Path of Exile - Kinetic Bolt, Spellslinger and Other Wand Improvements

Kinetic Bolt, Spellslinger and Other Wand Improvements

Posted: 02 Mar 2020 03:40 PM PST

Alongside Path of Exile: Delirium, we're introducing two new Wand skill gems, with some associated wand changes. Today we're going to look at Kinetic Bolt, Spellslinger and changes to the Wandslinger notable.

Kinetic Bolt
Kinetic Bolt is a new level 1 Wand skill. It fires a projectile a short distance before forking, splitting into a primary projectile and a limited range secondary projectile, each angling off at 45 degrees from the direction the skill was aimed. It then starts doing this at regular intervals or when hitting enemies, forking 5 times at gem level 1, creating an angular spread of projectiles over a wide area.

Increases and reductions to Spell Damage also apply to Kinetic Bolt's attack damage at 150% of their value, opening up new build paths and item choices right from when you get the skill, and taking advantage of increased Spell Damage on your wand.

The skill has unique interactions with a number of projectile modifiers. Adding "Projectiles Fork" causes the skill to fork an additional time. Adding additional projectiles causes the secondary projectiles to fire this many additional projectiles each time they're created by a fork. With the Barrage support, each shot fired still performs all forks, resulting in both high single target damage and extra side projectiles.

The skill is offered to the Witch after completing "Enemy at the Gate", but purchasable from the vendor for Witch, Ranger, Shadow and Scion.

Spellslinger
Spellslinger is a new Skill-Support that supports linked spells. Activating the skill causes all of these spells to reserve mana, and when you perform a wand attack, all of the skills are triggered. They have a 0.5 second cooldown and gain cooldown recovery speed as the gem gains levels, so you don't need to push your attack speed too high to get the most out of the support.

Spellslinger also provides a unique effect to supported spells: Your wand's base damage is added to the damage of the spell. Base damage includes all local added and increased damage modifiers, making attack wands powerful when you're focussed on Spellslinging.

Spellslinger sets the reservation cost of linked spells to 15% of your maximum mana, with support gem mana multipliers have a direct impact on this reservation cost. This makes it a cheap way to trigger unsupported spells, or lets you reserve larger values of mana for devastating fully supported spells.

You can have multiple skills reserved with Spellslinger, letting you perform combos like triggering Frostbolt and Ice Nova together, Desecrate and Volatile Dead, or Bladefall and Blade Blast. You could also use Spellslinger to activate secondary skills like Curses, Wave of Conviction or Lightning Warp.

The skill is offered to the Witch after completing "Lost in Love" from Clarissa, but purchasable from the vendor for Templar, Witch, Shadow and Scion.

Wand Skill Balance
Power Siphon and Kinetic Blast now deal a higher portion of base damage at lower levels, growing to slightly more damage at higher levels. This greatly improves leveling with Wands.

We've also adjusted damage on a couple of unique wands that were below the damage curve of other unique items around their level, making them better tools for leveling and early mapping.

Wandslinger Notable change
Wand passive skills were recently reviewed, so not many changes have been made here. We have made a major change to Wandslinger, granting a new effect that was previously only found on the Crown of Eyes unique item.

This means that if you want to use a wand skill other than Kinetic Bolt, but you've already invested in spell damage to take advantage of its special spell damage interaction, then Wandslinger has you covered. It also opens up new build possibilities for classic wand skills.

As a result of making this interaction more accessible, we've improved the Crown of Eyes unique item so it now grants attack damage from spell damage at a higher ratio, and Crown of Eyes is still the only way to get this effect on other weapon types.

Check out a preview of these changes in action.

We hope you've enjoyed this look at some of the new Wand mechanics available. Reality is an illusion. More teasers are coming soon, including an in-depth look at new mana based gems later this week.