The lucky lightning one obviously they wanted to make the Breach necklace valued, which is probably isn't to the extent they're hoping, kind of like how The Pandemonius and Xoph's Heart are both really, really good necks but the lightning one was incredibly lacking.
The removal of the -1 proj seemed like a nerf, but they added two proj (one normal, one bow) to the tree so I'm guessing that's why they removed it. Still in a spot down by Raider that most Elementalists aren't even dreaming of touching on an attack tree. Wanders for sure will probably head for it or Thread of Hope it, but casters with Arc, not likely unless they're down there for the life nodes and power/frenzy charges.
The real weird one is the chaos resist clusters. It was a lot of chaos resist, like 46% before mastery or something, but seems weird. Especially now that phys as extra chaos is a map mod.
It is funny they did 0 to minion masteries. Minion Attack masteries are incredibly underwhelming whereas Minion Defense masteries have some amazing QoL stuff. Maybe they know what they're doing considering every minion build takes about 4-5 entire Minion Attack wheels. They said they've "noted" the complaints so maybe next pass, but outside of DPS Spectres I think minions are still in a really good place. SRS poison is a top build, regular SRS can reach 5-10m dps with little investment, skeletons come in a variety of flavor with poison, regular, dark pact, and mages. Zombies are still pretty fucking good even though they're not at their legacy The Baron numbers. Golems are strong if not the T18 100% delirium Carrior golem carry builds they were, they're still close to that with heavy investment. And Absolution is a low-key absolute monster and now that there's Vaal Absolution you've got help clearing some of the more dense areas. I'm planning to Rathpith Necromantic Aegis Absolution, again, this league to see what I can do with it. I got it to a comfortable 20m+ Shaper dps, but skelly mages just cleared maps and had so much more QOL for me as well as getting to something like 40m+.
Honestly the people who should be mad are slammers. They didn't get shit one way or another. This league mechanic seems very reminiscent of Ultimatum where I played a Seismic Slammer and it was great. Run around, shout, hit twice, shout, then blow up the entire Ultimatum bubble. It was pretty cool combo mechanics, but they've lost like 30-50% of their DPS from Warcry nerfs and 2hand weapons just haven't scaled like other weapons and uniques for other builds have recently. We'll see if there's some mega 2hand Crucible shit to help slammers, I could definitely see playing one again and in terms of defense since Ultimatum they've actually just gotten tankier due to passive defense changes for everyone else (suppress didn't exist, lul).
Triggerbots looking complicated. It's going to be an Expedition type situation where you really, REALLY need to figure out your mana costs as they said the bots trigger your mana cost again for each spell, making a 30 mana spell effectively cost 60 mana every time it's triggered. With some reduced mana cost, maybe the hybrid life cost, EB, minus mana cost, and some other shit you may be okay, but this alone is going to turn off most people. Kind of sucks because that was the coolest part of the Ascendancy the rest was just big stats. Reminds me of the Slam Clone in the Chieftain tree which should be an Ascendancy defining thing, but just kind of doesn't exist.
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