This should provide more time to kill the Ruined Fabricants before they reach the Reclaimer and become empowered.

The original values in the first PTS patch were residual testing numbers; apologies for the confusion this caused! The new duration and cooldown should also fix some issues where the Aegis Caller could continue dealing damage as it was spinning down, and would deal “ghost” damage when it was spinning up as well since its cooldown was shorter than its duration.

Iceheart has long been a powerful defensive set that has become a staple for situations where you want to sacrifice damage for survivability, especially in instances such as Maelstrom Arena and no-death Trial runs. While we love the idea of this set helping in those contexts, the value of defensive and offensive potential this set provided was leagues beyond our standards when comparing it to other sets such as Brands of the Imperium or Phoenix. 

This set’s initial design felt lackluster compared to some alternatives and didn’t feel like it brought anything special to the table in comparison. While we wanted a set that wouldn’t be too defensively enabling, we also wanted to make sure that builds utilizing cast times, such as Heavy Attacks or channels, had a slight buffer zone since they leave themselves vulnerable while they partake in these actions. We’ve opted to help this set stand out a bit more by rewarding offensive players who get full use out of the shield with a slight Magicka restore, as well as increasing the chance this could happen by reducing the overall cooldown. 

While we’re relatively happy with how this set rewards players for going on the offensive during a moment where you’d normally need to go on the defensive, we’ve heard loud and clear that this window was far too long for how it could occur, and felt too easy to reliably proc off cooldown. We’ve reduced the duration to still be long enough to allow you to spend at least a second or two healing yourself before going on the attack, but we’ve intentionally put the cooldown on an inefficient timer with the natural 7 second cadence of CC immunity; you’ll have to think more about when to CC break to proc it, rather than constantly getting its effect at the same time. 

Based on a lot of the feedback we’ve read, the original design of Vykosa being a powerful damage reduction source for a short window was generally a success. However, the set was far too enabling for the very select few groups who could fully utilize its power with its incredibly short duration, leading to huge power deltas in experiences with it. The swap to make it more passive with a lesser effect didn’t yield the results we had hoped for, so we’re putting it back into a category where it’s strong for a short period of time, but we’ve increased that duration a bit to help it be more usable in situations where you haven’t perfectly memorized the time frames for each attack. Additionally, we opted for a percentage reduction over a flat decrease to prevent situations where groups could stack this with other damage reduction sources, such as Mending or Weakening enchants, and significantly reduce the threat an enemy could pose.