Energy Burst – a Deep Dive

Hello and welcome to a special guide on the Passive Tower of Knowledge ability “Energy Burst”. In this guide we will dive into what this passive is. We will also ask, Is energy burst any good? Energy burst has been nerfed before and we will look into what has happened to this passive and how the hidden mechanics work

I have been recommending energy burst for builds for a long time, but it is very important to understand when and how to use it succesfully. In this guide we will look at how it works. Explain the hidden mechanics that some players may not even realize exist! Furthermore, we will look at how to use this Passive. What NOT to do and how to set up this Passive for major impact!

How does it work?

This skill is pretty simple to understand at first glance. But do not let that fool you! It is one of the most complex skills in the game, because of it’s hidden mechanics.

What it does on the face of it, is boost your energy regen every time you land a critical hit. Well it says every time.. But it is not really every time, more like most of the time. More on that later! What is important to know for now, is that it only provides energy regen once you land a critical hit. Once you land a crit, you gain 100 energy.

This means you want to equip this passive on Immortals that scale well from Energy regen. Such as Attila, Hippolyta, Khan, Gilgamesh, and so on. Also you want to make sure to use passives to synergize with Energy Burst, meaning passives which cause many damage instances per minute as possible.

Furthermore, because we only gain energy regen once we land a critical hit on our enemy, we want to have a lot of critical hit rate before being able to use this passive. You should be aware of the significant 9% Base Crit Value boost from achieving VIP rank 13. If you do not have VIP 13, you will likely not have enough critical hit rate to gain real value from this passive.

Critical hits giving energy also means that we can begin to scale Critical hit rating beyond the additional damage. Critical hit has a given value for any Immortal as it boosts the damage output of set Immortal. But with Energy Burst, we can begin to scale the value of critical hit rating further. This in turn, means more value from buffs like the Combat Crit buff and from Immortals such as William and Trajan.

Hidden Internal Cooldown Mechanic

Now that we understand how it works, we can begin to look deeper into it’s hidden mechanics. Remember I said this Passive was nerfed? So back in the day when it was first release, we would get 100 energy with EVERY single critical hit. So if a Hippolyta hit with 5 attacks from her Ultimate Ability in the half second it takes her to cast it, well then she would get back 100 energy 5 times, basically getting her to cast again.

This meant, that pairing Energy Burst with Weakness, Crit Boosts and a proc ability like Death Breath, would cause any Immortal to get almost no downtime between casting skills. As you can imagine, the results was extreemly broken and had to be fixed by the development team.

The fix they came up with was applying an internal cooldown to the ability. Which honestly, is a really good fix! They just forgot to add it to the information text of the Passive description.

What does all this mean?

So what this means is, once you land a critical hit Energy Burst activates and gives you 100 energy. It then begins an internal cooldown timer. Once this timer is running, any critical hits you land gives no energy. Only once the Ability is off cooldown again will you get energy from another crit.

Many players have been looking into figuring out precisely what this internal cooldown is, and it seems there is an agreement in the community that Energy Burst has a 2 second internal cooldown.

How to run it “right”

Alright then. We fully understand what this passive does and how all the aspects of it works. How do we run it right then? Is it any good?

You want to run Energy burst preferably in a fire setup because you have the added critical hit rate.

If you have VIP 13 and you have strong crit technology and so on, you can run it very succesfully in other setups too. But you need to have a setup that feeds consistent critical hits into Energy Burst. That means, you should always try and have Weakness in the same setup as Energy Burst.

This means having many small instances of damage is far superior to fewer large hits. If you land for instance 1 large attack every second, then you need to have every single attack be a critical hit to not have downtime in between Energy burst going off cooldown and you activating it again.

If you on the other hand, land 4 or 5 hits every second, you need only one out of these hits to crit, giving you a much higher consistency and a much lower downtime on the Passive. Hence, many small attacks is allowing you to take full advantage of the Passive and the Energy regen boosts

So is Energy Burst any good then?

It is very very very powerful if you are using it right. Having maximum uptime on it’s procs enable your Immortal to regen energy extreemly quickly. Check out this Seon, she relies on Energy Burst to secure near 100% uptime on her Ultimate Ability for massive damage.

But just as powerful as it can be when done right. Just as terrible is it to do it wrong. If you have low critical hit and fighting against someone with Malice on. You are not going to have a very good time with this Passive. Check out this poor Gilgamesh.

He is trying to run Energy Burst to get off more Ultimate Casts. Which is a good idea on paper, but because the player is not running Weakness and dosen’t have very high critical hit rating. The enemy puts on Malice and suddenly Gilgamesh does not land a single critical hit for the entire fight. Hence this guy get zero value what so ever from having Energy Burst. Literally any other Passive would have more impact.

Published: 21-10-2022