Skills that should be improved for 0.5- The Sweep Up

0.5 is looming, and since there is still a bit of time until it's release, I thought it was time to talk about a bunch of skills that for some reason or another aren't played.

I'm purposely ignoring skills released in 0.4 because they are newer and honestly most of them are pretty decent.

As it stands; a bunch of skills are lacking in one way or another; be it mechanically or strictly just weak numerically, they are either too niche, or too weak to be used over other skills in the archtype (without just choosing to play a much weaker skill).

This post is in no way indicating these skills cannot be made to clear all content in the game; it is simply indicating skills that could greatly benefit from adjustment and are too niche or far weaker than the alternatives. I'm also sure I'm going to miss many!

Class Specific Skills

Both Manifest and Temper weapon have abysmal play rates- Even among SoK players, they are selected less than 5% of the time.

Manifest Weapon- Even with last patches AI adjustments; this skill is rough. The AI is still a bit wonky; but mostly, the damage this skill can deal with absolutely min maxing every aspect of it - is far too low. It desperately needs some skill level scaling; it is functionally identical from level 1-20. To buff it should receive some base scaling or additional weapons scaling per level. It's currently barely useable in any meaningful way.

Temper Weapon- On paper this ability sounds awesome; in practice, it is super clunky. Its hard to say how additional melee weapon types would benefit this skill; but conservatively, the charge time should be improved, it should get the attack tag, and it should activate another combust on each anvil hit so that you aren't a complete sitting duck while charging it up.

Blood Boil- Should apply to unique enemies at a minimum, but should also be able to be triggered on attacks against unique enemies.

Ritual Sacrifice- Very cool thematically but unless the game is slowed down an insane amount; the ability is just really rough. If it procced automatically, I could see it getting some form of play as a ghetto headhunter.

Inevitable Agony- This skill has the perfect balance of clunkiness, ineffectiveness against bosses and being generally weak across the board.

Unravelling- This is super neat actually; it's just locked behind an absolute sac of 2 volatility nodes. It's not so powerful that it should be either. Making this a 2 point pickup could definitely help chayula's play rate a little.

Void illusion- This is also pretty neat; it could benefit from more tags to scale the damage, increasing the scaling further or a cooldown buff or something along those lines.

Concoctions- I'm not sure where to begin with these; combined, they have less than a 1% play rate amongst pathfinders. These should just be removed from the pathfinder tree and replaced with gems or buffed in countless ways to make them worthwhile to chose at all.

Spells- Most Spells are actually super lacking numerically compared to attacks and the ones that are used are either great mechanically or are triggered.

Lacking numerically; chaos bolt, enervating nova, firebolt, freezing shards, power siphon, solar orb, soul rend, volatile dead, flame wall, frost bomb, ice nova, unearth, fireball, frost darts, frostbolt, incinerate, eye of winter, flameblast.

Being honest, without triggers and outlier skills mechanically like spark and plants; most spells feel really bad in end game.

These are all quite weak numerically, but some of them even if you tripled their numbers would still be borderline unusable just due to them being mechanically extremely weak in a lot of cases.

Summons-

Honestly, outside of maybe snipers; all the skeletal minions need a look. Most of them are too squishy, some of them deal next to no damage. Spectres whilst having their own issues are a much better pick up in most cases and infernal legion is the common denominator to slot in to fix a minion build.

Raging spirits/Ravenous Swarm/living lightning/rock golem thing- They just don't scale well and can't be used for main dps more or less. They fall off enormously after the campaign and are negligible into end game.

Melee Attacks-

Almost all Mace attacks need something- Basically every mace character is playing shield wall, mace strike or sunder. Almost every other skill is either weak mechanically, numerically or both.

TL;DR; Many skills are basically going unused because they are just weak mechanically or numerically, and this is a list of a bunch of them that should get buffed in some way for 0.5