Path of Exile Skill Reveals – Siphoning and Seismic Traps

The upcoming Incursion update for Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile is going to revamp the game’s currently existing trap skills and add some new ones. You can read a bit about the revamps in an earlier developer forum post, but if you’re more interested in the new traps, the GGG folks have revealed a couple of those as well. First, there’s the Siphoning trap that will help the trappers with some of their regeneration issues and also offer a bit of crowd control as a bonus. And then, there’s the Seismic trap that will serve as a viable physical damage dealer. You can see both of them in action below:

Here are a few paragraphs about the Siphoning trap:

Available at level 10, Siphoning Trap is the quintessential utility skill for trappers. It does three things:

It deals cold damage over time to up to ten enemies within a large radius: The damage it deals is not enormous, but the area it affects is very generous. It targets the enemies closest to the central trap device, meaning an enemy’s movement can change whether or not it is targeted (even during the trap’s effect!)

It chills: Each enemy affected by the trap is chilled, slowing them, and conveniently ensuring that they stay within the trap’s area of effect just a little longer.

The best part? It grants you both life AND mana regeneration per enemy affected: It’s not just a little bit, either. At level 20, with 10 enemies affected, Siphoning Trap will send nearly 500 life and a little more than 25 mana per second your way.

Siphoning Trap may not carry you through your Incursions at lightning speed, but it will provide an avenue for life and mana recovery while crippling enemy speed. With supports like Increased Duration Support and Trap Cooldown Support (now renamed Advanced Traps Support) you’ll potentially be able to maintain multiple Siphoning Trap effects at the same time.

Combining chill and regeneration, we expect Siphoning Trap to be used by more than just trap characters. We also expect players using this trap to be posed an interesting question: will I gain more from killing this cluster of monsters in a boss fight as quickly as possible, or using them to maintain my life and mana levels?

And the Seismic one:

Available from level 28, Seismic Trap is a powerhouse of Physical damage, with enormous area coverage.

Once it triggers, Seismic Trap produces a mechanical stomper which strikes the ground, sending little quake bursts in five directions. Each direction is picked to favour enemies near it, but you’re pretty unlikely to have any naturally overlap. That’s OK though, because the stomper keeps sending these bursts out for the skill’s entire duration.

The bursts function similarly to Glacial Cascade — they’re a series of damaging circles that appear in sequence, in a straight line. The final burst in the line is larger than the rest.

There are a few ways to scale Seismic Trap’s damage:

Damage: Since Seismic Trap deals Physical Damage, it is compatible with all the various damage conversion types and associated ailments. It’s a spell, however, so it can’t inflict bleeding.

Area of Effect: With enough Area of Effect the bursts can overlap, allowing you to hit multiple times with each stomp of the trap.

Duration: Seismic Trap has a cooldown, so while it’s possible to maintain permanent trap uptime for longer fights, it requires careful management. It’s made a lot easier by increasing the skill duration and lowering its cooldown.

Cast Speed: This is what makes Seismic Trap particularly awesome. As you increase your cast speed, the mechanical stomper’s stomp-rate increases. An unsupported Seismic Trap gem will stomp the ground every 0.9 seconds, but that delay is cut in half for every 100% increased Cast Speed.

Unlike Siphoning Trap, we expect some players will use Seismic Trap as one of their primary damage-dealing skills, though just how they’ll scale it remains up to them. There’s no single correct answer — slow hits will suit some purposes better than rapid ones.