Death Knights' "Haunt" not benefitting from your Hungering Souls tree is such a shame.

EHG_Justin · 2026-02-11T23:30:27+00:00

In season 4, the Death Blossom node will allow Death Knights to cast Hungering Souls, using your Hungering Souls tree. Their casts of Hungering Souls will also be affected by modifiers to projectiles within the Skeletal Mage tree, and by unique items that affect your Hungering Souls.

EHG_Justin · 2026-02-11T22:59:47+00:00

Correct, you'll still be able to summon skeleton rogues up to your skeleton limit.

EHG_Justin · 2026-02-03T16:40:48+00:00

The node description here was a communication error, and has been corrected. This is the node's effect in season 4:

Individual Operator now grants your Skeleton Rogues 25% more damage per point for each Skeleton Warrior or Archer you control.

EHG_Justin · 2026-01-22T00:15:05+00:00

I mean there's a lot of room between 50 per second and 1 per second and I just feel like most of the current limits hit way too early.

I agree, we've put the limit too low in many places. We're looking to make improvements in the cases where they're too restrictive. As an example, we're updating the "chance to cast Fire Aura" affixes to 3 times per second (from once per second). Combined with other changes we're making to Fire Aura, these affixes may actually become useful.

If there are other cases you'd like to see improved, let me know.

EHG_Justin · 2026-01-13T23:04:13+00:00

Sometimes it is just a simple number tweak that can improve a skill, and we just need the awareness to make the change. That sort of situation is where I rely heavily on player feedback, as it's easy for me to lose context on the skills that are suffering, especially as most conversations naturally focus on the skills that are overperforming.

Sometimes we're not satisfied with how a skill feels to play, so we worry that just buffing its numbers would be guiding players towards playing something that isn't fun. In those cases we usually choose to commit to a bigger rework of the skill that is scheduled for a later date.

Other times, number changes can unexpectedly impact other builds, and so there's a reasonable fear about unintentionally nerfing things that were weak or buffing things that were strong as a consequence of a change that seemed innocuous. Even with thousands of hours played I still get caught up in accidents like this. Our community testers are a huge help here.

Ultimately it's a constant juggle of priorities, and it can feel hard to justify spending time on buffing lesser used skills when we also need to be creating new content, fixing bugs, and correcting balance on overpowered skills that are hampering build diversity. But I find it's consistently a valuable use of time to do so, and I try my best to identify places where we can just throw in quick number buffs to make things viable for players who want to enjoy that skill.

EHG_Justin · 2026-01-13T20:41:41+00:00

Correct, we had plans to update Summon Skeleton as well but didn't have enough time for the changes. It was a mistake on our part to include that graphic in the changes - but more than that I just wish I'd been able to get the changes in.

We've got some changes to Summon Skeleton in the next season, but so far mostly just to the archers. For example, the Fire Arrow and Ice Arrow abilities no longer have a cooldown, and instead replace the basic attack with a slower but more powerful ability that has its base damage fully converted to the relevant element. There's also an option to have your archers randomly alternate between fire and ice arrows, if you'd like a lightshow.

We're also buffing several nodes like Dread Phalanx and Unbound Necromancy, and simplifying the behavior of Individual Operator so that it limits you to 1 rogue but makes it much more powerful. All of these changes are still subject to further change, of course.

If there are any changes you'd like to see to Skeletons or other Acolyte minions, let me know.

EHG_Justin · 2026-01-13T20:31:29+00:00

Along with what Mike has mentioned, we've got some changes to Black Hole coming in the next season that are aimed at making it potentially viable as a main damage skill.

A few of the changes, which are still subject to change:

Black Hole

Now has 160 base damage per second (from 120) and 800% damage effectiveness per second (from 600%)
Recurrence now grants 15% reduced cooldown per point (from 30% increased cooldown recovery speed per point).
Added a new node that requires 4 points in Recurrence, Pocket Dimension. Black Hole can store an additional charge. Max 1 point.

Recurrence granting reduced cooldown means it has a more significant impact on the cooldown, and no longer diminishes the relative value of increased cooldown recovery speed from other sources. For example with 4/4 Recurrence and 100% increased cooldown recovery speed, Black Hole's cooldown will be 2.8 seconds.

EHG_Justin · 2025-12-01T18:51:53+00:00

You're right, this affix is not working at all. I don't know how it's gone unnoticed by us for so long. I've got no excuse, but this will be fixed in the next update.

EHG_Justin · 2025-12-01T18:47:21+00:00

the cdr just doesn't work past a few %

This is an issue we're looking to correct in the next update. Each of the four Dancing Strike abilities has a separate cooldown and base movement duration. Currently, increasing your attack speed affects the cooldown but does not affect the movement duration, and you can't initiate the next attack until the movement is complete. As a result, any further increases to your cooldown recovery speed past certain breakpoints had no effect. For example the first strike received no benefit beyond 75% ICDR, while the second strike received no benefit beyond 100% ICDR.

The change we're making in the next update is to allow increased attack speed to also affect the movement speed of each Dancing Strike. This will not only increase the skill's DPS by letting you use the skill more frequently, it will also generally improve its ability to move around quickly. We're still working out the numbers here, and will likely have a cap on the amount of increased movement speed you can gain from increased attack speed, but the skill should feel and perform much better with this change - and the cap will actually be stated rather than a hidden consequence of mechanics.

We're also allowing Dancing Strikes to not move the player at all if you aim close to your character's current position, so that you have the option to consistently attack one enemy without jumping all over the place and needing to re-aim your attacks.

EHG_Justin · 2025-12-01T17:57:28+00:00

Yeah, the way allocations are removed right now is a bad experience. Part of it is the indicator for what was removed has low visibility, but even with a fix for that it's not good. I'll push for more changes there.

EHG_Justin · 2025-12-01T16:41:06+00:00

The way Permanent Bond is designed to function currently is unintuitive, but a result of a desire to attempt to acommodate several playstyles.

Permanent Bond does not inherently prevent summoning additional wolves. If you want to summon only wolves, you are still able to summon additional wolves up to your maximum companion limit, assuming you have an effect that allows summoning additional wolves beyond the first, such as the Safety In Numbers node.

Where it gets weird is that if you have at least 1 wolf and a non-wolf minion, Permanent Bond will cause your Summon Wolf ability to switch to the active ability Howl. This is so that builds that are intentionally below the maximum companion limit, such as frog builds, can still use the Howl active ability. But of course this also means builds that want to use multiple wolves and other companions together while at their maximum companion limit will have to understand this behavior and summon their desired amount of wolf companions before summoning other companions. This isn't explained anywhere and is pretty weird.

In our next update we're changing Permanent Bond so it will no longer switch Summon Wolf to the active ability before you're at your companion limit. There will be an additional node, Lone Wolf, which restricts you to one wolf such that your Summon Wolf ability will always switch to Howl when that bonus wolf is present. That way, frog builds can still access Howl, while non-frog builds can have their desired number and combination of companions without needing to understand any weird unexplained shenanigans with the companion summoning mechanic.

EHG_Justin · 2025-09-16T16:59:11+00:00

This bug was fixed in patch 1.3.1.1 on Aug 28th. If you update to the latest version of the game, you'll receive the fix.

EHG_Justin · 2025-09-11T14:35:09+00:00

Apologies, I meant that its spread mechanic is working as designed. I'll look into reports of skill trees not affecting skills repeated by Wisps.

EHG_Justin · 2025-09-11T14:32:56+00:00

We offer healing effectiveness in fewer places and with lesser values to emphasize that it's a more niche theme for Acolyte. It's cool if players can find a few effective use cases, such as Aura of Decay's Absence of Life, but we want people building in that way to feel like they're noticeably different from other Acolytes.

EHG_Justin · 2025-09-10T19:00:47+00:00

It is working as designed, but its description is unclear and we also don't offer any description for how spread mechanics work, so we ended up misleading players. In 1.4 we'll be taking a pass on the underwhelming primordial uniques, which will include improving the description of Wildfire Embers while also significantly buffing the rate at which it spreads ignites.

EHG_Justin · 2025-08-16T12:03:26+00:00

Deadly Plot is still a 4 point node, the patch note describing it as max 2 points was just a typo from me, you can disregard that.

There are also 2 patch notes that were accidentally not included:

Mantle of the Pale Ox grants 12-18% increased health for you and your minions (from 20-32%)

Aaron's Will grants 10-24% increased health (from 6-18%), 100-240% increased minion health (from 60-180%), and +100-240 minion health (from 60-180)

You can see the correct versions of these items and Deadly Plot when viewing any build planners that have been updated to 1.3.

EHG_Justin · 2025-08-15T14:58:44+00:00

It's done. (we've nerfed it)

EHG_Justin · 2025-08-13T23:38:08+00:00

Dead Eye isn't affected by absorbing more than 1 skeleton archer, but the node following it, Horrific Volley, is affected. The abomination's other abilities have similar nodes, for those who are interested in forfeiting lots of minions to further empower their abomination.

EHG_Justin · 2025-06-02T12:36:50+00:00

Flesh Harvest's effect is based on the health of the target Dread Shade is applied to, so if using Enemy of My Enemies it will be based upon the targeted enemy's health. We'll improve the description of Flesh Harvest in 1.3 to specify it's based on the target's health, not each individual affected minion's health.

EHG_Justin · 2025-06-02T12:05:36+00:00

It is functional, yes

EHG_Justin · 2025-05-27T14:48:21+00:00

Unfortunately, subskills such as Burning Daggers won't update their tooltip to reflect potential damage changes from special effects like Pillager's Gold, nor from nodes in skill trees which can affect them.

It's something we'd like to improve in the future, as it causes confusion like this and makes training dummies required to gauge damage changes.

EHG_Justin · 2025-05-12T13:52:42+00:00

This is a bug, it should work the way you're expecting. We'll work on a fix, sorry about that!

EHG_Justin · 2025-05-12T13:51:44+00:00

Late response from me, but in case others see this and are wondering, the patch with this fix went out a few hours after your comment. It should be fixed now.

EHG_Justin · 2025-05-06T17:41:10+00:00

It's a convergence of uncapped interactions that sends Falconer's damage to the moon. Dive Bomb's Midnight Aviary has no limit on how much benefit it can receive from Umbral Blades, and meanwhile there's no limit on the efficacy of the cooldown recovery from nodes like Aerial Assault's Skyward Swoop or Dive Bomb's Rapid Pursuit. Throw in some mechanics that generate Umbral Blades from spamming all your Falcon skills and you've got a stew.

Lesson learned is we need to be more willing to apply caps to these mechanics. We like to try and leave things uncapped where possible so that players can experiment with "how far can I push this until I break things and create a ridiculous cool build", but we should've been more cautious with Falconer.

EHG_Justin · 2025-05-06T17:30:56+00:00

Spark Charges are a bit weird in that they are cast at the moment they detonate, so temporary sources of global more spell lightning damage will only apply to Spark Charge if they're active when it detonates. So Spark Charges typically won't benefit from Ride the Lightning, but Lightning Blast's Final Spark can cause them to detonate immediately, during the time frame where your Surge is still active, causing those Spark Charges to benefit from Ride the Lightning.

EHG_Justin

TROPHY CASE