Enchanter is totally busted, and even more so with Frost Knight. Really the standout for being OP is the Charms, especially the non-Water ones. The non-Water Charms with their modifier maxed have a 50 second duration with 60 second cooldown, that’s a mere 10 seconds of downtime for some truly ludicrous stats. You only need 18% CDR to have Earth, Flames, and Wind always up, and that’s not even considering getting +skills to the modifiers for even more duration. Charm of Water is incredibly powerful with that 20% Total Damage Modified stat, but has a more reasonable 50% uptime. Let’s not mention that you can barely even see your character with all the Charms running. It seems that allies get a much less graphically intense effect than the player (it seems to be doing the graphic twice on the player). Did you perhaps have the Charms do an effect on the player and an effect on the aura, which also affects the player?
As to why Enchanter is even more OP with the Frost Knight, it’s because you further buffed the already amazing Icy Flows modifier. Let’s compare Sweeping Strike to Blade Arc shall we?
- Points to take: Sweeping Strike 1, Blade Arc 10
- Points to max base skill: 16 for both (that’s something at least)
- Weapon Damage: This part is a little tricky because Blade Arc has no CD unless you take the transmuter, and Sweeping Strike has a CD unless you ultimate max Icy Flows or near so with some item CDR. We’ll compare as just a cooldown skill for simplicity. Sweeping Strike with transmuter (no reason not to) is 345% weapon damage, Blade Arc 371.25% weapon damage.
- CC: Sweeping Strike has Chance to Freeze and 33% attack and move slow, Blade Arc has a chance to knockdown.
- Number of Targets hit: Sweeping Strike 5 in 180 arc, Blade Arc 13 in 280 arc (with modifier maxed)
- Bonus Effects: Sweeping Strike 25% chance to reduce all cooldowns by 4 seconds on a 1 second cooldown and reduced elemental resists, Blade Arc… crit damage?
Let’s talk about that flat CDR proc on Icy Flows. As far as I understand, that 25% chance on Attack is rolled against every enemy hit, not on skill use. Add in some attack speed and it’s not hard to be activating it close to every second as its cooldown allows. Remember that as a Celestial Power proc it too is affected by regular % CDR, letting it activate even further. This gets absolutely absurd, because it’s less restrictive to use than Belgothian’s Carnage (requires dual wield) while giving more cooldown reduction. With Enchanter, this means trivial full Charms all the time. With Arcanist, I’m pretty sure you can get 100% Mirror of Erecotes uptime, never mind Devastation, OFF, transmuted Calidor’s and even Nullification.
Okay, enough ranting. There are other skills to cover!
Frost Aura - This skill seems totally fine until you see the maximum Cold resist from Frost Nimbus scales you to over 100% max. This should either be a flat amount that never scales, or something more like 1% per point at most. Maximum resists is super powerful for protecting against that damage type, a Frost Knight would be effectively reflect immune due to his resists and doing basically just cold damage. The physical to cold damage conversion is a bit much as well, it’s quite trivial to get 100% physical to cold on almost any physical skill because of it. Reduce the scaling so more item investment is needed to achieve this, but I like having the possibility of full conversion.
Glaciation - Is fine until you get to the Celestial Power (this seems to be a trend). +100% OA, 60% Damage Absorption, and that’s not even all it gives! Even with only 10 seconds out of every 30 you will murder everything in those 10 seconds. You could at least make it on kill instead of on attack, that way it would match the name of the proc, and also make it harder to combo with Sweeping Strike (have to kill with Glaciation, not just swing a bunch and then turn on Godmode). Piercing Ice… doesn’t show any stats at all to me (the physical to pierce conversion, though I have no idea why you would want that with the metric ton of cold damage conversion you can get instead, would have figured it for a piercing to cold conversion). This tooltip error may just be because of DAIL, not sure. It’s clearly on 1.1 of your mod, as its Enchanter doesn’t have Touch of Nature or Resurgence. Back to the topic at hand, the proc is just fine, actually quite balanced (no weapon damage or flat damage). Thankfully this needs a two-handed melee weapon, which slows it down a bit compared to Sweeping Strike.
Cold Snap - Why ever bother when there’s Sweeping Strike with Icy Flows? If we take that out of the equation, I think it’s kind of lackluster with that cooldown, but CDR will greatly reduce it. Which brings up the fact that if one is using your mod alone and not in DAIL that means you don’t have the Cornucopia devotion changes, which means Time Dilation is still in the game. And getting 0 CD Cold Snap for 8 seconds is absurd, though I realize there isn’t much you can do about it.
Winter’s Gift - This feels and reads more like a mastery level 50 exclusive buff skill like Stormcaller’s Pact, but maybe that’s just because I really dislike uber buffs for a short time with a huge cooldown. I didn’t like the old Possession, Menhir’s Bulwark or Oleron’s Rage either, and by the current state of the game neither did Crate since they’re now constant exclusive buffs.
Path of Frost - The resist reduction seems excessive, and I believe if you have this and use Sweeping Strike with Frost Fever the reduction stacks as it’s all one attack then. If not, then maybe it’s okay, it does require you to hit with a 2-handed melee weapon after all.
Howling Wind - Mega OFF, considering when you get it I think it’s fine, maybe even a slight buff (normalize the freeze duration maybe?).
Frost Blast - Looks cool as hell, it being a melee range ability is a bit puzzling however. Like the transmuter, so many are done as just a raw power increase, this is more like original transmuter design like Quick Jacks that makes your use of the skill different, in this more of an Oh Shit AoE.
Frost Shell - Too much % DA for a level 1 skill. Hell, it would be too much for a level 50 exclusive skill, it gives more than twice that % of OA Oleron’s Rage gives. Rest of the stats seems mostly okay. Crystallize… is weird. Is the resist multiplier stat supposed to be being used here instead of giving flat resist? Because multiplying cold resist by 1.67 is an incredible amount that really reduces your cold resist from items need (which is kind of cool), but doing the same for physical resist which is quite rare can for many characters mean no boost at all unless they get lucky with an item drop, but then once you do will make you crazy tough. I’m not sure the resist multiplier stat can be used in a balanced way, maybe in much smaller numbers.
Heart of Ice - More than twice the OA Oleron’s Rage gives, while having an on kill proc for healing to go with that offense and defensive CC resists.
Trained Knight - It’s Veterancy, so it’s just plain bad. As a melee character you want physique anyways (need health), so this doesn’t usefully help in your gearing unless you want to go full glass cannon with minimum physique for gear and then all Spirit for your Cold damage. Cold Steel is way too good, it’s the bastard child of Whirling Death and Feral Hunger that got put on steroids. Need to half the weapon damage. Frostborn again gives way too much % DA, and frankly too much Physical resist. Just it and Crystallize gets you to 45% physical resist! A Shaman can get a mere 8% physical resist. Harbinger of Winter seems totally okay though.
With all that said, the theme of the Frost Knight is prevalent throughout, but does feel like it restricts its synergy. Nightblade, Arcanist, Shaman, even Soldier can work with it, but Occultist and Demolitionist are totally out of the question. This might be okay, but perhaps a little bit more than physical, cold, and frostburn damage would be nice? You could do it as a transmuter, look at Corrupted Storm for Shaman giving it great synergy with Occultist. And as I’ve said, Enchanter is just way out of whack in balance.
