Corrupting Cry Support identity after 3.24

3.22 introduced Corrupting Cry Support (CCS)

CCS is intentionally hard to scale. It's a support gem, so skill levels do not affect it. Corrupted blood is limited to 10 stacks, so cast frequency does not directly increase damage. It can only scale itself with 4 support gems, since once socket is used by the warcry it supports. It has a 1000% cost multiplier. It has limited support gem options. It doesn't have additional scaling types like spell or attack damage.

That's all pretty reasonable -- it has high base damage, physical damage auras are strong, and it's easily combined with another physical damage over time skill. You can entirely automate it. Using three or four damage auras and Spiritual Aid with minion damage, a corrupting cry build is (was pre 3.24) modestly viable.

The 3.24 Call to Arms change was a large nerf to CCS. If we want the same QoL we lose a support gem. We gain a slight reduction in cast rate from the new Call to Arms gem. The warcry is now triggered, not cast, so we lose 15% total life recovered on warcry from the mastery.

I understand that we want automation and quality of life to come at a major cost. Why don't we just self-cast it now? We could, but there's not really enough power in the gem to compete with other skills that you have to cast. In its current state CCS could use a little consolation love.

Just buffing the base damage to compensate for a support gem loss is a horrible idea. That would make self-cast CCS way stronger in a phys dot build for no reason.

Making it scale with spell damage is also a horrible idea. That would slot in too perfectly with Reap/Exsanguinate and break continuity with Corrupting Fever.

Suggestion:

Lower the base duration of the gem down from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds (or 1 second -- still fine since corrupted blood inherently refreshes). It is already easy to get 100% uptime on the 2 second Enduring Cry buff with just 3 clusters on the passive tree. Without increased duration support. And that's with 2 second duration over the 8 second cooldown on Enduring Cry. CCS can easily be used more than twice as frequently with General's Cry which now has a 3 second cooldown. We even have tattoos for warcry recovery in the core game now. Lowering the base duration will not affect builds that purposefully invest into CCS. Note that you can also refresh corrupted blood with other corrupted blood sources without investing in warcry recovery (corrupting fever) -- but this seems reasonable.

Change the quality on the gem. We have seen so many skill gems get incredibly strong quality effects recently. At the very least go for 0-20% increased area of effect instead of 0-10%. If you're feeling generous, one of the damage related stats I'm about to mention would be potent.

Now that the skill has lower duration and thus requires slightly more warcry investment, buff the damage. Either flat damage at around level 20 (Forbidden Shako variant does not need more damage so be careful with 30+) or give us some damage stat. I recommend +0-2 max corrupted blood charges on enemies if that's easy to implement. That would pack in some more damage on rares/bosses without making the clear speed too high. Otherwise something like +0-2% more damage per corrupted blood on enemy would feel nice. You could also do the RF route and rework it with a health scaling (for the same patch you plan to touch Blood Magic in), although that requires some balancing I haven't thought about.

Ya. same thing happened to generals cry builds and divergent trauma. They are archetypes ggg doesn't really care about, or want to be good.

If its not bows or spells its not important enough.