Ice Nova

I find this skill fine to cope with provided the enemies have a shock stack up (though with the current state of shock nova, it's tricky), used to be awesome when you could use righteous fire but with the way that skill is now, you're stuck with what you have.

A damage boost I feel is required for endgame, or something to improve it's effectiveness.

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ammenz wrote:

This skill is not viable for end game content. Period.
I'm using it with a templar equipped with a Taryn's Shiver with 5 linked sockets. In my skill tree i pick up many related notable passive such as spell damage, Heart of Ice, Frost Walker, Amplify, Blast Radius... I have decent cast speed and critical strike chance and multiplier. I have desperately tried to support it with several different gems (probably ALL the support gems that works with ice nova) in so many combination... As a result i am level 75 and i need a total respec...

It works if you go apeshit with spelldamage and crit. You can also use it with Cast on Crit to get insane castspeed. Other skills will still deal more damage but the "benefit" of this skill has to be the relatively high base radius.

Is it just me or increased aoe support gem (or increased aoe in general) doesnt work with ice nova atm?
Added a increased aoe support gem (lvled and with quality, 38% in total) but theres no difference in the aoe at all.

Edit.
My bad, it does seem to increase the aoe range after all, but yeah, theres no visual difference.

they didn't update the graphics still? inc AoE DOES work on ice nova (and boy does it), the visuals doesn't change however which leads to stuff far outside the edge to take damage.

I think I have an idea for making Ice Nova do some damage:

Ice Nova + Cast on Crit + Conc Effect + AoE attack + flat added damage (two of Lightning/Cold/Chaos depending on passives)

The supports (except Cast on Crit) all boost the damage of the attack as well as Ice Nova, flat added damage makes up for the poor base damage of Ice Nova (and of the weapon, if you're using a weapon with high speed but low damage), and Cast on Crit overcomes the slow casting speed.

Could this work?

you need an attack skill to link the spell+support to in order to function.

Skill needs a bit of a buff but I think the mana cost, cast speed, range, bonus, and initial damage are all fine. It just needs it's base critical chance increased to about 8% (in line with discharge) instead of the current 5% (lowest cold spell in the game).

It's a bit silly that it banks on freezing everything but the spell has a pretty horendous crit chance that would prevent it from achieving a high crit rate.

My names ROBO,
i wanted to share something with everyone today:
i'm a lvl 74 templar running ice nova, and i need help

i figured with the low crit point i could just go damage % nodes and rely on tanking/spamming nova to squash enemies. I knew it wasn't going to be as effective as discharge or some of the fire aoe spells. but i thought hey, i shouldn't need to be abhorrently rich to run this in end game merciless.
I was wrong.
my dps will probably max out around 3k unless i spend 50 exalts on gear. (which i dont even have 1!)
yes it does quiet well for merci dock runs, decently in peity runs. HORRIBLE IN ALL MAPS

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darkel wrote:

Skill needs a bit of a buff but I think the mana cost, cast speed, range, bonus, and initial damage are all fine. It just needs it's base critical chance increased to about 8% (in line with discharge) instead of the current 5% (lowest cold spell in the game).

It's a bit silly that it banks on freezing everything but the spell has a pretty horendous crit chance that would prevent it from achieving a high crit rate.

increasing the crit rate would be OP for this... freezing everything 30-50% of the time is not cool. not all spells should be based off crit to succeed. if thats the case for this game im uninstalling. Its why i left D3 (well i left for a lot of reasons but the crit was a top 3) increase damage at high end again or improve cast speed.

IF they were going to increase critical strike. you would need to remove the freezing mod and make it normal chance to freeze from cold. but i dont like this. i like the 1 out of every 20 times i cast i freeze everything solid.

there is a point here though that why are some skill gems so op late game while other half fail? shouldn't people be somewhat rewarded for thinking outside the box (again i dislike crit build for this skill)?