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# Wintertide Brand
[[Wintertide Brand]] is a spell that creates a brand at the target position. While attached, the brands deals cold damage over time to the attached target and chills them. When the enemies it attached to die or the attached duration end, it creates an area of effect that applies the total amount of DoT that it has dealt to the enemy it attached to to the surrounding enemies.

## Skill functions and interactions

- **Cold DOT**: The skill has two debuffs.

- While a Wintertide Brand is attached to an enemy, it has the "Wintertide" debuff, which deals cold damage over time and chills. Multiple instances of this debuff stack when there are multiple brands attached to the enemy. This debuff has no duration.

- When a Wintertide Brand is removed, it removes its "Wintertide" debuff from the enemy it detached from, and applies "Wintertide's End" debuff to each enemy in range (may include the previously-branded enemy if that's still alive). It also deals cold damage over time (value copied from the removed "Wintertide" debuff) and chills. It lasts for a a base duration of 1 second. This debuff cannot stack, and only the strongest instance will apply at a time.

- The "Wintertide" and "Wintertide's End" debuffs can both deal damage to an enemy at the same time (e.g. if an enemy is having a brand attached while receiving "Wintertide's End" from a removed brand).

- **Area**: Wintertide Brand does not create any AoE ground dot, it just puts individual "Wintertide's End" debuffs on each enemy in the area when removed. Because of this, modifier to AoE damage will not affect the skill, and modifier to AoE will affect the area the brand can put its "Wintertide's End" debuff on.

- **Activation**: While attached, the brand gains stages every time it activates, which increase its damage. The activation rate (and hence the stage-gaining rate) can be modified by modifier to brand activation frequency such as cast speed, or [[Swiftbrand Support]] or [[Brandsurge]].
  - By default, with a 0.25s activation frequency, a brand need to be attached for 5s minimum to reach the final stage of 20.

- **Stages**: Stages are a property of the brand. Each brand has its own stages that only affect its debuffs. If multiple brands are attached to the same enemy, they don't share their stages in anyway.

- **Hit**: Wintertide Brand does not hit in anyway, so for example it cannot be supported by [[Hextouch Support]], it cannot trigger [[Elemental Equilibrium]], and its damage cannot be reflected.

- **Chill**: Wintertide Brand has built-in chill, and this chill is not prevented when the skill is supported by [[Elemental Focus Support]].

- **Duration**: Modifiers to skill effect duration and brand's duration will affect the following properties of the skill: total attached duration, total detached duration, and "Wintertide's End" debuff duration.

- In general, an increased attached duration will allow the brand to reach a higher stage (up to the max stage, in which case it allows the brand to stay in max stage longer). Since higher stage means higher DOT damage, scaling duration is an effective way to scale the skill's damage.