Ice Nova

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ROBOnehanded wrote:

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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)?

You appear confused...Ice Nova does not have a chance to freeze attached to the skill. The only way it can freeze is through crit.

On top of that damage is basically achieved through the multiplicative effects of cast speed, spell damage, crit, and crit multiplier. With a low base crit chance (lower than all cold spells), it becomes the worst scaling cold spell in the game which is the primary problem with the skill.

Darkel your response makes me think you did not read one word of my post. I described how freeze on crit can be opp IF the crit chance was increased on the base skill gem.

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ROBOnehanded wrote:

Darkel your response makes me think you did not read one word of my post. I described how freeze on crit can be opp IF the crit chance was increased on the base skill gem.

Because most people go with crit, making this increase won't really have an effect on the skill. Your typical crit caster gets about 40-50% crit on this skill with power charges so an increase to 70-80% only affects how fast the power charges scale up and would increase the net damage to just under 60% improved. It would be easier to perma-freeze at lower levels but, honestly, I perma-freeze everything when I get around 25% crit with this skill.

The entire purpose of using cold over a damaging type like fire is for the constant freeze. If one didn't care about the freeze, they'd just use flameblast or firestorm as they are far superior damage.

The base crit suggestion I made was specifically to address it's lack of scalability. Being 60% improved at max level and maybe 5% improved at base level is what this skill needs. Increasing the damage could be scaled but would effect the max health of mob that could be frozen and increasing the cast speed would make this skill more or less unsustainable with 6 links.

Increasing Base Crit, Base Cast Speed, and Damage Multiplier would be the only ways this skill could be consistently improved without it's effect being reduced by added gems (example: putting on added lightning makes a 60% damage increase reduced to 40%, instead as it spreads out the damage).

Improving the cast speed to be 60% more damage without reducing the mana usage = Casting requirement goes from 300 mana/sec to 480 mana/sec (unsustainable). If the mana is reduced, as well, this would protect the skill from being improved with cast on crit.

Base Crit = Scaleable damage but only if the user goes with crit (which is the entire point of this skill). More crits adds consistency (no droughts) and doesn't increase the max damage which would protect a lot of bosses from being frozen.

Damage Multiplier (if also increasing normal damage) = consistent damage increase throughout the skill but the skill doesn't need a damage increase at the base and bosses would be substantially easier to freeze.

so another words you want to make ice nova the new discharge with a freezing effect? right.....

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ROBOnehanded wrote:

so another words you want to make ice nova the new discharge with a freezing effect? right.....

The damage would still be uncomparable. The reason discharge is so powerful is because of uniques like Voll's Protector and Voll's Devotion.

If not for the capability to gain more than 1 charge on a crit, that skill would be worthless.

The idea is to get damage a bit closer to it's competition - flameblast, firestorm, even storm call. Shock Nova is just flawed with it's dead zone mechanics so I won't compare to that one.

Flameblast, for example should do about 220 damage per charge on a .3 second timer. It shares a similar range with ice nova at max charges. Effectively, this is 733 dps unmodified. It also has a 6% crit chance, has lower mana cost, and is targetable. It's damage modifier on attacks per second is also higher than Ice Nova's (1.56:1)

Firestorm, on average, hits each target in it's range about twice on base duration. It's, effectively, 305 dps unmodified but is modifiable by an additional more AOE damage gem (increased duration). The other major advantages to firestorm is it is effectively immune to reflection with high resists and arctic armor, has a much lower mana cost, and is targetable. It shares a 5% crit and has too low of a damage modifier (marginalizing added damage gems) - it needs to be closer to 50%.

Storm Call, does 658 dps unmodified. It has a lower crit (4%), lower AOE range but has a lower mana cost and is targetable. It has a much higher damage modifier per second than ice nova's (1.87:1). It also naturally shocks.

Ice Nova does 222 dps unmodified, has the highest mana cost per second of any AOE ability, is untargetable, has a weak damage modifier, has a lackluster crit rate, but has good range.

It's hard to say what ratio POE is targeting between cold and fire damage but I'd expect it's a lot closer to 1:1 than many people expect. POE has always balanced these damages by the duration of the effect for each percentage of damage taken.

As anyone could tell you ice nova is easily the worst spell in the game. At level 20 it has a base dps of 194 (~200 counting the crit rate). Compared to any other ice skill that's laughable, even compared to the recently nerfed freeze mine it's still laughable. Freeze mine does 423 base dps and freezes enemies at a 100% chance at 4x more damage while costing 1/5 the mana(2/5 if you take the cast time into consideration).

In my opinion Ice nova needs a crit chance buff as well as a sizable damage buff. This way it'll do more damage than freeze mine with much less freezing potential. Either way something needs to be done with this skill because as it stands it's literally useless.

For information provided, this is the way the AOE works and why it gets minimal bonus from increasing the radius...

Ice Nova has a base 15 yard radius where it hits everything in that radius. For the 15-30 yard radius, it has a number of spikes that shoot out that are not guaranteed to hit and become linearly less likely to hit as the range increases...these spikes are of variable size and shoot a distance based on their size...double your AOE radius and the spikes are twice as likely to miss a target. At the very edge of the effect, the chance to hit targets is practically non-existent.

Despite having a lower radius, firestorm is much more predictable on damage dropped in an area as well as targetable.

As it stands now, you can't reliably hit archers/spell casters/runners unless you have around 80-100% increased radius of effects with this spell...this requires every AOE passive (52%), max quality ice nova (20%), and either the unique chest piece or an increased AOE gem. Right now, I only have 58% increased and don't really come that close to hitting these mobs with the inner ring.