Let’s talk Lich and Chaos Skills

Haven’t seen anyone discussing the new ascendancy yet as all the hype seems to focus on Hunter issues.

I’m having a lot of fun finally playing a self-cast chaos witch. But a few specific changes simply make absolutely no sense and are quite frustrating as they could be very fun if they worked right.

Ascendancy nodes: My only real issue here is Rupture the Soul - for a quarter of my total ascendancy points, I can get a less dependable version of Impending Doom. Why???

Gems:

Hexblast: Without Hexblast, there are two self-cast chaos spells, ED and Contagion. It’s fun to play around with the mechanics of curses, spread, and scaling damage, but Hexblast used to introduce at least one more self-cast element that felt decent to use. Now it requires an incredibly delicate dance, and the frequency at which I can proc it scales inversely to my skill duration, which is something I need for all of my DOTs. Hexblast alone isn’t worth decimating the sustainability of my other skills, so it’s effectively pretty worthless.

Burning Inscription: I hoped to build around scaling int and mana to do a lot of damage with curses on the ground - decaying hex, impending doom, and burning inscription. One frustration here is the fire damage synergizes with absolutely nothing else. Additionally the area of effect of the burning ground doesn’t scale with the curse.

Hexbloom: Worthless, as contagion spreads curses.

Decaying Hex and Impending Doom: My only concern with these, while I love them, is there’s a very limited way to scale them since we cannot level support gems. It will only scale with my mana, int, and chaos damage multiplier. I imagine this will fall flat as I get further.

Let’s hear all y’all’s thoughts