Rory_Rackham

This change was a result of us discovering that Ballista Totems could keep using Vaal Rain of Arrows and Vaal Burning Arrow with Hateforge with no limit at all (as they ignore all costs, which was never tested because it was assumed at the time that they worked slightly differently), but as far as we could tell nobody was doing this build (and it requires no investment other than owning the gloves). We decided to change it quickly before it became known, but by no means should it have been changed without any warning or patch note. I'll have to investigate how this happened.

We weren't aware of the trap use case, and it's definitely not something we'd want to change mid league. We usually only nerf something mid-league if it far outclasses anything that is otherwise possible (like the unlimited Rain of Arrows) or give unlimited damage or damage immunity. I'll look into having this changed temporarily to only apply to totems for now, as soon as we can deploy the restartless ...

This is probably an actual enchantment that has a stat that isn’t being described. If you hold on to the item it’ll be fixed in an upcoming update, most likely!

The reason comes down to the area of each impact being significantly larger, in a smaller area, so each enemy is hit significantly more often per impact than before. I’ll see if I can confirm the updated radius when I get the chance, but off the top of my head it’s hitting targets more than twice as often per impact, maybe even three times as often as before.

The idea was just to make more use of the powerful Split mechanic by introducing it at low levels. I wasn't aware that it was already good with Shattering Steel!

Ah there is more info in the skill reveal post coming soon that'll explain all the details, I shouldn't spoil any more!

A generous helping of Frost for the orb, a splash of Hildryn for the shield cost, and a dash of Harrow for the crit buff.

It's also worth noting that Lancing Steel was inspired by playing a whole lot of Blaze Artillery Protea. How they build up damage is kinda the opposite, but you can still see the inspiration!

Previously, because of how the stat was worded, an attack with a mace while using a dagger in the off-hand would benefit from the "Damage with Ailments from Attack Skills while wielding a Dagger" stat, but not the "Damage with Daggers" stat. Now, none of that applies to the Mace hit.

Conditional modifiers like "Damage for each remaining chain" would apply to ailments, but not to non-ailment damage over time.

When we combined the hit and ailment damage stats, Wrecking Ball had the change made, but the new stat wasn't described/displayed. This will be fixed for release!

Area modifiers only apply to the explosions of Stormbind, not the rune sizes. Critical chance should be rolled per rune explosion.

Rune detonations can overlap their area, hitting multiple times. You can detonate un-upgrded runes, so a very short cast is all that is needed to set off the detonation.

The multiplier to AoE is only for Blade Vortex blades detonated, so if they cascade to other blades then no additional area will be applied.

Blade Blast with Spell Cascade only gets the extra area of effects on the initial cast; detonations of other blades won't have the extra areas.

Spell Echo and Unleash count as casting the skill yourself.

Animated lingering blades don't still count as lingering blades, so you can't re-animate them or detonate them with Blade Blast.

This was moved, but I've now moved it back again. Sorry about that! It will be back in position for release.

After some investigation, it seems that it randomly drops two or three if you have 5 volleys, picking randomly based on action id, which is close to random.

Sorta; The total area you saw was still being applied, and there was the same amount over overlap; It was better for the critical chance stats on the gem, but less total area if you knew the size of each damage area and their distances between them.

The Bladefall change warrants some explanation, mainly because nothing has actually changed. When setting up the skill gem's Labyrinth enchantments, we unintentionally used the same stat description for both, which resulted in the skill gem saying it would have 'additional Volleys'. This was never the case -- Bladefall always had and was always intended to have 5 volleys by default. When updating the description on the website's gem, there was a bit of a miscommunication. For that, we apologise. Bladefall still just has 5 volleys, and the Labyrinth enchantment still adds additional volleys. Nothing has changed, we've just fixed the description.

I've looked into this a bit more, it's semi-random rather than rounding down with blades being left behind. It'll average out to ~50% of blades over multiple casts, but per cast can vary up or down by one.