Too many restrictions against buffing Eye of Winter's projectiles

Eye of winter for some reason has 3 kinds of projectiles. The orb itself, which does no damage but periodically unleashes needles and then explodes and creates a nova of 8? Needles. Each needle does really small amounts of damage, unless you buff them with elemental ground or orbs, in which case they can do some damage.


Scattershot / "chance to fire two additional projectiles" passives: These only apply to the final explosion so you get two additional needles per eye of winter. I don't really get why the two additional projectiles can't apply to the periodic needles as well. Yeah, this can potentially triple the amount of damage done by Eye of Winter. Assuming all the new needles hit some enemy. But the 3x damage possibility is true for basically every other projectile skill or minion attack. Except for Eye of winter, where the extra two missiles do almost nothing.


Wild shards: This skill can only affect the final explosion. It's honestly barely noticeable. I have no idea why it can't apply to the periodic needles. With 20% chance to do wildshards per shot, then it would be roughly the same as giving the Eye of Winter an extra explosion. Although this may sound excessive to some people, it's honestly still not a big deal when compared to giving Wildshards to something like Fireball.

Fork fork actually does apply to every needle. But it's kind of not worth it , IMO. To add forking your only options are the Fork Support gem, the FreezeFork support gem or the Gambleshot one. Gambleshot is kind of nice, but the rest are not great ideas for Eye of winter, Freezefork makes it lose freeze build up, Fork makes it lose damage, and eye of winter already has too little damage.

Honestly? I would change it so fork works ONLY with the Orb. If the ORB forks, you can potentially get double damage, but it changes the angle of the orb, so that's a factor, specially since this can actually make it dodge an elemental ground surface.

Chain: Let's be honest, if Chain was allowed on the Orb instead of just the needles, it wouldn't even be a big deal. It would barely just give it a bit more of a chance to do more damage to enemies if you didn't aim correctly or something. You'd still be picking chain for the needles themselves.

Ricochet is a good example of why it's really nice when the orb can be affected by a projectile buff. It's useful but not overpowered or crazy. Just wish you could say the same about all the other projectile buffs.