Doomed Darkness tree

[uightpt]

Has anyone been able to get a darkness-based doomed off the ground? I'm aware that shadows are nigh-mandatory to build a strong doomed, but I thought perhaps a combo of the two could be useful, with either force of will or punishments as a support for that base. I haven't been able to get that to work yet. Anyone else?

[ster]

IIRC darkness is mega buggy and doesn't function correctly, sadly (doesn't properly block LoS, darkvision may not work)

[uightpt]

Didn't we get a fix on that with the recent doomed fixes, though? I know that feed and gesture of warding got altered, enough so that the latter can replace armor entirely on well-built characters, when it used to be paper-thin.

[SmallTownGuy]

I just started a Darkness doomed. After a pleasant walk through the Trollmire, I came upon Prox the Mighty. I immediately filled the gap between him and me with my talent-level-3.9 Creeping Dark. He walked straight through it, taking zero damage. I retreated (darn 20 CD) and tried again. He walked straight through again, but this time he took 1 round of damage (13 hp). I was baffled, as it took him five rounds to cross my Dark. I retreated and tried a third time. He walked straight through again, taking 2 rounds (2x 13 hp) of damage out of 5 rounds in the Dark.

By now my Dark had failed to slow Prox at all, and had done less damage than 1 round of Willful Strike. I decided to melee. He fell easily to my Gesture of Pain and t1 mindstars.

Yes, I would agree. Creeping Dark still seems less than effective at low levels.

[The Tapir]

Darkness itself doesn't deal a lot of damage outside of Dark Torrent, which falls short of force of will and advanced shadowmancy talents. However, the movement speed + increased damage could be useful if you're willing to spare the class points, and I'm considering trying 4/5 creeping darkness with madness and mental tyranny as an AoE ball of stun/slow/confuse and -mind resistance.

[bpat]

Darkness's problem is it doesn't do anything reliably. Sometimes enemies just ignore your Creeping Dark so it does nothing on a 20 turn cooldown. Dark Torrent's damage isn't even good because there's no way you're going to stack darkness damage with just one darkness damage talent. Dark Tendrils is way too slow to be good. The whole category is just underwhelming.