This skill is unbelievably bad. It has decent damage, comparatively 120% of Soulrend’s damage. You’ll think, yeah, so it’s good or at least decent, no it’s not. WKM (Winter King’s Might) projectile speed is so low, that it effectively reduces your damage dealt. Moreover, you can not not the enemy with multiple projectiles. Talking about projectiles, they have kind of odd or wrongly adjusted collision, because, multiple times when I used this skill, the enemy was on the edge of the skill but didn’t get hit.
Maxed out ABB (23 and 19 points) and Ring of Steel (21 and 1 + some bonusses) has even thrice the damage of WKM. My clearing speed with ABB+RoS is very high, Shadow Strike + ABB = one monster is dead, one ABB + auto attack = monster is dead. WKM needs to be casted twice/thrice to achieve that. Add the super slow projectile speed and your clearing speed effectively is reduced by ~60% (still comparing WKM and ABB+RoS).
I am not talking about non-crit damage, but crit damage. Critting for an average 30k with WKM when you critted for 50 (ABB) and 98 (RoS) is kind of a big deal.
Comparing Chillspikes (Seal of the Night) and WKM, well yeah, go for chillspikes because they’re faster, can hit multiple times in one cast and are cheaper in cast. The crit damage on it is even bigger (35%, while WKM has 25%). Right now, Chillspikes’ damage lower my overall clearing and damage by about 10 - 20%. I would still rather get that instead of the good looking but very weak WKM.
Possible ways of fixing the skill (choose one):
Increase the projectile speed by 150%. This will make this skill very good at high cast speed, increasing damage well.
Increase WD from 55% to ~70 - 90% and increase the projectile speed to the same value Soulrend has.
Make it hit multiple times (up to three times for every projectile if the enemy is in melee with you). I’d rather see that applied along with one of the other suggestions I gave.
Either increase base damage by ~30% or increase the crit damage to 45% (caster builds would like that).
Never happened to me that it hit with all three projectiles, thus I said this skill is shit. I used it in max range, dealt 30k damage (on average, mostly about 28 - 32k), when I used it point blank, damage stayed the same (no additional numbers were visible).
The hat itself is very good, no doubt, but the skill is really bad (or bugged if it actually hits for each projectile).
Dude, point blank range is where the damage potential comes from, it’s not meant to be used at longer range than that. And it’s not supposed to be super powerful, it’s an item skill. Item skills are supposed to be weaker than mastery skills because they don’t need skill points.
I just tested on my Spellbreaker with LA up and it was 50k to 60k per projectile. That’s an average of 160k damage per cast at point blank range.
Take in account that this item blueprint is rare. Like very rare. This skill could use some buffs (not exactly damage increasing ones, but still). If the projectiles were wider and/or speed were higher, this skill would be good. Right now it’s really better to use Chillspikes, at least in my opinion.