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