Vaal skills - Explain to a noob

So, still very new to the tremendous mountain of info that is PoE, but I've found several Vaal skills so far on my journey and all of them look awful to me.

I know that I have to be wrong on this, they wouldn't exist as special drops if they were worthless. Can someone explain to me which ones are bad(if any) and/or how exactly do you make good use of these things when they apparently require monster kills to fuel in the first place(seems bad to me but I'm sure it works).

Thanks in advance for taking any time to reply to this lowly nooblet.

The problem with Vaal skills is that they were developed a couple years back but were never really expanded on, so most of the more active vaal skills kinda fell by the wayside as time went on. Others like Vaal Molten Shell got nerfed into the ground.

The ones we're left with fill a certain niche and are fairly situational and depend on the build. Anyway, here are off the top of my head the ones that are useful:

Vaal Spark: the only offensive one that's still good enough to focus a build around, I know Ziz has a video.

Vaal Burning Arrow: strong single target for some bow builds

Vaal Cyclone: Spin while remaining stationary, only relevant for cyclone builds

Vaal Detonate Dead: popular at the moment for breaches

Vaal Grace: ups dodge for a bit, very niche

Vaal Haste: go faster. fast is popular.

Vaal Clarity: no mana use for a while, useful for some builds

Vaal Discipline: massive ES boost. pretty much must have for CI and low life builds

Vaal Lightning Trap: to apply shock to bosses if you don't run a Vinctar

Vaal Righteous Fire: single target one hit kill button for some builds

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Vipermagi a écrit :

Every Reave build needs to have a Vaal Reave, imo. It's a massive boost to Reave Radius.

This is one that tripped me up for a while. I was using Reave for a long time, without Vaal Reave, so when Blade Flurry released, it was just better than Reave in literally every single respect.

Nowadays, thanks to Vaal Reave, Reave does have a clearspeed (area) advantage over Blade Flurry, or so I hear from other players. Blade Flurry still has pretty crazy single target compared to other melee skills, though.

Hmmm...interesting. How do you make builds work though when they require souls to use? I mean if the Vaal Discipline is so clutch, doesn't it cripple the build when you can't start a zone with it on?

How do you keep it fueled? It only lasts 3 seconds on the skill description and requires 24/46/48 souls to activate.

I personally am bothered by the same thing. I prefer reliability.

But, based on my understanding of "the clear speed meta," 99% of game time spent by expert players is just mowing down armies and armies and armies of weak enemies, which means you get plenty of soul income to spend on Vaal skills to kill twice as many armies a good portion of the time.

Monster density in endgame Maps is quite high nowadays, so you can rack up kills quite quickly if your build is "viable" as most forum posters would call it.

On the few characters that I do use a Vaal skill on, I refrain from using it and save up the fully charged skill until I run into an emergency, a sudden large spike in difficulty. This strategy is often associated with the term "boss killer" for Vaal skills that may not be spammed while clearing maps, but can be saved up to unleash at the right time.

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HotFuzz83 a écrit :

Hmmm...interesting. How do you make builds work though when they require souls to use? I mean if the Vaal Discipline is so clutch, doesn't it cripple the build when you can't start a zone with it on?

How do you keep it fueled? It only lasts 3 seconds on the skill description and requires 24/46/48 souls to activate.

Vaal Discipline, for example, is a backup plan for ES builds. It is a panic button. You press it in times of danger, to get a big boost to ES, and regen. It isn't something you keep running all the time. It is there just in case (essentially like a super-flask for ES builds).

There are builds that rely on keeping vaal skills active 100% of the time though, the most popular of which is vaal spark. The Vaal Spark skill just sprays sparks all over the place, and does a lot of damage. This makes for insane clearing in open areas, or linear maps like Gorge and Strand. The way it works relies on unique jewels called Chill of Corruption (which has a 50% chance to give an additional vaal soul when you shatter an enemy), and Sacrificial Harvest (which has a 20-30% chance to give an additional vaal soul on kill). So get Cold Damage to spells, and use Herald of Ice, and Use Call of the Brotherhood (which converts some of lightning damage to cold). When you crit, you shatter with cold damage. When you start a map, you use regular spark until your vaal spark is full (full souls), then you pop vaal spark, and run. The vaal sparks shatter mobs, and because of the unique jewels, you get all of those extra souls, and in the duration that vaal spark goes, you ideally kill enough mobs to refill it again, so you can infinitely string vaal spark casts together. There are some pretty insane builds that have been done with this, clearing maps in seconds.