Hydrosphere

Hydrosphere needs a lot more aoe if it's supposed to be useful. Between micromanaging shocks/freezes for pulse, its frequency is terrible, but what really clinches it is the actual area of effect. It's about half of orb of storms. Drenched also doesn't apply much effect. Honestly, I'm starting to feel that orb of storms is better since it can actually hit things.

I played 6L Hydrosphere + 6L Vortex as a league starter with elemental overload. I cleared all the new content, bosses and reached level 100. So here's my feedback:

- Scaling along regular cold spells is hard since HS profits the most from "gain X% of physical damage as extra cold damage". Especially with cold DOTS the only way to scale both is generic dmg and spell levels. This is a bit weird since it felt very good to have it as a clearance skill in connection with vortex.

- Cast Speed is problematic. You need some cast speed for hydrosphere to actually feel good as the main clearing skill since it takes quite a while to self cast. The most attractive feature on hydrosphere, the pulse frequency, does not scale with cast speed however. So it seems kinda wasted to push casting speed.

- Clearing power once you stacked some increased AOE for sure felt good. It was great to be able to reach spots you couldn't reach with projectiles, eg. some stuff around the corner.

- The overall damage of hydrosphere seems to be rather low, considering its required investments to feel good. With pulse frequency of 0.4s and no way to significantly increase this besides the 10% from superior quality, it seems rather limited. IMO that pulse frequency should 1) incrementally go up if you keep casting hydrosphere yourself and 2) be affected by CDR. This would open up the skill to be used as ma main skill and finetune builds in late game.

- Having to constantly freeze / shock the sphere with another skill is cool but as said above, the reward should not be capped at 2.5 times per second.

Is this skill supposed to stop activating from ailments based on the input damage? If so, can it be more transparent about how much effective HP it has for ailment application purposes?

I leveled an Elementalist with Orb of Storms + Hydrosphere but the Hydrosphere suddenly stopped activating with shock around level 65. Now, my Lv16 Orb of Storms still crits regularly (I can see Elemental Overload reset every few seconds) but my shocks don't proc the Lv16 Hydrosphere. I did some rough testing in my hideout and:

[✓] I can shock-activate Lv15 Hydrosphere with a Lv11 Shock Nova (yolo bought it from the vendor just now after confusion in Act 9)
[✓] I can consistently shock-activate a Lv1 Hydrosphere with a Lv16 Orb of Storms
[X] I CANNOT shock-activate a Lv16 Hydrosphere with a Lv16 Orb of Storms even if it's linked to Innervate (Lv11)

It seems like the Hydrosphere has some threshold damage required in order to shock, just like player/enemy entities do based on HP. If this is intended, please add Hydrosphere's effective HP in its skill gem description (or tooltip if it scales somehow) so that it's not a guessing game whether the ailments will proc.

Amusing how no one has posted about how absolutely broken this skill gem is with chained projectiles, it is far worse than how Kinetic Blast interacted with Frost Wall back in the day. Like this is pretty much slightly less than doubling ones damage just having it up on a boss.

This absolutely needs a nerf.

1 second makes the chaining function pointless. Wouldn't 200ms be more appropriate?

Edit: Idea: Instead of the cool down, have it to chain in a circle area similar to orb of Storms rewarding close combat.

You nerfed this skill. And they did it right, players with projectiles and chains have Tornadoes, with a reasonable limit. Players with Strike skills are still in trouble, but this is not their league.
And everyone seems to be happy... But no.

You are developing the theme of auxiliary skills for solotargets.
Lightning builds have Orb of Storm.
Ignite builds have Flame Surge.
Various archers have Ballista and Tornado.
Cold skills have... Hydrosphere? Funny. Because of the 1 second per hit limit, unless I have a 100% critical hit/freeze chance, there is a chance that my Hydrosphere will be a useless ball, and will not provide any help in solo targeting.

Okay, keep the 1s CD, but add a loophole to apply ailments without chaining/meleesplash damage.

Since the added cooldown on how often the sphere can be hit, it also has become much more difficult to use the sphere for its intended purpose.

If I hit the sphere and fail to shock/freeze i need to wait the cooldown before it can be attempted again.

I'm currently playing a lightning character in Lake of Kalandra League and even with 100% chance to shock I have multiple skills which cannot shock(Herald of Thunder, Galvanic Field, Lightning Conduit) which eats up the cooldown, also im playing in a party and some of my party members seems to be able eat up the cooldown as well.

It feels very bad at the moment.