In this article, we’re going to be talking about Vengeant Cascade.

This is a noticeable that has to be allocated to your character through anointing it on your amulet or on a Blight unique piece of gear. Because it doesn’t appear on the Passive Tree. That’s the only way you can get it.

People have been talking about it a lot. And a lot of people actually been playing it in this league. Actually, 21% of players in softcore trade Crucible League are using this notable right now and that’s including all the players that can’t use it because it wouldn’t work on their build since they’re using spells or something that can’t interact with it.

Patch Note

The reason why it’s being used so much in this patch is due to a change in the patch notes for Crucible League and you might control Vengeant Cascade and you’re looking for that exact change but the actual change wasn’t to do with Benjamin Cascade, specifically it was just a general mechanic change. This was a simplification of the returning of projectiles mechanic. And this basically tidied up the interaction with a lot of projectile skills.

Now, this interaction noticeable works as expected most of the time, and the projectiles are returning to you. The actual mechanic here on the notable says that the projectiles returned to you. But for a lot of abilities, they’ll just return to the firing point, for example, with Volcanic Fissure. They’ll return to the fissure in the ground that spawned the projectiles in the first place rather than actually returning back to you.

And it’s a little buggy for some abilities like the Molten Burst skill that this unique ax grants you this one kind of just refires the same projectile animation twice when Vengeant Cascade is allocated. But it is still working is still actually playing that interaction and the projectiles are hitting twice.

Balance Discussion

For a lot of abilities, this is just doubling the damage that they can deal. If I’m being completely honest with you on this one, I’m not really convinced this is the healthiest way to grant power to projectile attack builds. I think it would have been better to just bring the power level of those skills up at the gem level, boost their flat damage, boost their damage effectiveness, allow Vengeant Cascade to come in after that.

That way, you can implement a less global damage modifier on Vengeant Cascade and that way, you get the same end result. You get the same power level of these projectile attack builds. But those builds are not forced into taking this notable and it really feels like that for most skills right now.

If those like you absolutely have to use Vengeant Cascade because there is no better option, it’s just so powerful and it’s not just the bow abilities, either. It’s also melee skills as well that fire projectiles, like Molten Strike and Volcanic Fissure. The Vengeant Cascade nodes of all just feel mandatory on all of those abilities because of how good it is.

Also Read: A Complete Guide To Creat Spark Inquisitor Build In Path Of Exile 3.21 Crucible

Poison Molten Strike

And I think Poison Molten Strike, one of the biggest abuse cases for this node right now in the league, has to be the Poison Molten Strike builds that is using it with the Pneumatic Dagger. If you’re interested in this build, you can try building one with your POE Currency.

That’s a Heist base and you can only get it from Heist. And this dagger allows you to deal poison with all the damage that the dagger deals. So, any kind of elemental damage or things like that, even the flat fire damage that comes on the Molten Strike gem, all of that damage is going to be able to inflict poison as long as you have the chance to actually poison. That’s really powerful.

This is a crazy abuse of this mechanic in particular because you stack additional projectiles through things like the Greater Multiple Projectiles Support gem the less damage modifier on the GMP support only applies to projectile damage. So, you don’t have that less damage applying to the poisons that are being inflicted by the Molten Strike projectiles.

Then, you have Vengeant Cascade allocated on top of that. With some area overlap, a bunch of these projectiles are going to be hitting twice, thanks to Vengeant Cascade. And that’s going to be stacking tons of poisons. This is just kind of broken on Molten Strike Poison for that reason.

Conclusion

Even on builds that are not abusing that particular interaction, it’s just insane how impactful this one node is. It’s really powerful. It just feels like there’s no choice for your anoint. It’s like it has to be this noticeable when nothing else comes close.