I discovered today that the legendary aspects for necromancer that create blights, such as the one that creates a blight pool when you cast bone prison, or the one that causes your sever ghosts to leave pools of blight behind, actually do more damage than blight if its hard casted.
This appears to be intentional, but the design of those aspects seems a little counter productive. Blight seems primarily useful as the main essence spender for a summoner necro build, but if blight is technically stronger when its used with aspects that don’t fit into blight builds, it seems to me like it has a bit of an identity crisis. Its also a shame that there are legendary aspects that result in stronger blights when you aren’t casting blight as opposed to when you are.
Those aspects which create Blights also activate aspect of the Void (the one that pulls enemies).
Sever + Empowering Reaper aspect is way better than Blight by itself because Sever has instant damage, benefits from Crit (unlike Blight), can make enemies Vulnerable (or get a 28% damage bonus with 14 minions) and then it can create a Blight that boosts yourself and minions by 15% anyway. Sever also has the Greaves of the Empty tomb unique.
Bone Prison has a cooldown, but you can lower that easily with Decrepify (or just CDR) and you can combine Plunging Darkness with Void to get a Bone Prison that sucks enemies in, makes them vulnerable, and is a 100-200% stronger Blight.
Hell, 1 point of Blighted Corpse Explosion does almost as much damage as 9 points of Blight and has a much bigger radius. And Blighted Corpse Explosion has Howl from Below (and potentially Black River if it gets fixed).
Blight seems to me to easily be the worst core skill - even with the Wither Legendary Node and pumping Willpower like a madman.
Yeah it is, I dont even bother with the aspect for prison any more and just use the 3 skill points elsewhere and gained an aspect slot - im pretty sure my overall damage went up when i stopped using it, supposed 15% buff or not, and prison without it still procs mendeln, and as to actually having it on the skill bar - no chance
Sever is terrible for Controllers in my opinion based on usage.
Not being able to actually pick your target like you can with M/K hurts the usage when it only travels to the target in front of the horde.
If that wasn’t the case. I’d be using it instead of blight for sure.
But blight aspect pulls them together and when they start being pulled towards me I just fire off blood wave and keep using blight to pull enemies into the waves as the knockback pushes them further away than the blight pull brings them closer.
Blight with aspect also works as a mini interrupt it seems.
Wait for the bigger ones to que up their hit and them hit with blight and it seems to reset their “swing timer” after the land from the pull.
Blight would be so much better and more comparable if the dot portion added a debuff that ticked for 6 seconds after leaving the blighted circle.
Backloaded dot damage ability with a small radius hurts it as well.
Works pretty well, bit faster clears than bonestorm setup I had and 1 less aspect slot that I can use for something else.
Definitely has it’s uses. But on M/K I would definitely use Sever over blight 100%
Long term Sever will win over Blight mainly because of Crit.
It has always been a huge way to scale damage in Diablo and until Dots can crit (change Wither legendary node to crit chance and crit damage in some way for shadow over time effects,) or just let all dots crit if you think you can balance it across the classes.
Ive been primarily using blight for the 15% bonus minion damage, but my concerns are less build specific and more skill specific. It just feels bad to have several aspects that produce buffed blights, but not if you actually take blight itself.