ArenaNet:Skill feedback/Necromancer/Cacophony

Niche skill -- 17:50, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Discussion
 * Issue
 * Very niche effect, especially for a 2 skill.


 * Suggestion
 * Make this skill a bit more useful. Rather than giving it unholy amounts of damage (like it already has) when the condition is met, make the condition easier to meet. Something like:
 * 10 2  8
 * Hex Spell. For seconds, target foe suffers -1 Energy degeneration while activating skills, and whenever that foe uses or is affected by a shout or chant, that foe takes  damage.
 * I also added in the energy degen. since I figured if there are a lot of loud noises going on (see skill name :-) ), it's going to be harder to concentrate on using skills. This would also help from a balance perspective since it would give the skill a non-conditional effect.
 * Adding damage when the target is affected by a shout or chant would also make more sense since loud noises are more likely to hurt the people hearing them than making them. It would also mean you could put it on anyone (rather than just the person using the shouts and/or chants), and the person using the shouts and/or chants wouldn't necessarily even know they were harming their ally. However, the aspect of skill involved (i.e. targetting a person with shouts and/or chants) still remains since someone who uses a party-wide shout or chant would get hit twice by this.
 * As an aside, this would also have synergy with foe-targetting shouts such as "YAA!" and "Fear Me!" since they should trigger it as well. This would actually make shout counters like this skill itself more useful due to the higher numbers of people which could start using them, but remember that foe-targetting shouts are much easier to balance than others since they don't benefit from a Paragon's leadership and so shouldn't lead to any nasty imba team builds.