Huge let down with inevitable agony (chronomancer)

I’ve tried to use inevitable agony both seasons so far and ended up dropping it both times.

I was really excited about the changes shown. It looked way more fun and actually useful.

But now… it’s not a curse anymore. We can’t scale it outside of generic skill effect duration and area of effect. It also has a cooldown (why?).
I was looking forward to specing more into curses and giving it another shot. But now it’s very generic with no direct synergies. It doesn’t lend it to builds other than “do more damage”.

I don’t know, maybe I missed something, but I’m disappointed. Hyped it up to be let down. Perhaps I shouldve expected less. Possibly they implied it wouldn’t be a curse in the showcase and I didn’t notice. Oh well.
Maybe someone else sees a silver lining here I’m not getting.



Good news for skill speed on sands of time. I’d been hoping for that. Maybe I’ll find something fun to do there.

I find it actually viable now honestly. The fact that you get to have Culling Strike now basically is quite nice. It is basically the Bleed Threshold execute. WITHOUT the need to use a DoT. So it all depends on your damage. The more damage you deal the faster and LARGER the execute will be. I can imagine it starting slow but ramping up on bosses. Potentially getting it to around 40% of a bosses health bar for an auto execute. Will depend on how much threshold you gain per damage dealt.

Another interesting factor. Is how it is worded in the patch notes.
"Culls enemies when total Life Loss reaches Culling Strike Threshold"
So does that mean it just has to reach the "Culling Strike Threshold" instead of the end of the health bar?

In other words. And for simplicity sake. Let's just say Culling Strike Threshold is 50% to try explaining what I am trying to say.

So.
Boss has full Hp. You deal damage. Normal Culling triggers at 50% in this example. Poof Boss dead.

Well if the Inevitable Agony "Culls enemies when total Life Loss reaches Culling Strike Threshold."

Does that mean.
Boss has Full HP. You trigger IA. You deal damage. Damage accumulates the IA Life Loss function. IA's Life Loss accumulates till it reaches 50% of Bosses Life. Boss executed? Perhaps? Instead of the Life Loss of IA reaching all the way to the left of the health bar...

IDK. This is probably a HUGE reach with how they have it worded and will have to be tested in game BUT... Overall IA being what it is now, is by far superior to what it used to be. Cuz what it used to be was delayed damage that does NOTHING if you end up killing the enemy before it reaches its full duration. Now it just flat out executes the more and the faster you deal your damage. Much MUCH better.

I mean I do think it is better. Like its actually playable, but I still lament it basically being isolated from any interactions with anything else.

Benefit is we don't have to worry about curse activation. Downside is we can't scale it all. But honestly curse activation was a trivial problem anyway.


I also saw someone mention the cull thing, and I hadn't noticed that. It is really hard to tell from the showcase if it actually culls before it has stored more damage than the enemies total health.

If it does actually use cull threshold, that would make it much more useful for fighting common and magic packs.
Take a common enemy for example, they buffed culling strike range to 35%.

*editted:math*
The equation is 5/(4*(1-threshold)) -1

So if it has 1000 health, culling strike range is 350.
1000-350= 650
It stores 25% of your damage, so you need to do damage/1.25 to kill.
This works out to 520 damage. That is nearly a 100% damage gain on normal enemies (you dealt 500 to kill a 1000 health enemy). That is nice and makes up for the "nerf" of it not being a curse and being reduced to 25%.

If we repeat this math for magic/rare/unique and calculate the "free damage" we would get assuming hit the threshold in one cast of agony:
common: effective +92.3%
magic: effective +56.25%
rare: effective +38.9%
unique: effective +31.5%

And thats honestly pretty good. Probably can't complain about not being able to scale if thats true.


Now it might be cope and be worded weird. I guess we will see! It would open a weird world where we could try taking culling threshold notables lmao


(Side note, is there any reason agony is Hit only? Feel bad if you want to play fire spells or chaos dot)