Some Ball Lightning Suggestions to get it into balance/lift it from the floor

I actually think one thing would be the best: Allow it to have duration increases.

The cost is a socket and passive and gear affixes to gain the incremental power of more ticks of beams.

Easy-peasy. Can add the off-screen limit to keep it from being a fire and forget mapping, kind of thing over time.

Sure, most folks will cast and move and just follow them as they continue to add BL to the screen.

However, even if the duration is 50 seconds, I don't think... Well, with an 8x per second cast speed, sire for multi proj... I don't think 2000 BL's would crash an instance, would it? Right? RIGHT? :D

Either way, I think being able to push BL to 6 second duration would not be a bad thing and make the skill more main skill viable.

I also think a combo from BL, should be sucking up mana remnants to do something. Either giving you mana, or pulsing aoe's, or bouncing. I dunno. When I try to play engineer in my head, the complexities of managing it seems like it would be bad for performance to have moving aoe overlapping other trigger zones and doing a trigger during passthrough.

Maybe BL should detonate things. Like Frostwalls, Orbs of whatever, etc.

Or maybe be more thematic to the history of real life BL. Some just sit there, some change directions, speed, etc. Pure CHAOS!