Mark_GGG

if some other unit casts the brand can the brand still be recalled to me?

Also more out of curiosity i assume traps(and totems) wont let me bypass the brand limit either, but a minion (in theory) could?

Totems, Traps and Mines use your skills - the Brands they create will count towards the same limits as your own Brands you cast yourself, and you'll be able to recall all of them. They'll also show in your UI that helps you keep track of your brands. Minions use their own skills, so they'll have their own Brand limits separate from yours, and you won't be able to recall them (but the minion could, if it has that skill).

Effectively you're "in charge" of all Brands created from your skills, regardless of whether you used those skills yourself or not.

My understanding is this was necessary to achieve balance goals regarding the value of bonuses granting additional levels being useful at all levels.

Yeah. They're pretty similar to Orb of Storms in this respect - a spell you cast that repeatedly damages things around it, and is still your damage.

As opposed to a totem, which is a separate entity with it's own life which actually casts spells itself to damage things.

It takes a roughly equivalent amount of total experience to reach max level as a regular gem, split over fewer level ups.

Not at this stage - numbers are still being finalised with regard to how much the base limit is and how much you can invest in raising it.

Technically yes, but they'll only be useful if you get a totem, trap or mine to cast the brand, rather than casting it yourself. They are a spell you cast that damages things, and Ancestral Bond prevents you doing that.

The Brand is a spell you're casting that directly deals damage to enemies. It's your damage, just like if you cast Orb of Storms or Fireball and they hit enemies. It just has a slightly more complicated way of working out which things you're damaging.

Of course, if a totem, trap, mine or minion casts the Brand, then they're the one dealing the damage.

There is not a currently support gem that makes supported skills interact with brands, and cannot be one that works the same way as the Totem, Trap and Mine supports, because Brands are fundamentally very different - they are themselves a spell cast by you that's damaging things repeatedly, where Totems, Traps and Mines are separate enties that themselves cast spells, and have those spells deal damage.

Discharge does not say that currently, because the detail was meaningless until the introduction of modifiers to minimum charges.

Would it show up as 1 charge with no listed duration? When you have above the minimum number of charges, do they then also show up with a duration for those charges and when the duration runs out the other charges expire while one remains?

Yes to all of the above.

No more so than it already is at 0 minimum charges.

What happens if you have 0 maximum endurance charges, but 1 minimum endurance charge?

We discussed this internally for a bit - like proton streams, we can't allow the maximum and minimum to cross. The rule implemented is your minimum charges can't be raised higher than your maximum (it could have been the other way around mechanically, but that made less sense).

In effect, maximum charges is also maximum minimum charges.

You have the difficulty of implementing those things way backwards.

This is correct. Minimum means minimum - you can't do something which would take you below that number. When you're at minimum charges, you can't lose/spend/consume any in any way.

Previously, your minimum charges was always 0. Anything that couldn't happen at 0 charges before because you couldn't lose a charge, still can't happen when you're at your new, higher minimum.

My knowledge here comes primarily from research I did for a project in high school, combined with a general interest in both languages/etymology and the historical concept of/belief in magic, not from my work at GGG. All the classes except the Shadow and Scion were named before I joined the company.

They will not take damage from impale, because that damage is reflected physical damage.

No. Impale does not add flat damage to subsequent hits, it deals relfected damage when the impaled enemy is hit. Because the damage from impale is reflected damage, your damage modifiers don't apply to it (they did apply to the initial hit which caused the impale, and thus the stored damage of the impale, but they don't apply again and double dip).

Your damage taken modifiers apply to the unmitigated damage of the impaling hit, which is then stored, but don't apply to the impale when it deals damage. The enemy's modifiers to damage taken don't apply to unmitigated damage (damage taken is mitigated damage, it's stored before this point), but do apply when the imaple actually damages them. Nothing applies twice.

The character still has a casting animation that must be finished.

That is not true of channelled skills in PoE. Channelled skills have a looping animation, which is played for as long as you're channelling. It does not have to "finish" (and never would, because it's an infinite loop). Most channelling skills also have an end animation which plays quickly when they're released, which does need to finish, but will last very little time - notably shorter than the actual "cast time" that applies to one iteration of the loop.

Traditionally, in English, witch is also unisex - some men were burned as witches, although fewer than women. Witchcraft was a name applied to a variety of traditional spiritual and religous practices that Christianity didn't like at various times, and they had both male and female practitioners.

Warlock means "betrayer", and it being considered a male equivalent of witch comes from Scots, and has only relatively recently become a popular English meaning.

To continue the random aside train, as an English speaker, Scots is a weird language to listen to - at times seeming like a dialect of English and at other times like a totally different language. ...

You are misunderstanding something. Vulnerability is not mitigation. But it is a modifier to damage taken, and damage taken is mitigated damage. Unmitigated damage is not damage taken, vulnerability cannot apply to it.

The reason vulnerability doesn't double-dip isn't because it's somehow considered mitigation, it's that what it does fundamentally applies to the mitigated damge value (damage taken), not the unmitigated one (which is stored for impale).