading enemies for a while or as in this ascendency with an active skill like the bubble shield. This makes it more interesting gameplaywise than merely adding passively more effective hp to the character and could be the solution to the balancing of defences dilemma: a full energy shield build could have less effective hp than a full armor or full evasion character, but have active defense skills to make up for it. And hybrid energy-shield builds have something like ghost dance or barksin.

2) Navira skills:
As has likely become clear: I like the bubble shield. I also like the interaction of getting chilled ground when it is destroyed that can then be used for kiting or exploded via Naviras fracturing. I'm a little bit concerned that with good enough number scaling, it could be possible to cheese bosses by standing at the edge of the bubble shield and absorbing their melee attacks. Maybe it simply shouldn't work for normal melee attacks, while still working for something like a long range slam. It's also quite enemy environment dependent: if there are lots of swarmy melee enemies it could be pretty much useless, but it would be good versus a group of archers. There is also a visual display bug showing a 2s cast time (which I'm glad this skill doesn't have).
I find Naviras Well has too much overlap with convalescence. It would be a stronger version of it. With the bidding 3 support gem (80% (!) cd recovery) it has a very low cooldown. I don't think providing infinite energy shield sustain like that is a good idea for the long term balancing of this game. The downside is of course that it can be interrupted, but one can simply add both skills to the skill bar for the situations were thats an issue. Since it overlaps so much with convalescence that its basically the same skill, I would either have to improve convalesence (either directly or be a better version of it while being mutually exclusive with it) or do something else:
A really cool effect I would like to see added to the game is the "slow time bubble" from the sorceress in diablo 3. It's essentially a bubble that slows down projectile that enter it. Here's a short video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFpG7ApIWdE
This could replace "naviras embrace" if specced into. I'm not sure regarding the balance, but dodging slow motion projectiles is fun.

Regarding Oasis: I find the skill animation to be bland and would prefer an animation that looks more like an oasis. It could show up a short time before fading quickly into the current skill's animation. An example for such an oasis animation is the mesmer animation for "false oasis", skill 6 seen in this video starting at 1:37 until just before the purple rhombus:
https://youtu.be/tuerW_tFbkk?t=97

In general I like here that the skills feel interactive: with each other, with cold ground and especially the bubble shield also with the enemy.

3) Kelari Skills
I would like these skills to be reworked in a way that the cricical weakness feels more impactful. The idea is to build up some critical weakness stacks and then consume them for a payoff with a high damage skill. If you build up enough stacks and have a good enough crit chance from passive points and items, the crit would be more or less guranteed.
For that I would like critical weakness to change to work in such a way that the stack duration refreshes when an additional stack is applied. I believe currently they run out independently, which makes stacking up critical weakness hard. The benefit per stack should be larger, but a critical hit would remove the debuff (or maybe only a large critical hit? - large would be determined by the base-damage of the skill gem, so comets would count as large, but a single spark would not). If that doesn't work, because it doesn't fit other classes: just make that change a Kelari passive.

I like that Kelaris deception feels unique, since its possible to cast the clones at different locations or stack them at a single location for different outcomes. The exploding beetles feel pretty unique as well. Both the beetles and kelaris brutality are low damage per hit skills which makes them good condidate for the controlled destruction support gem to not consume the critical weakness stacks they build up.
Kelaris judgement (fully channeled for a large single hit) and Kelaris deception would then be good skills to hopefully cast a critical hit after building up critical weakness. An idea to support Kelaris deception in that regard would be to only let the 3rd cast in a row consume critical weakness - that would be the largest damage hit.
Since applying critical weakness is an open synergy, it could of course be consumed by any other high damage skill like comet.

4) Ruzhan Skills
Dealing some fire damage every 4s via Ruzhans Blazing sword looks visually cool. I don't think it should not give more damage for each damaging skill you've used recently - why not just let it deal more damage in general independent of playstyle?
I first misread it as "the fire djinn attacks if using a skill with at least 4s cooldown" - something like that would be a cool addition to the chronomancer ascendency, since it would fit the "using skills with cooldown" theme. So maybe chronomancer could get some time-djinn nodes...
I feel like there is some lack of synergy in this skill set or something is missing to make them more interesting: maybe some of the traps from Ruzhans trap could be of a different type and immobilize the enemy to create a synergy with Ruzhans Fury. Maybe Ruhzans Fury could generate a fire infusion.


5) lacking synergy with infusions
I noticed a general lack of synergy of this ascendency with infusions. Some infusion synergy could be added like one of the fire djinns creating a fire infusion in some way. That could be something like simply creating an infusion on a medium cooldown with Ruhzans Fury or something like "if a certain number of Ruhzans traps gets triggered, it created a fire infusion".

6) active skills vs passive power
One thing I find strange in this game is that often passive power increases from ascedencies are more powerful than the active skills offered. The active skills are usually more fun to use. This seems to be the case here.
On the other hand if the active skills were significantly more powerful than the normal skill gems, a new issue would arise: why not focus exclusively on the unlocked active skill and ignore the normal skill gems? This is less of an issue if the unlocked active skill is something like a damage buff. This is a tricky issue to deal with and likely best resolved on case by case basis. In some cases it might be actually good if the ascendency skill is a little bit stronger like investing 4 points into Kelari could grant the best skills to consume critical weakness stacks.
Maybe allocating all 8 ascendency points into the active Djinns skills could give some kind of buff? (supporting a playstyle of fully commiting to the Djinns). Maybe there could be a smaller buff for allocating 4 skill points.
As a more general idea for this issue, not neccessarely related to this ascendency, I would find it good if an active skill offered by an ascendency would offer some passive benefit (and be it just some additional passive points to make the characters tronger in general) as well. This way the active skill can change up the playstyle of the ascendency without needing to be dominatingly powerful, since the passive benefit compensates not choosing a passive benefit ascendency node.

3) the portrait and ascendency image
While I like the general design of the asdencency image, the yellow skin colour looks unappealing to me. I would prefer a normal human skin colour and a green or blue eye colour for the middle djinn. I would change the portrait in a similiar way.


4) skill damage
What didn't work out in my test was the damage scaling: I find it strange that the djinn skills do not seem to scale with the typical sorceress damage nodes like additional spell damage.
I tried switching to more a minion build, bought a cheap staff from the auction house and tried to assign some minion damage passive nodes. While the damage got higher, the first attempt did not really work out: the fire djinn skills still felt very low in damage while the earth djinn was approaching playable territory with the exception of Kelaris Deception which dealt significantly more damage than all the other djinn skills. I think one should take a look at this skill, why this happens.
While I'm not sure how good the damage would be with good minion based equipment and full passive tree optimization, I would prefer the damage scaling just to work with typical spell damage scaling instead - to have it fit better into sorceress builds. Kelari would still be in a weird spot, because there are so few physical spells in game yet, but maybe that could be fixed by adding more of them or let her scale with elemental damage. Alternatively it could become a witch ascendency.
Overall in my very limited experience the damage felt much too low. Maybe that would be different if fully optimizing minion damage - I don't know.

5) lack of support gem slots and weapon set support
Every Djinn skill should have seperate support gem slots to allow the player to customize the skills, since different djinn skills benefits from different support gems.
While the djinn passive should always work for both weapon sets, it should be possible to benefit from weapon sets by assigning each active djinn skill to a weapon set.

6) regarding the passive benefits
I can't accuratly evaluate how strong they are - they look pretty strong to me.

7) if you have a lot of time...
You could add some custom dialogue with the djinns.