Icestorm

Fine without spell cascade (no fps drops) but when i'm using awakened spell cascade, my fps drops under 20.. the skill is hurting my eyes, too big, too much particles, can't even see other effects such as burning/caustic ground because of the chilled ground. We need a way to reduce/remove particles.

So i'm playing Icestorm this league and it's such a great skill. Only one downside, fps drop kills my enjoyment. My video card is Gefore gtx 1070, cpu Intel core i5-4670k, 16 gb ram, using SSD on PC windows 10 64 bit platform. Using Icestorm without Spell cascade i'm having 45 fps, using spell cascade my Fps drops to 14 and using awakened spell cascade my so called fps becomes 4. Would be great if you could improve this skills performance, because it's terrible.

Can GGG confirm whether Dynamic Particle Culling will be activated or improved for this skill? Vulkan rendering was a step in the right direction, as it actually did improve framerate performance of Icestorm.

With maximum stacks in one place I get the exact same drop in framerate with culling enabled or disabled. Anywhere.

I don't know if anything changed with respect to this skill and particle culling at all. But I certainly think it does help reduce clutter caused by other stacking effects that may occur while running intense high-tiered maps. However, it doesn't help with the main performance killing feature of Icestorm particle calculations. I sincerely hope this can be improved.

What have you done...

Icestorm has been absolutely gutted in your 3.12 patch notes. It is not a single gem that you can pick or drop at your pleasure, it is a stat scaling unique that you have to invest your entire built into.

You have left it doing about the same amount of damage (a bit less that double damage per hit, half the impact rate and a bit more of added damage effectiveness and chance of hitting), but you are limiting it to 5, 5!!!!, active storms, on a skill with 0.75 BASE cast speed and a duration that can easily hit the 4-5 seconds and much higher if you concentrate a bit on that.

And I am hoping that you are not considering things like Spell Cascade in this limit, or you would end with Awakened Spell Cascade hitting the cap IN A SINGLE CAST.

Holly hell.

In its current form the skill never hits nothing, look like it has exactly the same explosion radius and the explosion spread pattern as before but now with twice slower hit rate and 5 storms limit
The damage is not sufficient, hit probability is pathetically low against moving or even static target, ground effect is excessive, overcomplicated and looks dirty overall.
I'm trying but still can't understand what was you thinking about while adding the storm limit without introducing any new scaling mechanics with cast speed. Those numbers been pooled from someones ass. You can easily reach 4 cast/sec and 4 sec storm duration, you actually have to have <0.33 sec cast time, the game is unplayable otherwise. 3.2-4 sec storm duration is naturally achievable, you get this value with proper int scaling. Those two constants are nowhere compatible with 5 max storm limit.

The skill is fucked up. It feels like the nerf was planned and implemented by people who fucking never run the game outside of internal presentation.

I'm gonna say smth that most wont agree with, but I believe that 5 storm cap should stay. The FPS gains are just incredible. However, the skill still needs buffs and I'm getting to in in a minute. Most people are used to do cyclone+cwc combo for this spell, and their feedback is from that perspective only. However as I understand, the designers try to make storm skills into more of a self cast identity. I'm leveling a build around selfcasting it and I must say I like the idea of having 5 storms max — building around increasing the damage of average hit the most, instead of focusing on duration and max storm counts as we did before. The skill however has insanely long cast time, and the time before mobs start getting hit after casting is too long. So I think the spell should have a front-loaded portion, like Firestorm got with the meteor. IMO we should get a big comet as initial hit, so we can potentially work around unleash setups with archmage, making it a "fire and forget" kind of playstyle, instead of "spin around and spawn long danger zones" playstyle.

Also big thumbs up to the visual rework, it looks awesome now. Although the sound effect sounds kinda like a train... lol

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Zuzanne wrote:

I'm gonna say smth that most wont agree with, but I believe that 5 storm cap should stay. The FPS gains are just incredible. However, the skill still needs buffs and I'm getting to in in a minute. Most people are used to do cyclone+cwc combo for this spell, and their feedback is from that perspective only. However as I understand, the designers try to make storm skills into more of a self cast identity. I'm leveling a build around selfcasting it and I must say I like the idea of having 5 storms max — building around increasing the damage of average hit the most, instead of focusing on duration and max storm counts as we did before. The skill however has insanely long cast time, and the time before mobs start getting hit after casting is too long. So I think the spell should have a front-loaded portion, like Firestorm got with the meteor. IMO we should get a big comet as initial hit, so we can potentially work around unleash setups with archmage, making it a "fire and forget" kind of playstyle, instead of "spin around and spawn long danger zones" playstyle.

Also big thumbs up to the visual rework, it looks awesome now. Although the sound effect sounds kinda like a train... lol

If you want frontload damage and be unable to invest in duration or cast speed, you can use Cold Snap, a Skill that actually scales quite well with concentrating only in damage. Or any other cold spell really, since your suggestion to add a big hit to work with unleash makes its similar to every other spell with a "slow" cast speed.

Reworking a spell so it is just a bad copy of another spell is not a good choice, specially when it is a unique exclusive spell.



I am a self-casting Icestorm user, I have never been anything but a self caster, and this storm limitation removes every single interesting part of the spell while leaving us with something worse that an useless gem, since then you can you swap to another with no issue.

This is an entire build made useless, all the investment necessary to get the amounts of INT that the build needs to excel wasted by removing half of its scaling by making duration irrelevant.

big changes need big testing
ideally before the league starts

So, it has been some weeks since the change and I have been able to test live all the changes and I have to say....

It exactly as bad as expected.



The hit rate and duration decrease / damage and chance to hit increase does balance itself quite well, giving you a much more consistent damage, something definitely great to have, but all the advantages get shot by the horrible storm cap.


My build is not an optimized self-cast Icestorm build, since my gear has been reused from other builds so I am still missing a lot of INT and even if I had the gear I still would be below a dedicated Icestorm build, since I also have heavily invested in curses, yet I can easily reach the storm cap with just 1000 int, and that is after having to remove my spell cascade support.


This is locking everything I do, I have issues with covering, specially after having to remove spell cascade, making fast enemies a pain to kill, and I hit my damage cap almost immediately when fighting bosses.


I don't know if GGG actually reads this feedback threads, but I implore you to at least increase the storm cap to 50. As it is there is simply no point for me to keep investing in this build, if I am already starting to hit the damage soft cap.

I played Heist using this skill and maxing out AoE and I noticed that Icestorm has a scaling shockwave effect on each individual hit, and with a lot of AoE, it's quite noticeable and induces dizziness/might be dangerous for photo-sensitive people. I think similar effect happens with Winter Orb. It also makes it uglier tbh... I just wish this effect got removed or something. I hope someone from GGG reads this.

I made a gif: https://gfycat.com/smoothtenseblackandtancoonhound