Frost Blades

Hi guys!

just wanted to let you know my experience with the skill. I died on normal diff right at the start of mutated Piety fight :D had a brain freeze moment where i just ate 2 lasers in very small time gap.. was not prepared for the fight at all.. but i killed her on standard and all of the other act4 bosses with no dying.. (as a punishment for not preparing properly for a fight i did no changes to my build or items or gems while killing the rest off bosses so practical relied on unlinked viper strike for solo dps... )

back on topic! while leveling in early game i used FB + melee splash. Surprisingly this works pretty good! :) you get an AOE skill with a little bit of range on it, and it increases the mob hit cap from 4 to more. you lose a bit of damage on the initial mob, but you get the next mobs double dipped. They get hit by the AOE part of melee splash and then they get hit by the projectile. So in the end you don't lose damage on small mob groups, but you get potential to hit more mobs.

a bit late on, i added multistrike and melee physical damage. while maybe this was not the optimal setup for your projectiles, this still made the skill work pretty good. With the assassins mark and fast attack speed i was melting the mobs in seconds :)

In the future this setup would be probably replaced in favor of one more favoring projectiles, because they give you an option to clear insanely fast with off screen aoe. But for early lvl's don't count out melee splash! ;)

Stay safe, and run from the lasers!

TL:DR:: Melee Splash works in early game, because your projectiles are not supported good jet, and the splash + projectile, double hit the mobs.

I took point blank with this. am I right in thinking the projectiles, without proj speed being added, are never really going outside of the good half of point blank? Thats how it seems to me but any confirmation would be nice.





So, the short of it basically I threw a ton of gear at it and it was op crazy, who knew hu? I think that goes for most offensive skill gems tbh but I tried it with a few different weapons from like 5 chaos or less value up in a setup you could do with a 5L, I used pcoc so you could farm that off to a curse or curse on hit think to do same thing I was doing with a 6L.

Actually it still felt really good with a very cheap weapon, but this is ALL late game, I reallocated my lvl92 double striker to try it out as it seems like it has a similar playstyle. so leveling with it could be awful, I watched nugi trying it leveling and it looked really bad. Maybe the first hit needs to just do what multistrike gives it and thats autolock on the nearest target if you have none namelocked.






Late game I really enjoy it. The sound effects and the feel of the skill are crazy, its exactly what the games been missing in that department, stuff like frenzy can feel so bad to use with the stiff animations. This just feels insane, even when your not doing great damage it feels like your hitting really hard and the mob is just tanky rather than you ave limp dps. For me its the most fun crit melee skill ive played since reave, by a long way. Im going to keep this char using it full time.


Its a little slow, its always going to be slower than reave or cyclone no matter how hard you work it but honestly you can still get pretty decent speed from it I think. I didnt bother with any sort of projectile supporting, just went damage and let it do its thing. Using flicker strike with multistrike autotargets mobs so if you fly around with whirling blades and get roughly in the area of mobs you can just multi flicker into them and start blasting away, keep whirling then flickering onto subsequent packs, you can sort of get a similar clearspeed to cyclone if you really work it at points. Close but not quite there and a lot more work, but its fun work because the skill feels great to me in an endgame situation.


Even wth the crappy couple of chaos slaughter knife running around in lvl6X range content it was blowing stuff away fairly rapidly and only against really buffed up rare/unique mobs do you really notice much clearspeed difference going from a crappy dagger through to a crazy dagger.

the lesser kriss is in the area of a binos, the skill felt crazy with that knife, like I could do any map in the game with it absolutely no problem dps wise. Thats where it should be too, if you have a binos thats a serious endgame unique and should pack enough punch with a balanced spec. With the silly main dagger the skill is as silly as youd expect.

But how comparatively silly is the question? Well its good, its maybe not a top tier skill the way it is now but if you really play it fast it can perform almost up there. Im not sure slight buffs should be ruled out, the way it functions alone I dont think any reasonable amount of damage of targeting buffing is going to put it into a league of its own tbh. Compared to a range of other skills for melee dagger it felt decent enough, a little buff somewhere wouldnt hurt, its certainly not a Tornado Shot type skill where you start using it and it just feels mega powerful amongst the other skills in terms of how much destruction its doing.

I get the impression early game maybe needs a look at, endgame its certainly a skill that is going to be used in decent builds, one of my favorite skills already.

I've decided to give up on Frost Blades. While I absolutely love the skill, it doesn't seem right that it requires a 5L to make it feel as it should. That is to have it with chain.

This skill desperately needs an innate +1 chain on the projectiles or fire more projectiles to have decent clear speed. While it might seem like giving too much with the chain, the skill still requires proper positioning to get the most of the projectiles.

2 things :

- Well ... agree with more projs at the base OR increased projs when you level the gem. Fork/LMP/GMP/Chain ... it feels wrong. I'm not using any of them.
Frankly i was thinking about Chain but ... meh.

- FB = AOE
Mono Target : you have to find something else ...

Clearing speed : Abyssal Cry doing the job. But yeah you have to do non-stop positioning.
So not so good on this point.

Are the projectile attacks this skill fires not based on the initial melee hit?

So if i put "more melee damage" on my links and i increase the initial hit that spawn the frost blades, are those not directly but indirectly buffed to be stronger?

It really does seem counter intuitive not not behave like this if it doesn't. I make the assumption the projectiles are created based on your melee hit.

So like others have said.

1- targeting is clumsy, like old-school-skill-garde clumsy. Remember why people didn't like the old single target melee skills?
Yeah, this is why.

Suggestion : create a small AOE that allows you to ground target, similar to ice crash, perform a "runic symbol" on its location to represent it. If a mob is inside of that AOE it triggers the skill.
Limit the triggering of the skill to "once" or with multistrike to 3x, meaning you don't get multihits if 3 monsters run into the AOE component.(closest target to character is always favored)

Another solution is to give it a cleave like aoe component that triggers the frost blades on the first target it encounters.(instead of a 180 radius, maybe just a 90 one in front of the character)

Really, the targeting without multi-strike is just aw-full player-experience wise. And will most likely contribute to players giving up on this skill, since multi is only available at 31.

2 - limited AOE potential at low level content, this is really only a problem in a low-link set-up and early game i imagine. It's hard-capped at 4 targets, which given the group composition of even normal means your going to have a TERRIBLE time.

Let's take the monkeys from act2 for example, shit was outrageous to play.
Mental note : this skills only purpose is AOE clearing, because you can forget about making this a single target DPS skill because of how it functions, so it should perform well in that department. It does not.

It came to a point where i just took my molten strike and went PoEf 2 hits entire screen dead.
Then i swap to frost blades again, and i am kiting backwards, trying to line up monkeys, picking them off 4 at a time, taking me multiple minutes to clear a blue pack.(where it would have taken me 10 seconds with molten strike)
LMP has the same result, since yeah you target more units, but you get a less modifier so it takes more hits etc.

Suggestion : There are multiple ways to go about this in my opinion

1) give the blades a small aoe component on impact that deals like 20% of there damage. This means that for packs like the monkeys etc who have a small lifepool but are tight together, you will actually slowly burst all of them down, AOE's should not be able to overlap as this would be extreme overkill.(or perhaps they could, but only deal 5% of the projectiles damage, resulting in a 15% effectiveness unsupported, but increased potential with gmp but with a less% modifier attached to them resulting in a similar damage outcome)

2) increase blades fired per level, but since the issue is in normal this seems like a poor choice as it will do nothing to prevent the clunky feel when the skill should really be all about having a good time and fun.

3- Cone shaped targeted distribution, This stuff made me eat a 50% less damage multiplier(aka = chain) it is frankly just annoying to have the skill not aim backwards with the released projectiles.

Here is the thing, it's melee, your going to have to "do the extra effort" compared to other play-styles, no mater what your end-goal/aim is.
Thus QoL is more important because after you have done the effort (positioning, defensive preparations, getting in melee range with all of the former in mind) you just want to see stuff go "splat". The effort was already made remember, you don't want to be punished after this effort.

But that's exactly what happens with this skill --> 3 creeps run to you, you whirling blades true them(which seems to be the intent of the skill to line them up properly), you fire at closest target, shit doesn't die fast enough, mobs come in to close, you fire at mob again, bummer now the other two have passed the cone shaped pattern at which blades are auto-aimed.
This feels punishing for no good reason. You can go "but positioning!" and i would have to remind you, it's a melee character, we are forced to position irrelevant of the skill we play.

This is like the cleave debacle all over again, except that cleave actually still hits 180 aoe so most units that come close get hit just the ones that run to your off-sides and back are not --> forcing a
re-positioning.

Frost blades however pushes this to a whole new level coupled with it's poor "on-target" aiming mechanic. It's basically a 20 radius aoe up close.

Suggestion : coupled with the "aoe" aiming part allow the blades to cover a 270 angle radius, meaning when a mob is in front of a player, only the mobs behind him are not targeted, but the ones flanking him up front still are.
This will also serve the aiming clumsiness well, since if you fail to aim at the "foremost" mob, you will still target the ones you missed and deal some damage to them, allowing you to burst them down more easily before they get to you.

I hope this helps, like others mention, the skill "visually" is very appealing. Mechanically it is equally appealing and quite frankly its what spectral throw needed to be.(projectile attack limited by melee range)
But in therms of actual "game flow/combat flow" it is very lacking. If i had to rank this skill in therms of player usability i would give this skill an "Expert" ranking, where something like ice crash would get a "Noob friendly" seal. Purely because of how it operates in a live environment.

Peace, love the concept/mechanical theory-craft expect of it, hate the combat flow and execution,

-Boem-

(this is all assuming a 4-link and up to cruel gameplay btw, which imo should be relevant since your trying to appeal to new players equally as old-garde)

"

Vipermagi wrote:

"

Boem wrote:

Are the projectile attacks this skill fires not based on the initial melee hit?

Of course not. It works the same as every other Melee plus Projectile (or AoE, or whatever) Skill in the game, the Projectiles are entirely separate from the Melee strike.

That's a pita since it locks the skill out of effective use with block characters. Since those nodes are directly worded as "melee physical attacks while holding a shield".

Then again, this apply's to a lot of skills. Which seems odd since ranger has heavy block focus in her passive tree and this skill sort of screams shadow/ranger/duelist from it's core.

Peace,

-Boem-

after trying and trying the conclusion:

this is a knife in a gunfight

skill that hits a limited number of foes will always end up inferior when there are skills with uniform AOE coverage (reave, cleave etc).

it is very fun to use and probably works 'ok' with mirrored gear (what doesnt..) but with 300pdps 1h sword with medium crit Reave/Cleave beats it hands down - mostly due to zerg-stop potential that Frost Blades do not posses (no matter freezing/chain/fork/lmp etc links)

Ele prolif with Phys To Lightning was cool but still only a gimmick

Not mentioning that 2.0 leech + 'converted' skill == even less leech.

"

sidtherat wrote:

after trying and trying the conclusion:

this is a knife in a gunfight

skill that hits a limited number of foes will always end up inferior when there are skills with uniform AOE coverage (reave, cleave etc).

it is very fun to use and probably works 'ok' with mirrored gear (what doesnt..) but with 300pdps 1h sword with medium crit Reave/Cleave beats it hands down - mostly due to zerg-stop potential that Frost Blades do not posses (no matter freezing/chain/fork/lmp etc links)

Ele prolif with Phys To Lightning was cool but still only a gimmick

Not mentioning that 2.0 leech + 'converted' skill == even less leech.

The main problem is, that since it is projectile based, the way to up the number of potential targets always comes with a hefty less% multiplier.

And even then it only roughly "doubles" the potential shards/targets hit in most cases.

Which is why i proposed a 5% damage explosion on every shard.

This would greatly improve the early game experience (think = forest ape packs of 25+ rushing your characters, horrendous to fight in normal with this skill) and would potentially help in an endgame environment as-well.

More target modifiers would increase the amount of explosions, but would be equally effected by the less% modifiers, keeping the overall AOE coverage damage reliable and stable.

Peace,

-Boem-

edit : as i expected, the one support that removes the target count (pierce) is the most beneficial link to this gem. It doesn't have a less% multiplier penalty and removes the target count completely.

Sad really, since the more interesting mechanical manipulations are removed.

this skill is still demolishing for me, I absolutely love it. I made a second char with elss survivability from dropping grace and a few life nodes, farmed my charges and leech off to curse on hit setups to free up gems, went full elemental with phys to lightning





the damage is pretty serious, just instagibbing most stuff, bosses, exiles, elites just melt on contact. With a 250pdps dagger its at 83k dps, with a mirrored one its at 142k, even the 250pdps binos level dagger you can annihilate with this skill. Aoe and single target both seem fine tbh, instant shock + freeze, herald of ice explosions etc mean I strike a group of mobs and the entire pack just disappears instantly. Binos are like 2ex in warbands, dunno about tempest, but achieving a crazy build with this in a temp league is absolutely possible. I could buy a binos in warbands right now, I could buy 2 and Ive barely even played that league. For the power of this skill with a weapon like that I feel like its in a good place endgame, far from needing 100s of exalts to do crazy dps. You could hit 60k in 2 weeks of a new league no problem and youll just ransack the map system.

If you really want pierce you can just grab it on the tree, honestly though my feeling is just get more damage. Theres so much damage sitting around Im not taking, Im using no gems like chain, gmp, blah blah, forget all that nonsense, just stack damage and its ferocious. I think using it with high crit builds are where its at tbh, just hitting extremely hard and fast with big dips that instaburts monsters, for non crit swords and what not I think reave and cyclone are still gonna be the choice for chipping away at packs. I feel like you just dont go for trying to make its aoe compare with reave/cleave, its already bigger aoe than cyclone, just work on instantly exploding what you hit, flickering onto the next pack and doing the same, youll kill them just as quick as cyclone will, maybe quicker. If you work on the aoe it wont save you time, it will just nerf your single target damage.