When casting Lightning Blast (LB) that has been specialized into Closed Circuit (CC), LB appears to only grant the CC buff when it has chains available, despite not needing to chain to grant the buff.
That is, when casting LB at yourself, with no other targets in range:
LB specced into both CC and Chain Lightning will grant the CC buff.
LB specced into CC, but not specced into Chain Lightning…
… will grant the CC buff if another LB has been cast Recently (due to the extra chain available from Arcing Power).
… will not grant the CC buff if another LB has not been cast Recently.
Note that I am determining whether or not the CC buff is active by watching the damage stats in my character details screen, so it’s possible, if unlikely, that the buff is active but not being displayed correctly.
Thanks for all your hard work!
(Though, incidentally, while I have your attention, maybe get someone to do a second pass of the recently revised skill trees? The descriptive text of Null Profusion in the Focus tree still says the cooldown is 10 seconds, though the stats and patch notes say 8, for example. Not particularly high-priority, but, you know.)
I don’t think that’s a bug. If LB doesn’t have any chains, then it can’t chain back to the character & grant a buff. If LB does have chains but it chains to a mob instead of the player then it won’t give the buff.
What might be a bug is if you have several chains (say 4 from maxed Arcing Power & you’ve been spamming LB) and it’s just you & the boss (or training dummy), LB won’t continue to chain between you & the target, it just hits the target then chains to you & stops.
Normally I would agree, except I very specifically tested casting Lightning Blast with no other targets in range. At no point did Lightning Blast actually chain to any other target, but only when it could chain did it grant the Closed Circuit buff. What you seem to be arguing is that it should not be giving this buff at all in that circumstance, which I think isn’t valuable for build diversity? But your mileage may vary.
To your second point, chaining to unique targets only (that is, not re-chaining to targets already hit) is how skills like this usually work, in my experience? The available specializations are likely intended to make Lightning Blast good for mobs or single targets, but not both at once, since that’s, uh, what specialization… means. But that’s one of those design decisions that’s ultimately out of my scope.
I would still argue that that’s ok. If you cast Lightning Blast on the ground & there’s no targets for it to hit, why would it chain back to you?
It depends how it’s been coded (or envisioned), I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some games where it would have chained between mobs that have already been hit. I even want to say that that’s how Shield Throw works but I might need to get back to you on that…
Lightning Blast is required to chain for this node to work, and that’s intended.
What may not be intended is that Lightning Blast can currently “chain” without having to hit a target in the initial cast, as you described. I’ve asked for clarification.
