Penance Brand

Penance Brand is a spell that creates a brand at the target location. While attached to an enemy, the brand adds "energy" stacks onto the target, which can also spread to a nearby enemy that hasn't been yet energized. When released, the stored energy detonates and deals area of effect damage. When energy stacks reach their cap on the primary target, the brand releases damaging pulses around it instead.

Skill functions and interactions

• Damage conversion: Penance Brand's base damage type is physical, but it also has innate 50% conversion to lightning, thus by default it deals half of its damage in physical, and half in lightning.

• Energy: Energy stacks have a cap of 20, and for each stack past the first one, the brand will deal significantly more damage in an increasingly larger area upon release. If an enemy has been energized to the maximum amount of stacks, the brand will instead release damaging pulses in an area around it (at the same frequency). Energy stacks are released in three circumstances:

  • An enemy with any Penance Brand attached to it dies.

  • Any Penance Brand gets removed from an enemy via the usage of Brand Recall, or utilizing a cluster jewel notable "Holy Conquest".

  • The duration of any attached Penance Brand ends.

• Multiple brands: If multiple Penance Brands are attached to an enemy simultaneously, they will all add energy stacks at a rate equal to their individual activation frequency. Energy stacks are accumulated per enemy and not per brand. In other words; if only one Penance Brand gets removed from an enemy, it will release all the currently stored energy, and the second brand will continue to generate energy stacks back from zero, if it still remains attached to that enemy.

• Limited duration and damage scaling: Penance Brand has a very low base duration of 2.5 seconds, and by default activates every half a second.

  • Swiftbrand Support is a good support gem choice for general mapping, where the long delay between casting a skill and actually killing enemies may lead into dangerous situations. However, depending on the build setup, it might not be the optimal choice when fighting tough bosses, for which stacking high amount of energy often outweighs more frequent but smaller explosions. This matters even more when elemental ailments are taken into account.

  • Casting speed of the brand itself, as well as its activation frequency, can be increased by cast speed modifiers. Getting a hefty amount of cast speed is recommended in order to maximize the amount of energy stacks generation before the brand expires. This improves its overall "damage per cast" efficacy.

  • Due to relatively low effectiveness of flat added damage at 40%, Penance Brand's damage is best scaled via modifiers that add damage based on another damage type (non-chaos added as extra chaos, physical added as extra lightning, etc.) and modifiers to skill levels (like Empower Support, various weapon prefixes, or corrupted body armour implicits).

  • Physical to Lightning Support allows easy conversion of the damage type entirely into lightning. Penance Brand is a popular skill choice in multi-conversion builds, utilizing two Call of the Brotherhood and either The Eternity Shroud or Incandescent Heart.