Adreaver, the issue with that is very clear. What if those were reversed. Venthyr doing, say, 10% more single target than Night Fae.
Now you get to choose between your covenant being even remotely relevant during 90% of M+, or having the single target DPS we’re tuned around. Personally, I don’t really like the idea of the game saying “ok, you can be good at AoE, or you can be good at single target, but not both. Pick which one you want to suck at.”
This is the reason they typically (typically) try to avoid placing purely single-target abilities against purely AoE ones. MM in general is kinda tough to point to examples on this, given how our AoE works, but the 45 tier for BM is a good example. Stomp, Barrage, Stampede, all of them talents primarily oriented towards AoE.
There are a lot of talent tiers that follow this convention, that you aren’t choosing whether you are good at AoE or not, you’re choosing which AoE benefit you prefer. The balance on these can be rather poor at times, with some having ST benefit and others not (ex. MM’s 25 tier, Destro’s 35 tier), but they still generally follow that convention, of a talent tier being specifically devoted primarily to AoE.
That’s exactly to avoid this situation here. Imagine if both Barrage and Murder of Crows were tuned much higher, high enough to be exceptionally strong in AoE or ST, respectively, if taken. Now put them on the same talent tier. If you choose Murder, your AoE is going to be a shadow of what it could be with Barrage. If you choose Barrage, your ST is going to stink compared to what it could be with Murder.
So which do you choose? Because that’s exactly the choice you’re proposing for these covenant abilities? Do you want to have good AoE and bad ST, or good ST and bad AoE?
That’s why I’ve been saying that Flayed Shot and Death Chakram need an AoE component, in addition to balance tuning. They need to have some element of them that provides worth in AoE situations. They don’t need to equal each other in both areas, but they need to contribute. Flayed Shot needs to not feel like a waste of a cast in AoE situations.
Better yet, use the Mind Blast mechanic (which they should, honestly, apply to most procs in this game). It adds another charge on top of the existing one (or existing two, with Dead Eye), that charge existing until it is used or the proc expires. During normal gameplay, if Kill Shot is already on cooldown, you’d gain the ability to cast it, and then the underlying “charge” would be back to where it was on the cooldown without interruption.
Basically, the procs would be entirely divorced from the normal cooldown of Kill Shot and wouldn’t interact with that cooldown at all. That’s how Mind Blast works for Shadow with the new SL proc, and it’s amazing, tbh.
Also, last I checked, it does make Kill Shot free to cast. Even says so right in the tooltip.