After logging a handful of hours on the new Angry Chicken build, it feels like the Manajuma and Cluckeye reworks stand at direct odds with the only 6-piece set that makes sense to support them—Spirit of Arachyr. More explicitly, my goal is to allow Corpse Spiders to also become Angry Chickens, and support a playstyle that incentivizes correct management of time both in and out of Hex - Angry Chicken.
Cluckeye revolves around spawning and transforming pets into chickens for large, explosive payoffs, but ignores the pets that the Archyr set supports. This is where my first fix comes in. Rather than transforming active pets and causing them to explode, my proposition for this item is as follows.
All Angry Chickens deal 150-200% damage. For 10 seconds after leaving Hex - Angry Chicken, all spawned pets are Angry Chickens, dealing 100% of your Hex - Angry Chicken damage. When an Angry Chicken explodes, gain a 20 second buff increasing the damage of subsequent Angry Chickens by 50%. This buff stacks, but does not refresh.
Next, an adjustment for Manajuma’s which—in my opinion—stinks in its current form. Spawning a single chicken every half second that is subject to crap minion AI is not enjoyable, and incentivizes sitting in Hex - Angry Chicken for its full duration to crap out more damage rather than engaging with monsters until the last moment when you manually explode.
The change I would make would be to give the player more control over any automatic chicken spawns and also give the player something to do outside of Hex - Angry Chicken.
Manajuma’s Way:
The damage of Hex - Angry Chicken is increased by 2000% and slain enemies trigger an additional explosion.
Your Hex - Angry Chicken lasts 15 seconds and movement speed as a chicken is increased by an additional 100% while gaining 75% damage reduction and for 10 seconds afterwards.
Every pet you summon generates a stack of This Is The Way, up to a maximum of 25. Upon casting and while maintaining Hex - Angry Chicken, unleash all stacks of This Is The Way as Angry Chickens over 2.5 seconds. All Angry Chickens deal 100% of your Hex - Angry Chicken damage and prefer targets afflicted by Locust Swarm.
The intention is to allow Corpse Spiders to play a roll in this alternate version of the Arachyr set while not being the build’s focus. This also has the added benefit of making the Arachyr 4-piece set bonus not feel godawful, by giving us back the tool through which to direct our spider queen.
These changes together would also allow for two versions of Angry Chicken to exist. By changing Cluckeye to support manually summoning pets, it would allow the item to lift out of the build in favor of Wormwood for pure speed runs where your Fetish Sycophants and Circle of Life Zombie Dogs would provide more than enough This Is The Way stacks to burst mob packs in players’ farming difficulty.
Lastly, less of a concept and more of what feels like a bug, Chickens not adding stricken stacks feels like an oversight or a mistake. Having to run a skill like Manitou to stack stricken feels foolish.