Gonna try to re-post this idea (hopefully better explained cause I think my initial explanation caused some confusion).

Instead of removing spirit and adding this additional stat of Darkness, why not literally embrace the darkness and add a scaling chaos DPS buff that is based on “reducing” (which will actually end up becoming stacking) light radius.

On the “Embrace the Darkness” side of the ascendancy, each of the minor nodes would be 10% reduced light radius.

The first major node would say something like “gain 1% damage as extra chaos damage for every 5% reduced light radius” and would only reward the player for reducing their light radius.

So you would trade off your ability to see the minimap only 2 points into this side.

The next major node (replacing grasp of the void) would be “increases and reductions in light radius are doubled”

So taking this node and the 2 minor nodes to get there would give you 40% reduced light radius and 8% damage as extra chaos damage.

The last major node (replacing inner silence) would say “your light radius can go below zero. your base light radius is zero. the effect of light radius is inverted”.

Going all the way to the last node would mean you would have a +60% light radius, which could easily be overcome and then some with the doubled increase & reduction, which means you would then need to get your light radius as close to or below zero as possible by stacking light radius.

Because with an inverted light radius, zero light radius would be the same as 100% light radius.

And I also think that adding this as a part of an ascendancy buff, the weighting of the light radius affix would need to be changed a bit so that it does not appear as often, so it would also potentially be a big help the other classes as well.

I really hope this made sense, as it’s pretty confusing, but so is the concept of chaos, which I believe this idea plays into beautifully.

Thanks for taking the time to read all this…

Definitely took waaaay more time than I’d like to admit to really think this through.