OR: How to Have Your Cake and Eat it (chilled)
OK, in the thread discussing today’s balance changes, I said that I couldn’t see how they could balance Deathly Chill without giving Chilling Darkness an ICD. I thought that, while the Chilling Darkness nerf was harsh, there was no other way around it.
I’ve now changed my mind: it occurred to me that Deathly Chill causes chill to do damage not as a “damage-over-time” effect the way every other condition does, but on-application. In other words, it’s not like Terror, where the duration of your Fear determines the amount of damage the trait does: instead it does damage when it’s applied, regardless of duration.
This is what could potentially make skills like Plague and Well of Darkness game-breaking when traited with both Chilling Darkness and Deathly Chill: because the short-duration chills caused by Chilling Darkness will proc Deathly Chill for just as much damage as the longer-duration, less frequent chills that are part of the Reaper’s weapon and Shroud skillset.
I’ve written earlier that there was no way to balance this by putting an ICD on Deathly Chill instead: most of the Reaper’s skills are aoe or cleaving, so if you put an ICD on Deathly Chill there was no way to guarantee that the chill damage would land on the person you’re actually targetting. If it procced on a ranger pet or rock dog, making the trait go on cooldown and sparing my real human target from eating the damage, I’d definitely be kittened off.
Therefore, the only way to ensure that Reapers could do decent damage with Deathly Chill, without causing Well of Darkness and Plague to singlehandedly destroy entire zergs, would be to put an ICD on Chilling Darkness instead. This is unfortunate, of course, as that trait was the only thing that made taking those skills worthwhile in WvW large scale fights, where the necromancer could spread a lot of snaring and disruption. Now, those skills will proc for only a single chill each, making them pretty useless.
It’s now occurred to me that there was another way they could have balanced it. Instead of putting ICDs on either Chilling Darkness or Deathly Chill, they could instead have changed the way Deathly Chill does damage! Instead of doing only a single packet of damage when you apply chill on a target, change it instead to work like Terror and do damage-over-time. So, instead of it doing 200ish damage when you apply chill, make it do, for instance, 75 damage per second. That way, assuming 50% uptime for a GS reaper, it’ll be roughly the same amount.
This way, chill duration matters, and Well of Darkness and Plague no longer turn into massive AOE damage, which also snares you so you can’t get out of it. Chilling Darkness only does 2" chills, and chill has just been changed to cap maximum duration stacking to 5.
Frankly, I don’t think either of those skills would’ve been bad enough to warrant this nerf anyway. After all, they do roughly what the ranger’s Barrage does (snare and aoe damage), but with added blind and MUCH less damage. I don’t see rangers stopping wvw zergs in their tracks personally. But, nonetheless, I don’t know the final numbers, so maybe Reaper would indeed have been overpowered with these skills. I accept that the Reaper’s traits have been balanced with the Reaper’s ability to apply chill in mind, and since they apply chill infrequently but with long durations, it was a bit silly that Core necromancer skills could get more damage out of Deathly Chill than the reaper’s own skills could. But by changing Deathly Chill to do DoT instead of single-packets of damage, duration now matters, and the Reaper’s long 4.5" greatsword chills will no longer do less damage than multiple short-duration Chilling Darkness chills: it’s the same damage, applied per-second like every other damaging condition in the game.
If you agree that this would make sense, please bump this thread till whoever’s handling balance sees this.