I’ll preface this by saying I’m sure the devs are aware of this. I’d just like to share why I don’t find the blight necromancer fun to grind with.
If I invest affixes, greater affixes and master working crits into increasing my blight skill rank I can achieve 25 ranks of blight; 8 from amulet, 8 from gloves, 4 from harlequin crest, and 5 from skill points.
This would be an amazing achievement within a season, especially for a solo self found player like myself. However, if I did all this, the base damage of my blight tick would be ~1903. Meanwhile, the base damage of an ebonpiercer tick is ~8,172 with a single bolt hitting the enemy, and ~32,687 with all four hitting the enemy.
Note: These numbers are using a 2h axe and account for blight’s damage being spread out over 6 seconds and ebonpiercer’s over 3 seconds, as well as damage over time effects ticking twice per second. Even if they were spread over the same duration we’d still have a large discrepency.
For me, building a blight necromancer feels bad because the “chase” effectively ends with a top damage roll on my ebonpiercer. This is even more true if/when wither gets capped at 1200. Achieving that much intelligence is trivial.
I’d enjoy the build a lot more if the efforts to increase the rank of the skill, which is typically the greatest way to improve the effectiveness of the skill, were rewarded in the effectiveness of the skill.