This is a follow-up post to my previous post (link)

TL;DR: Vortex of Projection appears to be hitting 3x-4x more frequently than it should when triggered, resulting in abnormal damage scaling.

It was tested through the classic Golden Rule method. For those unfamiliar, the Golden Rule (wiki link) is a unique jewel that reflects poison you inflict right back to you. By making Vortex have a 100% chance to poison, we can visually observe how many hits this skill is causing in real time.

https://i.imgur.com/2EHlZ5n.gif

FYI my CoC character only has 10.08 triggers per second, and it was tested on single target.

The actual testing clip (white map): https://youtu.be/h7SxFBy1nv4

If you have any doubts about the testing method or process, please check out section 3 for details.

Context:

I built a CoC Vortex of Projection character (from now on referred to as "Vortex") a few days ago (PoB: https://pobb.in/I6yHmcZj28Pu) and noticed something interesting.

1) Myths about Vortex explosions

According to the skill tooltip, Vortex can "explode from up to 5 Frostbolt projectiles" and "destroy those projectiles". This is actually nothing like Ice Nova of Frostbolts. Vortex explosions happen in a sequence with seemingly fixed frequency (roughly 0.2s per explosion). The intriguing part is that when a new sequence is initiated by triggering, it cancels out the previous one, which means if your Vortex triggering rate is higher than the inherent sequence rate, aside from the initial explosion that happens on the CoC trigger, no follow-up explosions will ever occur.

To test if it really works that way, I linked Frostbolts with LMP, GMP and Awakened GMP respectively, tested in the delve dark area and got the following results:

LMP: https://i.imgur.com/QLAGVFL.jpeg

GMP: https://i.imgur.com/C0Gmu9R.jpeg

Awakened GMP: https://i.imgur.com/fi9vfsr.jpeg

According to PoB's calculation, my Cospri's triggering rate is 3.38/s and vortex is at a consuming rate of 10.08/s. Taking GMP as an example, Cospri's should be generating 3.38*5=16.9 Frostbolts per second and 10.08 of them would be consumed by vortex. If the explosion sequence ever existed, there definitely wouldn't be a visible stream of projectiles remaining almost untouched as shown in the screenshot above. And judging from the number of the leftover projectiles in the other 2 tests, I think it's pretty convincing that it does fit the pattern.

In short, visually there doesn't seem to be any follow-up explosions when CoC is up.

2) Unreasonable damage scaling.

Since it can be observed that the projectile consuming rate is roughly 10/s. it is reasonable to assume that Vortex's hitting rate is also at the same frequency, just like what PoB displays.

But if that assumption holds up, why Vortex in the first place? According to my PoB simulation, Ice Nova is at 50% of Vortex's DPS, yet it hits 4 times per trigger. In my estimation, Ice Nova should be roughly 2x of Vortex's dps, right? Wrong.

Here are the testing clips (Uber Exarch, both hit 50% shock):

Vortex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2rW36wnNug&t=15s

Ice Nova https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2rW36wnNug&t=48s

(FYI Vortex killed Uber Exarch in 156 frames(2.6s), while Ice Nova only removed roughly 70% of the hp in 215 frames(3.58s). I did at least 7-8 rounds of tests and the results are all the same.)

Not only is Ice Nova's DPS lower than Vortex's, but Vortex's DPS is almost twice that of Ice Nova's. What is going on?

3) The last resort to reveal the truth.

That question puzzled me for quite a few days and I had no clue where to start, and that's the reason I made my first post here, but nobody could answer that either. There had always been a wild hypothesis in my head, that there might be some invisible "shadow explosion sequence" keep dealing damage after they got visually canceled ,and projectiles would not be removed this way, but that's just too absurd to be taken seriously.

After running out of ideas, I eventually decided to give it a shot.

You might already know the results now, but I did have a good laugh when I first saw the poison stack numbers and realized I had been right all along.

The testing method was quite straightforward: Getting 100% hit chance, 100% crit chance, 100% spell poison chance and adding chaos damage to Vortex only, socketing a Golden Rules jewel for poison reflection, and then running a white map for the results.

PoB of the testing character: https://pobb.in/yc7kJmrdWiBr

Given the testing character did not have any skill duration passives so the poison duration was at the default value of 2 seconds. Similar to how poison functions, there might also be a "warm up" phase of the explosion sequences to reach to its peak DPS. So I picked several 1s samples from the video all starting from 1 second after CoC being triggered.

The avg poison stack number was later found to be 40. Compared to 10 Vortex triggers per second, it's roughly dealing 4x the PoB damage. For some reason this number is still 20% less than I expected. However, I’m not certain how long a full explosion sequence takes from start to finish. If it's longer than 1 second, my sampling method could end up with fewer poison stacks. Additionally, some explosions occurred far away from the enemy, resulting in a lot of misses. I must admit, something doesn’t add up here, but it's explainable to some extent, and I think it's still somewhat convincing.

Regardless, Vortex is dealing significantly more damage than it should. This is for sure.

4) Outro

I was initially planning to make a build showcase and only mention this discovery in passing. But eventually I decided to make a long post to answer my own question and bring awareness instead.

Anyways here's the build I was originally gonna showcase (high budget):

https://youtu.be/mDzsWFbX91o

At the end of this Ima give a big shoutout to @KrypticLime, the creator of this awesome CoC Vortex Tank. This build absolutely face tanks everything while having absurd DPS. Despite it unintentionally taking advantage of a potential glitch, It's still the best all-rounder I've played in years. I absolutely love it!

Hope the devs are gonna address this soon. And for you guys, it's probably too late to say "exploit early, exploit often" at this point, but feel free to give Vortex a shot. Especially if you already own a well-polished CoC Ice Nova build. ;)