Blade Vortex

For the Vaal-themed counterpart, see Vaal Blade Vortex.

Blade Vortex (often referred to as BV) is a spell that creates an ethereal blade that spins around the caster that deals physical damage, each blade lasting for the minimum duration of 5 seconds.

Skill functions and interactions

Blade Vortex's base damage is boosted by Physical Damage, Spell Damage, Area Damage, and Damage.

Interaction w/ Blade Blast: When targeted by Blade Blast, the blades will detonate in sequence, increasing in AoE with subsequent detonations. The damage from these detonations scale solely from the Blade Blast skill.

Physical Damage: Because Blade Vortex deals physical damage, it can be boosted by supports and skills that are more commonly used to modify attacks, such as the Added Fire Damage Support gem and the Hatred aura.

Spell Damage: Despite the fact that it does physical damage, Blade Vortex is a spell and not an attack. It does not utilize weapon damage in any way. Blade Vortex is one of several skills that work in this manner. The others include Ethereal Knives, Bladefall, and Shockwave Totem. Its damage can be amplified by Spell Damage on items and passives from the skill tree, as well as support gems that increase spell damage.

Leech: Leech effects that apply to Spell damage and to damage types dealt by Blade Vortex (Physical by default) will work as usual. Note that leech effects which apply to attacks do not apply to Blade Vortex because it is a spell, not an attack.

Area of Effect: Increases and decreases in to Area of Effect from support gems, passives, and equipment will augment the radius in which the skill deals damage (e.g. Increased Area of Effect Support, Concentrated Effect Support and Carcass Jack).

Cast Speed: Faster Casting Support, Spell Echo Support, and Cast Speed from passives and gear will increase the rate at which blades are generated.

Duration: Increased Duration Support, Less Duration Support, and duration-modifying passives and equipment will affect the duration of the blades (including Temporal Chains on yourself.) It is possible to have multiple blades active at the same time, up to a maximum of 10 blades. Once the limit is reached, creating a new blade will simply remove the oldest existing active blade, similar to Summon Raging Spirit.

Poison: As Blade Vortex deals physical damage, it can easily scale poison damage.

Visual effect: Blade vortex's visual effect does not scale with Area of effect modifiers. Instead, to give a rough indication of radius, there are several versions of the knife effect, each rotating at a different radius. The skill will always try to have one knife using the largest-radius effect that's not larger than the actual radius of the skill, but that skill results in discrete visual changes where you need to reach a certain threshold before the next wider effect can be used. The full radius is always used mechanically.[2]

Multiple casts: When Blade Vortex is linked to Unleash Support, the damage is defined by the initial cast and does not inherit the less damage multiplier.[3] This behavior includes the Greater Spell Echo Support

from Pledge of Hands.

Version history

VersionChanges

3.17.0

Blade Vortex now deals 3 to 5 Physical Damage at gem level 1 (unchanged), up to 128 to 191 at gem level 20 (previously 86 to 129).

Now has 30% Effectiveness of Added Damage at all gem levels (previously 20%).

3.14.0

Now has a base duration of 4 seconds (previously 5 seconds).

Now has a radius of +2 at gem level 20 (previously +4).

Now has added damage effectiveness of 20% (previously 25%).

Now deals 86 to 129 Physical Damage at gem level 20 (previously 101 to 151).

3.10.0

Blades created by this skill can now be destroyed with Blade Blast.

3.6.0

Mana Cost at gem level 20 is now 16 (was 19).

Now deals 3 to 5 Physical damage at gem level 1 (from 7 to 10) and 101 to 151 Physical damage at gem level 20 (from 123 to 185).

Now has an added damage effectiveness of 25% (from 30%).

3.5.0

Added physics interactions.

3.3.0

Now has 35% increased hit rate for each blade (up from 10%).

Now deals 35% more damage with hits and ailments for each blade (up from 30% for hits and 20% for ailments).

Now has 10% increased critical strike chance for each blade.

Now has a limit of 10 active spinning blades (down from 20).

3.0.0

Blade Vortex had its 'more spell damage' scaling modifier changed to 'more damage with hits for each blade', and separately 'more damage with ailments for each blade'.

2.6.0

Blade Vortex's radius has increased from 14 to 15 units.

Blade Vortex gains 1 additional unit of radius every 5 levels.

No longer gain increased area of effect radius.

You can now only have one instance of Blade Vortex active at once.

2.5.1

Blade Vortex's "More Damage per Blade" modifier has been changed to apply only to spell damage instead of all damage types. This will remove a double-dipping effect that should not have been occurring.

2.5.0

Blade Vortex has been refactored. Instead of separate hits for each active blade, the blades now increase the frequency at which all enemies in the radius take damage, and the amount of damage they take. The skill now has a base hit frequency of 600ms and has 10% increased hit rate per active blade. Its damage has been reduced by 30% at all levels and it deals 30% more damage per active blade.

2.4.0

Blade Vortex now has a stack limit of 20 (down from 50). It now deals 63% more damage at level 20.

2.2.0

The frequency with which Blade Vortex's can repeatedly hit the same enemy has been halved, but its damage and damage effectiveness have been doubled.

2.1.1b

Extra Gore now doesn't trigger every time Blade Vortex hits.

Fixed a bug where some of the visual effects on Blade Vortex weren't being updated when swapping in and out support gems which modified the area of effect.

Fixed a bug where some of the effects of Blade Vortex weren't finishing their animations smoothly.

2.1.0

Added to the game.