Guild Wars 2

Originaly, it was a gw1 elite skill, so I took some inspiration from there.

So, for the next balance patch/fix/nerf i would like to suggest these changes to this wonderful skill:

Cast time: 1/4s
Aftercast: None.
Duration: 2s
Max targets: 5.
Initial effect: foes in the initial area are 1/4s deep freezed (180 radius) and chilled 1s.
Final effect: Creates an explosion of ice (360 radius). Foes caught in the explosion are chilled for 3s. Already chilled foes take 25% additional damage. Base damage: 2000.
Cooldown: 18s

How does it sound? (un)Balanced? Useful? OP? Weak/useless? Could it open new strategies/builds? And you, how would you like the next shatterstone to be? Let’s be constructive (though realistic) and inspire the devs! Even if they don’t read!

I like your ideas and I will comment on them:
A deep freeze, even if it’s 1/4s sounds way too strong on a 3s cooldown. You can say “but headshot from thieves then!”, but headshot costs alot of initiative and is daze, which doesn’t lock you in place.
I like the idea of adding damage when a foe is chilled, however the problem I see here is that it doesn’t really fit scepter. The scepter skills don’t do any chill atm and would be hard to synergise.

It seems that the devs want to make shatterstone a vulnerability applier skill (I guess after 10 times of tweaking the vuln). My personal suggestion is to keep it this way, but increasing it’s damage based on the numbers of vulnerability the target has next to the original vulnerability:
- Damage increases by 1% extra for each stack of vulnerability. So at 2 stacks it would increase 4%, at 25 stacks 50% more damage.

I totaly agree it would be too strong on 3s cd, hence why I increased it to 18s untraited, 12s traited.

My intention was to give scepter a hard cc that could be used defensively, or offensively to set up a larger combo. Sure it could be done with dagger offhand but air 5 and earth 4 are on a pretty high cd, and needs you to be close to your target, which you would want to avoid on a squishy spec without hard dmg mitigation and relatively modest disengage potential. Focus Air 5 is single target, and Water 5 not so reliable.

Indeed scepter skills don’t do any chill, and I wish it did. For a condi weapon, and for a class that uses elemental damage, it is a pity water aa couldn’t apply some chill on third strike for instance. It’s not like it would be op compared to bleeding+poison+boon conversion on necro aa.

I thought it could synergize with Elemental surge (condi on arcane skills, arcane cdr + ferocity) in a damage oriented build.

I feel somewhat frustrated that we have so poor active access to chill in water line (and weapon skills in general), everything is about vulnerability for a line that focuses on sustain. Vulnerability should be air thing (gw1 armor penetration).

I have suggested that the Scepter AA in Water will apply a short-duration Chill with each of it’s 3 Projectiles. (1/4s per Projectile, total of 3/4s Chill). It wouldn’t be OP, as the Projectiles deal very little damage and are pretty slow and inaccurate, not to mention that the Chill from this wouldn’t last very long after Attuning out of water unless the Ele spends time building it up.

However, it -would- synergize with Shatterstone, mixing it and AA up would let you hit with the skill more reliably than before.

ele with a useable interrupt?

No, any cc an ele has must have a cast time of at least 3/4 sec

My idea is to keep the skill as it is but add a 1s daze :o