Even though the skill has never got any love from the devs I’ve always liked the Bone Spikes ability of the Diablo 3 Necromancer. While I see that Marrow Shards is basically an amalgamation of Teeth and Bone Spear (both introduced in Diablo 2) I would love to see something like Bone Spikes for the Last Epoch Acolyte.
There’s a few ways I can see it being implemented but the first thing that comes to mind is that it makes Marrow Shards a channeled ability.
Whether it’s channeled or not there’s a few different ways it could be launched.
There’s of course the default way it’s done in D3 where it just hits everything within a circle that erupts from the ground. Next is one of the D3 Bone Spike runes called Path of Bones which to quote the tooltip: Instead of the circle, unleashes a fast-moving 5 yards wide line of spikes.
Then there’s the other rune that modifies it called Bone Pillars which to quote again the tooltip: Instead of the circle, instantly strikes the target and up to two nearby enemies with large bone pillars.
I personally like the sensation of Bone Pillars as it feels more impactful.
Then again why not just combine the two of both Path of Bones and Bone Pillars, although that does bring to mind the attack of the Lurker from Starcraft but I’m not complaining.
Now of coarse there’s the question of how it interacts with already implemented nodes such as the Bone Spinters stuff but that’s what testing is for. Then of course Summon Volatile Zombie has a node that can cause a Marrow Shard to be fired so there’s that to also consider.
Now could Bone Spikes be its own separate skill? Probably but at the same time it’s just too close to Marrow Shards to not really differentiate itself from it so that it would probably be best to implement it as a Marrow Shards skill node if it’s to be in the game.
Any thoughts or refinements to the idea? Would love to hear it.