How reliable is Spelltongue's Time Siphon?

[JerekKruger]

I've been mulling a few ideas for builds using Spelltongue but I'm not sure whether it can be relied upon to proc Time Siphon regularly enough to keep buffs up permanently. Other than for Barbarians, where Carnage multiplies the number of procs of Time Siphon, how viable is Spelltongue for building builds around?

[Boeroer]

If you have short recovery and ok DEX it works pretty nicely even against single targets. I's not like a barb, but it's ok. Works well with a fighter for example with Constant Recovery, Disciplined Barrage and Vigorous Defense plus Outlander's Frenzy. Most of the time it's not enough to prolong them endlessly, but it will give you a lot more duration.

 

I honestly never tried if it prologs Feign Death's invisibility which didn't use to break even when attacking.

 

If you pick off buffed enemies it works better by the way.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

I believe it procs on every hit, but to prolong buffs you need to be hitting buffed enemies, so it's not 100%. I really like spelltongue but you'd probably want fairly high dex if you were relying on it to keep buffs going.

 

The attack speed buff and siphon happens regardless.

[Boeroer]

Yes, it's 100% proc chance. The time stealing stuff also works when hitting non-buffed enemies, but the timespans you steal are very short then (shorter than your attack/recovery cycles). Hitting buffed enemies gives in much better results.

Edited March 5, 2017 by Boeroer

[JerekKruger]

Huh, I guess the description should have given it away, but it never occurred to me that the steal would vary depending on whether the target had buffs or not.

 

A Fighter with those buffs was one of the ideas I had had. I also wondered whether a Mage might be able to make good use of it, but I suspect that too many of a Mage's good buffs are fairly short duration and pausing to cast would quickly see them fall off.

[Boeroer]

Yes, but combined with a Draining Wall it's quite nice. 

[George_Truman]

So I was messing around with spelltongue and noticed some interesting stuff.

 

First off, it appears that spelltongue distributes its siphon between all buffs. So 1 or 2 buffs are much easier to sustain infinitely than 5+. A 3 dex zero recovery paladin was able to infinitely sustain 2 buffs on targets he had a 75-100% chance to hit.

 

Also I believe that the siphon has its own hit/crit/graze range that is independent of the weapons hit/crit/graze. It seemed like I had better luck with higher accuracy but I didn't look into it hard enough.

 

The 15% attack speed steal does not appear to stack with spell buffs. I observed a lot of inconsistencies with instant speed while I tested this (varying durations of the recovery bar particularly after getting knocked down, stunned, or interrupted) but I don't know if it was just UI bugs that didnt effect actual recovery frames.

 

I am really interested to hear from somebody else that has checked this out.

Edited March 15, 2017 by George_Truman