Blazing Spirit (weapon blessing for force swords) applies soulblaze on enemies upon a crit, however if the enemy dies by the crit, soulblaze doesnt trigger to allow it to spread with Wildfire (psyker talent that allows enemies who die with soulblaze to spread to another nearby)
Now, is it intentional that this combination is made almost useless when an enemy dies by the crit that would otherwise trigger widfire if they didnt die to the initial crit?
Wouldn’t it be reasonable for soulblaze to spread with Wildfire regardless? It just seems like soul blaze in general and all its blessings associated to it are weak outside of venting shriek.
It’s an order of resolution problem: when they die they don’t have any active stack of wildfire, so the talent does not proc.
If they don’t die, then the blessing gets triggered and on death the talent activates.
The wildfire damage is negligeable, though, not something I’d build a character around, just a random bonus to get while hacking at a horde.
The wildfire is only negligible because of all there mechanical issues. You have blazing spirit on a number of weapons, but chaff enemies die before soulfire even triggers, so you don’t benefit at all from your perk for spreading it. Then you have a perk for soulfire, but it’s not overly impactful on elites, and spreading it to chaff enemies is largely outside of your control. Then you have a perk for spreading soulfire, but it’s limited to 4 stacks, so spreading any high stacks from an elite you attacked many times with blazing spirit is outright impossible too.
All together it’s a pitiful damage increase at a pretty great cost (2 perks, 1 blessing) - all because it’s mechanics is heavily walled by very specific restrictions and quirks.
Another issue with all DoTs is that damage is always the same, and some DoT effects that are very underwhelming in T5 at the same time contribute quite notably in T1-3.
But with bleed at least devs decided that it’s not necessary to give it some hard caps and limits absolutely everywhere, so stacking bleeding via melee attacks in fact works WAY better than soulfire ever can. It’s still pretty weak for T5 of course, but at least not exceptionally so.
The big problem I have with blazing trauma + wildfire is not so much wildfire itself (though it does have issues), nor killing enemies outright with crits (trauma’s very large outer radius tickles things). It’s the blazing spirit itself seems to have a pretty low stack cap. Changed horde spawns that often come in smaller waves also deprives you of the density for it to really start popping off.
So it appears that soul blaze in general needs to retuned along with many talents and blessing associated with it to come to parity with bleed.
It would be interesting to see, instead of a crit bleed focused build of other classes, that the psykers version be crit soulblaze, which seemed to be the initial intention, but its execution was way off.
Soulblaze is pretty bad right now. Add to that they nerfed the talent that applies stacks from 4 to 3. That may seem trivial but because of the way damage calculations work with soulblaze, losing a single stack is a pretty big nerf to overall damage it can pump out.
DoTs in general would benefit from having lower stack caps and more dmg per stack, this exponential dmg scaling is just weird
sure they could also just increase the number of stacks applied by most things but that doesnt really solve the issue of low stacks being near identical to 0
The elephant in this room is the Purgatus staff, which makes balancing the various ways of applying soulblaze a bit tricky. If they buff the incidental soulblaze application cap or rate of other weapon’s blessings then it invalidates the use of Purgatus. If they directly buff soulblaze in some way then Purgatus becomes a monster.