The Impaler

The Impaler is a keystone passive skill. Whenever you impale a target, it applies four additional impales and also applies it to nearby enemies, but prevents them from receiving impale for 4 seconds.

Mechanics
The Impaler changes your attacks to cause them to inflict 4 additional impale hits. This gives a total of 5 impales instead of 1. The downside to this is no impales for 4 seconds on enemies after the impale effect. This can be particularly strong when 1 skill has much more impale damage than others.
 * Example: A character uses Vaal ground slam as their first hit on an enemy with the Impaler. The next 5 hits will activate 5 times the impale damage than vaal ground slam did before, but they will not apply new impale stacks themselves. A fast attack skill like cyclone will activate the 5 vaal ground slam impales faster.

Party

The impaler prevents all impales on enemies from all sources. If other players are scaling impale damage this can potentially lower the overall damage of the group. Therefore when joining a party with strangers, telling other people about this might help the groups overall damage.

Other party members hits activate your impale damage faster than solo play.

Damage calculations
All calculations assume 100% impale chance to make them simple. For characters using impale damage, The impaler keystone has the potential to raise or lower the total damage done. Whether or not the impaler can raise or lower the total damage is dependent on the following factors:
 * Hits per second: The more hits per second on enemies, the less likely the impaler is to be a better option. The reason for this is because hitting a lot will make the impales run out before you can apply more after the 4 second impale cooldown. Slow attack builds do not have to worry about the 4 second cooldown lowering their damage.
 * Damage Variance: When a player is capable of doing a lot more damage with 1 single hit occasionally and mostly doing less impale damage afterwards, this increases the damage of the impaler keystone. The reason for this is because The impaler gives 5 times the impale damage for the higher damage skill, than without it.
 * Maximum impales: For players with 5 impales max, this factor will not matter. For players with over 5 max impales, the total damage potential will go down in a longer fight that involves more than 6 total hits. For fights with fewer than 6 hits on an enemy, the 5 impale limit will not matter.

This example will try to use all of these factors to their highest potential to show that The Impaler does higher damage for certain specific builds.


 * A slow attack speed vaal ground slam build.


 * no maximum impales (It doesn't hurt, it just doesn't help in most short term fights)


 * Even higher damage variance by using as many temporary damage modifiers that raise the hit damage.


 * For most enemies clear trash with your favorite skill, cause they are easier to kill. For harder enemies, use as many temporary damage modifiers right before vaal ground slam. Make sure Vaal ground slam is your first hit on tough enemies or they will get weaker damage impales for 4 seconds.


 * Long Fights For characters with 100% chance to impale, using a 4 second cooldown instant skill or 4 second duration flask right after the impale lands will remind you when you will land impales on hit again. Always use your higher damage skill with as many temporary damage modifiers that affect the outgoing damage to maximize the impale damage.

Location
The Impaler is located on the south side of the tree, on the left side of outer part of the Duelist's area.

Version history

 * Now prevents Call of Steel removing any Impales inflicted within the last 4 seconds.


 * Introduced to the game.
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