[Support gem suggestions] Spell weapon, Cursing cry, others.

Since new skill gems being announced seem too similar to existing ones or have far fetched sinergies (in my opinion) here are some support gem ideas I think would add fun ways to use already existing skills or encourage the use of more than one active skill.

Spell weapon: For the daring spellcaster, the supported melee weapon attack becomes a spell executed with weapon stats that this support will provide. The resulting skill can be supported by relevant spell support gems and is modified by spell damage and cast speed. Leveling this gem increases the "weapon" damage, and quality increases casting speed.

Less projectiles: Similar to concentrated effect, decreases the number of projectiles of the supported skill in exchange for more damage.

Cursing cry: The supported curse skill becomes a warcry. It applies the curse and taunts enemies. Shares cooldown with other warcries and can not exceed the curse limit. Has a flat/lowered mana cost and leveling up increases the curse effect.

Inspiring cry: The supported aura skill becomes a warcry. The warcry applies the aura buff to self and allies in range for a duration, with a mana cost proportional to the aura reservation instead of the reservation itself. Level increases duration.

Deliverance cry (This one is an active skill): Sacrifice a % of your current hp and es to remove all debuffs on you and your nearby allies, and clear negative ground effects in range. Also taunts enemies in range, shares cooldown with other warcries. Level reduces the % hp and es cost.

Edit:
Ground control: The supported area elemental spell deals less damage but creates ground of its element. Only a certain amount of "ground effect patches" can be active at a time, if more are created the oldest ones dissapear. The gem level increases damage of burning ground and the duration of the chill and shock ground (different types can have different durations to achieve balance).

I like a except for Spell Weapon and the fact that Deliverance Cry would remove ground effects cause I dont get it why I could cry flames, lightningsparks? or frost away, or even green ghostly bones. :D I think you get what I mean. What I realy like are Inspiring Cry and Less Projectiles. Less Projectiles for LS or SA and Inspiring Cry for short Aura Buffs. I think Summoners would love that.

Thanks for the comments :)

I put "clears ground" on the deliverance cry suggestion because ground effects would apply again inmediately, unless temporal inmunity is added instead. But potions already do that and inmunity to everything seems OP. Also there is no way right now to clear the ground.
Lore-wise it could be you blow them up with the power of your lungs. Or a mage did it. Anyway I would buy Deliverance Cry even without that effect, seems useful enough.

Cursing cry and inspiring cry are awesome. There might be some weird overlap though that you'd need to avoid - blasphemy or spell totem + cursing cry for eg. So it's probably not trivial to code. But it's a great way to get more warcry stuff going without needing to invent a bunch of new warcries.

Less projectiles is the best suggestion though. Such a good idea. It should be called 'Fewer Projectiles', though, since I imagine it will reduce the number of projectiles by a fixed amount (eg: 2 fewer projectiles) instead of a percentage amount (eg: 50% less projectiles).
Perhaps it could also be called 'Single Projectile' and just set the number of projectiles to 1?

-1 to spell weapon; I think the idea of summoning a magical weapon to use for attacks is cool, but this way of implmenting it is not.

Spell weapon overlaps somewhat with Crown of Eyes, not quite the same as it would be affected only by spell bonuses but it could use spell crit and spell damage multipliers. I'm not really against having a close copy of an item ability as a support, gem slots are valuable but maybe you're in a situation where you can't spare the gear slot. What this could do is perhaps incentivize ES melee, which might be a good thing, it doesn't really have much going on for it at the moment.

I kinda like less projectiles, some skills that naturally gain projectiles but don't benefit much from them (flame totem) could certainly use it. Unfortunately, we don't really use single target skills too much so I can't say how popular it would be.

Deliverance Cry is a mixed bag, I suppose, the problem is it would be very situational, awfully useful sometimes and useless most of the time, and we players don't tend to drag along things that are useful once in a while. Another problem is a fair bit of effects often get reapplied right away, which is why status removing flasks have an immunity period attached.

The general issue I have with creating ground effects is you could do it even if your skill deals no damage, and if you do, you could get two full strength status effects by converting damage (on anything except fire). And they can also be a bit gpu-intensive which is why devs toned down their appearance in maps.

Those cry-ify supports might be implemented some day, I see no problems with them. Devs got long term plans with the game and probably got a phonebook-thick notepad with ideas and concepts for some future patch.

Poor Spell weapon, nobody loves it :(
It would be different from the crown effect in that it is not using the equipped weapon and is not affected by attack passives.

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Less projectiles is the best suggestion though. Such a good idea. It should be called 'Fewer Projectiles', though, since I imagine it will reduce the number of projectiles by a fixed amount (eg: 2 fewer projectiles) instead of a percentage amount (eg: 50% less projectiles).
Perhaps it could also be called 'Single Projectile' and just set the number of projectiles to 1?

I was thinking about EK and frost blades or skills that already have many projectiles.

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raics wrote:

Deliverance Cry is a mixed bag, I suppose, the problem is it would be very situational, awfully useful sometimes and useless most of the time, and we players don't tend to drag along things that are useful once in a while. Another problem is a fair bit of effects often get reapplied right away, which is why status removing flasks have an immunity period attached.

You are right here, maybe it could add some kind of buff if the receiver has no debuffs on.

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raics wrote:

The general issue I have with creating ground effects is you could do it even if your skill deals no damage, and if you do, you could get two full strength status effects by converting damage (on anything except fire). And they can also be a bit gpu-intensive which is why devs toned down their appearance in maps.

I wasn't very specific in the description, I meant only skills that cause hits and using only the element of the base skill.

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Peturba wrote:

Poor Spell weapon, nobody loves it :(
It would be different from the crown effect in that it is not using the equipped weapon and is not affected by attack passives.

Well, you did say it would use weapon stats as base, that counts as using a weapon in PoE. The concept is good, I think it's different enough from Crown of Eyes and that it opens up some interesting setups.

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Peturba wrote:

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raics wrote:

The general issue I have with creating ground effects is you could do it even if your skill deals no damage, and if you do, you could get two full strength status effects by converting damage (on anything except fire). And they can also be a bit gpu-intensive which is why devs toned down their appearance in maps.

I wasn't very specific in the description, I meant only skills that cause hits and using only the element of the base skill.

Yeah, I was talking about those too. If it used the element tag of the skill to determine ground type it wouldn't need to do any damage, just hitting would do it and you could trigger multiple statuses easily, one with a hit and the other with ground effect, both at full strength. And if it used the highest amount of damage you could get away with doing some token amount with a level 1 spell and pick your status at will with added damage.

The biggest problem I got with ground effects is they're always the same strength regardless of how much damage you did, applying shock to bosses with some peashooter damage amounts is a bit broken.

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raics wrote:

The biggest problem I got with ground effects is they're always the same strength regardless of how much damage you did, applying shock to bosses with some peashooter damage amounts is a bit broken.

That's not the case afaik. Apparently burning ground damage from:

is based on the initial hit damage. (Actually, I think it's based on the ignite damage, but anyway...)

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dudiobugtron wrote:

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raics wrote:

The biggest problem I got with ground effects is they're always the same strength regardless of how much damage you did, applying shock to bosses with some peashooter damage amounts is a bit broken.

That's not the case afaik. Apparently burning ground damage from:

is based on the initial hit damage. (Actually, I think it's based on the ignite damage, but anyway...)

Yeah, it was something like that, it should have the same base as the ignite it inflicted, forgot about the jewel so I thought they don't have the mechanic for that in place.

I'm worried about shock the most, though, if its duration is based on damage you did it will be very similar to proliferation and if it doesn't it will be exploitable, not many ways to create shocking ground at will currently. Hmm, the reason they went with burning ground on Pitch is probably the flavor, not much difference between proliferation and that if you think about it.

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raics wrote:

I'm worried about shock the most, though, if its duration is based on damage you did it will be very similar to proliferation and if it doesn't it will be exploitable, not many ways to create shocking ground at will currently. Hmm, the reason they went with burning ground on Pitch is probably the flavor, not much difference between proliferation and that if you think about it.

Well the idea is that the duration depends only on the support gem level and duration modifiers (such as increased duration support gem)

For example:
Lv | Burning g. dps | Burning g. duration | Chilling g. duration | Shocking g. duration
1 | 2 | 3s | 1.1s | 0.5s
5 | 8 | 3s | 1.5s | 0.7s
10 | 45 | 3s | 2s | 1s
15 | 170 | 3s | 2.5s | 1.2s
20 | 450 | 3s | 3s | 1.5s

So the player has to recast the spell rather frequently to maintain the effect, at the cost of the time he could use to move or deal damage directly, and also 3 gem slots (The skill, this support, and increased duration.

If he wants to use a peashoter, fine, he is losing the chance to add some damage to the utility.