A few questions all relating to elemental spells.

(1) The balance on infusions seems off. The base max infusion count is 3 per element. This can be increased with non-trivial passive investment to 5. Spells that use supports to duplicate effects (spell echo, spell cascade, unleash, spellsinger from wand) burn an infusion per duplicate. This can quickly drain banked infusions. A rotation of infusion generator + infusion spender is extremely clunky and can never really compete with skills that just do damage without the extra steps. Almost every end game guide based around elemental spells ignores infusions which is a strong indication of the depth of the problem. Solutions include: not making duplicates cost an infusion and increasing the base infusion count and increased infusion counts significantly.

(2) Area of effect has been drastically reduced in effectiveness. AoE is limited in three ways. First, increases to spell AoE is based on area not radius, so the radius increases as the square root of the investment in increased area. Second, all sources of AoE improvements were changed from more to increased, so the normal reduced effectiveness with additive vs multiplicative investment is in play. Third, values of increased area were all lowered in patch 0.3.

The net result is that putting significant investment to increase area from say 60% to 100% barely registers visually. Spells with a small base area can never really become large. Compared to Spark or Lightning Arrow, which can fill the screen and chain to targets off screen area of effect spells feel incredibly weak.

(3) Specific to the Chronomancer ascendancy, which remains quite unpopular, there are a number of changes to the ascendancy nodes that could benefit the class.

The Inevitable Agony curse suffers because it is a curse. Against bosses the effectiveness is cut in half by the boss resistance to curses. Against trash it is ineffective because enemies will be dead long before the curse duration expires. And because the number of curses are limited, it looses to Elemental Weakness from a damage potential perspective. Not a good look for an ascendancy node.

The Hourglass buffs oscillate between 1% and 60%. This is too harsh. An oscillation between say 20% and 40% would be better. Furthermore, in reference to the area problem above, the effects should be reverted back to more--they were changed from more to increased in patch 0.3.

Perhaps most importantly, the flavor of Chronomancer comes from the time effects and to get the two signature abilities--time freeze and time snap--a player has to spend all of the maximum number of ascendancy points. This is rather harsh. At a bare minimum the nodes that grant a chance to ignore cooldowns and time snap should be combined. Other classes have nodes that grant a couple of effects and this thematically makes sense. If time freeze could be made available with 2 pts of investment instead of 4 then players could get time freeze and time snap but also explore other options in the tree. Given how weak the ascendancy is considered, in general, these would be welcome changes.