This set was originally created to be a risk/reward set that inflicted you with such a high penalty that despite the power potential it offered, attaining it would be something you'd seldom want to keep. After monitoring much of the sets' performance and metrics after Greymoor launched, we noticed the overall goal of people using the set was to sit at max stacks for as long as possible, and never really think about dumping them.The issues behind this stemmed from the fact it offered so much damage, that even if their character did die, they'd rather try again than not try at all. During this PTS cycle, we've found a much healthier maximum of the set that still offers a staggering amount of power if you can capitalize, but with even more aggressive penalties, to hopefully reinforce a sense of looming dread when you try and reach the cap.

Additionally, we saw this set being used by far too many players in Trials, which led to an unhealthy balance between Magicka and Stamina. We've rectified the latter by adding in the addition of Weapon Damage, but we still don't want this set being ran by 8+ damage dealers. Last week with the first PTS patch, we attempted to make this impossible by making stacks last 30 seconds, but it came with the trade off that this set now introduced a new layer of difficulty, time and stack management; we heard that overall, it was simply too much for the set. We've toned it back and increased the duration to 10 minutes (which we can still address further if need be) to remove some of that stress of needing to constantly live in battle and get kills. This change would have allowed the set to be ran again in Trials with relative ease for non progression groups, so we needed to find a new way to prevent it from being ran all over the place.

As mentioned above, in a future PTS patch, we'll be increasing the maximum number of stacks from 20 to 50, as well as amping up the penalties from the original 40% (pre-PTS) to 50%. With both of these changes, it will ensure it will be MUCH harder for multiple users to all reach the maximum stack count of the set in a Trial environment, as the number of available kills is limited to the number of enemies inside, and the increased threat will make you think twice about keeping it active all the time. With these changes, we're hoping to still see the set being used in areas such as dungeons, arenas, and PvP, but hoping to see it far less frequently in Trials.

As a closing note, we'll be monitoring our effectiveness of kiss curse, or risk versus reward sets better in the future, and trying to make penalties that are harder to bypass when in group settings, to ensure we don't have another repeat of Thrassian's release.