Cast when Damage Taken

Suggestion: (haven't read all 41 pages of this thread so ignore if repeat)

Make the damage taken based on % of total life, say at lvl 1 it will require 90% of your total life taken to trigger, at lvl 20 it would require 5%. (Numbers are just pulled out of thin air, GGG can optimise it)

Reasoning:
CWDT is the only gem where leveling it up almost makes no sense! At level 20, you need to take 3240 damage before it triggers! For many endgame builds, that's half their HP or more, which means this skill will only trigger at dire circumstances, which is a waste of an entire set of gem slots.

With a percentage based trigger, it would mean that it's actually advantageous to level it up, you won't even need to have the supported gem require level limitation anymore; it also means that lower HP builds can use this gem.

Exceptions:
CI builds. Should use their life as if they didn't have CI (similar to how life leech works when capping it based on life)




Alternative suggestion:
Low lvl gem has a long cooldown (say 10s), while a high level one is much faster (let's say 1s?). But then remove the gem requirement level requirement
Getting more Life should not make a Support Gem weaker.
Either it's balanced around 4k Life and CI builds spew forth Skills constantly, or it requires a higher percent Life (thus stopping the CI silliness) and it's useless when you have beyond 3k Life.

Even without those issues, your proposal makes it another Gem to mindlessly get to 20/20; why remove a unique mechanic like that?
It also makes low-level CwDTs almost literally useless. Triggers after 90% of Max Life, or a 10s cooldown? What. There's a reason most Supports don't actually gain all that much from leveling.


The way CwDT currently works is remarkably fine for something so powerful. You need to take a large portion of your Life in Damage to trigger incredibly high-level CwDT's, but that's why leveling Gems is entirely optional. If you want it to trigger more often, the linked Skills will have to be of lower level and will deal Less Damage. It's a trade-off.
Last edited by Vipermagi on Jul 18, 2014, 3:33:15 PM
I tend to see it as a negative, not the positive change of mindlessly leveling your gems to lvl 20 qual 20. While I agree that this particular gem should not involve mindlessly leveling as you screwedly put, I see the other end of the coin which you aren't bringing to light. The point is that this a "grinding game". And while having a higher level gem shouldn't be an advantage in all cases if you don't have the life/ES/regen/leech to sustain the higher levels, I can tell you that from my experience, no one tries to have a level 21 cast when damage taken. I think that is a design mistake. The last thing I want to see is that a gem reaches its most effective point for a particular build at say level 5 even if you are level 100. Leveling a gem takes considerable effort and the reward should be there if the life/ES/regen/leech is there to sustain it. While I wouldn't lower the damage requirement much at the top end (though perhaps the lvl 21 requirement should be the damage at lvl 20 with everything shifting down accordingly), I would raise the damage requirement at level 1 and increase the damage bonus significantly at higher levels to a multiplier at around +40% with the quality bonus being a crit bonus rather than a useless tiny additive bonus that takes away the reward for leveling it to 20 once and then back again. The fact is that most people use CwDT in a defensive sense. Either I see a high level CwDT to support immortal call or molten shell or enfeeble, or a low level CwDT to support enduring cry or desecrate. I tend to feel that while the gem is quite useful, its uses should be expanded in an offensive role. The problem is that while the positive of mindlessly leveling the gem is avoided, the reward of the grind and the risk of the damage required to activate it only seems to be acceptable from a defensive perspective at the moment.
That's probably more to do with the mantra of "dying should not be a part of your strategy". Same reason Cast when Stunned tends to rely on Blocking; you can be Stunned without taking Damage if you just Block it.

If you're taking so much Damage that a high-level CwDT actually triggers in a tight spot, would you prefer to become immune to Physical Damage, or spit out a Fireball? IC is a mostly-guaranteed way of improving your odds against incoming Damage - an offensive option, not so much. It might kill something, but it could also actually miss entirely. Or the enemy just tanks it. Worse, it can kill you through Reflect (you've already taken a lot of Damage).
"
Vipermagi wrote:
That's probably more to do with the mantra of "dying should not be a part of your strategy". Same reason Cast when Stunned tends to rely on Blocking; you can be Stunned without taking Damage if you just Block it.

If you're taking so much Damage that a high-level CwDT actually triggers in a tight spot, would you prefer to become immune to Physical Damage, or spit out a Fireball? IC is a mostly-guaranteed way of improving your odds against incoming Damage - an offensive option, not so much. It might kill something, but it could also actually miss entirely. Or the enemy just tanks it. Worse, it can kill you through Reflect (you've already taken a lot of Damage).


While I agree with what you're saying, I think you're missing the point. Aside from supported gem levels going up, this gem's statistics also clearly indicate that it was meant to be used with offensive spells. Namely, the fact that +/- damage is both a level-up bonus and the exclusive quality bonus.

No one uses this gem with offensive spells. At least not for the sake of DPS, at all. The +/- damage is just entirely ignored because in order to get reasonable offensive spells linked to this gem doing reasonable damage, you need to be taking thousands of life in damage every few seconds. Link a low-level nova to trigger elemental equilibrium for degen strategies, that's the most offensive spell you'll see linked to CwDT on a good build..

I actually really love how CwDT works right now. However, I think they've missed their original design goals with it.
Last edited by codetaku on Aug 3, 2014, 1:55:29 PM
The Damage scaling exists to prevent it from being a good damage source, from my perspective. It prevents low-level CwDT setups from being a powerful source of Damage output, and by scaling the Damage penalty it's not a complete write-off either (you can deal Damage with it, just not frequently).
I just read that CWDT does not trigger from degen damage. Is this true?
If so, what other damages that will not trigger CWDT?
is cwdt+ec+IC still a good way to prevent reflect (physical)damage?
Degeneration (ridiculously exploitable, and probably very impractical to implement) and Life loss (Caustic Flasks for example) are excluded.

Nothing has changed, so if EC+IC was working for you before, it will still do so.
Last edited by Vipermagi on Aug 12, 2014, 7:55:21 PM
triggering on degen would be clumsy at first (or period) as they'd have to separate and identify sources as self or not self (the important part).
I'm using lvl 12 CWDT.
1500 dmg to trigger is 1-2 white mob hits on Meciless, so at the beginning of a fight I have much better defensive buffs on me then from lvl 1.
I don't know why you are talking about leaving CWDT on lvl 1-5.

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