Wolcen Hype Release!

Watching a giant Mortarbeast slide down a muddy hill in the new Ashfall area has to be one of the cutest things I've seen in an ARPG. Wheeeee.

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It's incredibly important to pay attention to the new 'Ailment Chance Multiplier' (ACM) statistic. Certain skills that used to be very good for stacking ailments are now much less apt to do so: annihilation, for example, was an excellent way to lay down ailment stacks thanks to its very quick damage pulses. Now it has an ACM of 30%, which gives drastic ROI in terms of Wisdom and other ailment chance sources. It's still okay at it but several of my old builds were scrapped due to this change.

Conversely, Consuming Embers (the game's basic fireball skill) now has an ACM of 250%, which is fucking ridiculous and awesome. It's not unlike PoE's fireball gaining some inherent chance to ignite, except that Consuming Embers can be converted to Toxic, Shadow or Lightning damage. So it's pretty easy to keep Embers above 60% chance to lay down an ailment per hit. Throw in some stacking from Cabalist and maybe a Sarisel item and you've got a very efficient means of delivering ailment stack. Grab the dual ailment node and it's party time. A secondary ailment of freeze at that ailment chance would keep mooks frozen for good, and bosses almost constantly broken...

I've yet to go through all the skills to check their ACM, but you can bet I'll be paying attention to it now. My guess is single hit skills got a decent ACM while multi-tickers were bopped with a nerf bat a little.