I went cornac because I have never played alchemist before and I thought I'll need some cat points for a useful lategame trees to unlock(i was wrong apparently). My build is 50/50: golem + Energy Alchemy, nothing else. I had to juggle points out of Acid Alchemy because I knew I wasnt going to use them. So opinion on the class is as follows(score is my overall satisfaction with every aspect)
1) Offense (power: 10/10, fun: 5/10)
During the whole game I basically used only 2 abilities: Throw Bomb and Channel Staff while it's on cooldown. Reason is pretty simple - there's no other offensive abilities at all, going any other Alchemy tree does not look viable because the only ability I have deals about 1k damage in huge AoE at level 30. That's nowhere close to any other class: brawler's takedown looks OP with its 500 AoE damage and this is twice more. With crit I hit for 1.4k + 700 damage from meteor prodigy that kills most dreadfeel rares in 1 turn. I can't say the class has enormous damage output: throw bomb has 4 turns cooldown between which you can only channelstaffchannelstaffchannelstaff but its spike damage is ridiculous. Due to this spike damage all fights basically go with one of the two scenarios:
- you shoot the bomb, everything dies(happens about 70% of times, rares included)
- you shoot the bomb, something does not die. you channel staff 3 times, the second bomb finishes everything reliably, most bosses included.
That's first scenario, how it usually goes(lvl 36, it's 1 turn, fire+phys damage is meteor):
And it's nightmare. I wager on normal you'll simply 1-shot everything except super-fat bosses.
Shockwave Bomb does always physical damage that has no bonuses/penetration, lower damage, more manacost/gemcost and higher cooldown than throw bomb and it's inferior in every single aspect. I have no idea why it's t4 skill and what it's intended for.
2) Defense 0/10
Hey, there's none! I picked Celestial/Light and it's my only defensive scenario that I use very rarely
3) Golem 9/10
Golem management looks very fun to me. With a shitton of instant runes playing my golem is way more interesting than playing alchemist himself. My golem has way more abilities and tactical choices of 5 runes. Synergy of Energy Alchemy/Dynamic Recharge is great as well and it seems to work on runes too effectively reducing their cooldown. The only drawback is I don't need it since everything dies from regular bombs.
Suggestions:
- Offense should really be tweaked down to less spiky and more uniform damage(more abilities that deal lesser damage in lesser AoE). Maybe add bomb damage scaling with gem tier? Any synergy like Dynamic Recharge is very much welcome.
- To encourage controlling golem and master, maybe add a mode to automatically switch control to that who currently acts. So basically it's cast alch spell - cast golem spell - cast alch spell - cast golem spell. Again, more synergies with master's offensive abilities are welcome.
- Add any kind of defense. Idk, share damage between master and the golem? Make your bombs benefit when you are in the AoE?
- The class does need 1 more generic(unlocked) and 1 more class trees because by level 35 you have nowhere to put points into.