Cold Bone Harvest with a shield - not exactly a popular archetype. But I’m a sucker for shields and so I kinda figured a build that could “possibly” work.
Affixless except for the amulet - this one I have at the ready.
It’s also a dual damage type and it looks pretty weird, I admit. But let’s cut to the chase.
Bonechill proc activates off blocks at 30% rate. Build has 32 block chance. This means its actual activation chance is reduced to 9.6%. Also let’s not forget 0.65s block recovery. Resistance Reduction from this proc is only applied for 2 seconds. It doesn’t take a genius to see its effectivenes is pretty terrible.
I see two ways of fixing this:
Increase activation chance to 100% and increase block chance to ~35%.
Increase activation chance to 50% and increase duration of RR to 4-5 seconds.
Also increasing amount of RR to 24-25 wouldn’t be bad too. Gods know such archetypes could use it - especially if going for dual-damage. But that’s not as important as its activation shenanigans.
Edit: as @Evil_Baka stated, using the shield instead of off-hand on a caster guarantees some problems with energy sustain. Adding 2-3 energy regen to this item would be a good QoL. Or at least add -% energy cost modifier for Bone Harvest.
+1. I’d love to see this shield and Morgoneth variants that aren’t DW/2-handed Cold Shadow Strike getting some help.
My vote goes to both of the above as much as I’d love to go the reverse and have the shield sprout a ton of passive bone procs with 100% block chance for fun.
Edit: @XandeRoot While i like the idea of Cold+Vitality hybrids (and have theorycrafted a handful in the same style as your Ritualist), I do wonder whether just giving the shield some Vitality conversion in some way would be better in the long run, like 50% global Vitality->Cold or 100% Vitality->Cold to Bone Harvest perhaps? Could even retool it to fit with Mythical Dreadweaver and swap the +2 Raging Tempest out.
Sure, DW Dreadweavers is gonna be far better for Reaper. But for whatever bizarre reason, Dreadweaver also supports Soldier and Chillblood’s Carcass is a shield with an on block proc. It would take an absolute ton of work for a S&B Cold Death Knight to even be remotely good but right now, besides the RR on Wind Devil, i’d say the shield just doesn’t suit Shaman at all.
That’s how I’ve treated Nightshard in some similar Morgoneth casters but some care does have to be taken with shields and the set lacking energy regen. If i could sustain some spells here and there, it would open up so many more possibilities but right now, it feels like it’s mostly just stuck to melee.
. Great minds think alike as they say.