Inevitable Agony (new Chronomancer acendancy skill) doubts.

Cutting right to the case; The Chronomancer ascendancy needed *something* that increases damage dealt, and from the available information I don't believe IA is going to be it.

1) It's a curse. That means a) opportunity cost as it replaces another curse and b) 50% reduced effectiveness on bosses.

IMO due to all of this, it would have to have a crazy value of 100% damage stored or more to even be a consideration.

Personally if I were to suggest an alternative, I'd say a very simple passive skill that straight up doubles every 4th cast at no cost (with a little UI counter so you know when to cast a doubled up Comet) would be better. Even better if it also counted as empowering that 4th cast and let you use related supports.

You could even keep the name of the skill the same.

Honestly, the Unleash skill we had before even seems better to me...

By the way, is the issue where skills gained from ascendancies cannot be assigned to weapons sets fixed by now? If not, this would also be something to look at in relation to the Chronomancer.

I agree the old unleash was better designed than this weird curse thing. You could even stack cooldown and empower supports on it to do cool things and have synergies. This new curse is just awkward.

That new curse is really bad for mapping, since you can't rely on it. You'd have to wait and see if the stored damage is enough to kill the monster. You can't just move on. And if you wait, you could as well kill the monster faster with conventional means.

The curse is great for bosses, but Chrono as a whole is less concerned about bosses.

I bet the curse is something lame like 30% anyways.

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drallcom3#6603 wrote:

I bet the curse is something lame like 30% anyways.

That would be so funny. Spending 2 ascendancy points to get a skill that's just worse than a curse anybody can use, and you can't use both.

...I heard Bloodmage is a good ascendancy. Might try it this time.

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drallcom3#6603 wrote:

I bet the curse is something lame like 30% anyways.

You were almost exactly right. So if you're using elemental or chaos damage, the respective -res curse is very significantly better.

I suppose if you're dealing physical damage the curse could have a niche use? Anyways I'm not touching Chronomancer in its current state (and I played one to level 90 before).

I was initially excited to try this curse because unleash only really works for direct damage hits and I hoped this would store damage from dots, but unfortunately this curse is even more explicitly hit damage only. I love playing dot builds and the chaos damage over "TIME" skills seem like a perfect thematic fit with a time manipulation ascendancy, but the GGG devs seem determined not to give the chronomancer toys that work with that playstyle

I agree - new curse is too niche (bad for mapping), competes with existing tools (because of curse limit) and delayed. Maybe it would be better if they revert it back to Unleash (which is much better mechanic wise and can be played around) or at least keep the curse as an option, but add other way to scale damage in ascendancy like suggested here passive double cast every X times or that same Unleash in other branch.

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Traumtulpe#5992 wrote:

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drallcom3#6603 wrote:

I bet the curse is something lame like 30% anyways.

You were almost exactly right. So if you're using elemental or chaos damage, the respective -res curse is very significantly better.

I suppose if you're dealing physical damage the curse could have a niche use? Anyways I'm not touching Chronomancer in its current state (and I played one to level 90 before).

If you take double curse you do get to basically put two "more damage" curses with either Despair or Elemental Weakness on an enemy, which is something you can't do normally. But yeah it's a good bit of set-up and only really worth doing on bosses.

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PunPunch#5910 wrote:

If you take double curse you do get to basically put two "more damage" curses with either Despair or Elemental Weakness on an enemy, which is something you can't do normally. But yeah it's a good bit of set-up and only really worth doing on bosses.

Right, so the only thing the chronomancer has that increases his damage does literally nothing unless you also increase your curse limit. That's pretty rough.

And then it's also very clunky and very situational and doesn't work on damage over time. And it's delayed, so makes no sense to use on anything below rare quality monsters.

And of course, even *if* you have increased your curse limit... there's still much better curses to use.

*If* this skill was a passive that added it's effect to any enemy cursed by you, *and* the stored damage applied automatically as soon as it is sufficient to kill the enemy, it'd still not apply to damage over time but would be good I guess.

As it stands is is just simply terrible.

I miss the old chronomancer unleash. It would feel so good now with the new support gem changes. I don't want no stinky curse...