Ice Spear

Weapon crit chance is not applied to spells unless it says "global crit chance".

Ice spears base crit chance is 7%. So 95-7 = 88 left to get to 95%. 88 / 8 = 1250% crit chance multiplier - 600% from second form gives around 650 needed to get to 95%.

Are you sure it works like that?

Assuming you are right on the weapon crit chance thing.

7% crit chance for ice spear + 600% = 49% crit chance in the second form.

So then youd need 46% more additively

46/7 = 6.57, ha works out about the same anyway.

so 650%.

This is actually not that hard to get.

From the tree i am getting 140%

510% left to go.

But it can roll on gear at +100% end game so 5 bits of gear with 100% crit chance for spells on it...

"Unmaking 76 Spell Critical Strike Chance +% 100 to 109"

Who needs diamond flasks

You can't roll high crit% unless it's on weapons. You can however get close to 200% on daggers(kris type daggers have 80% implicit global crit then you can roll 109%) and 38% on amulet. Might be some uniques too, like those crit multi gloves iirc they had global crit on them too. Also the crit% support gem. Still that's pretty hard.

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Chris wrote:

Version 0.10.1
Balance Changes:

• Stun Threshold Reduction now has diminishing returns when it exceeds 75%. It's still possible to build very effective stun characters, but they cannot permanently lock down the hardest of bosses.

Is Ice Spear going to get the same nerf bat?

It's possible to freezelock any boss with Ice Spear and just 3 supports, even without heavily speccing into crit multiplier and freeze duration. Add Elemental Proliferation and you're freezelocking whole rooms at once (this seems more OP to me, but that discussion should be held in the Elemental Proliferation thread).

Despite posting this, I seriously hope Ice Spear won't get nerfed. The only good use it has is freezelocking bosses. Take that away and ice witches lose a lot of their cc.

freeze and stun are not same thing. also spells are not affected by stun modifiers.

"

soul4hdwn wrote:

freeze and stun are not same thing. also spells are not affected by stun modifiers.

Thanks, Captain Obvious.


Read this real carefully now:
Stun was nerfed, because it could "permanently lock down the hardest of bosses", right?
Ice Spear can "permanently lock down the hardest of bosses" with freeze, okay?

Understand?

Good.


Now, back to the question. Should Ice Spear get the same nerf?

cold spells need to deal at between 3% to 1/3rd of foe's hp to have chance and duration to it. duration boosts lowers damage threshold for freeze status (and increases the max's length)... but it still needs to proc in first place (easy via ice spear). duration is from .3 seconds to (rounded) 3.33 seconds. max can be up to 4.33 seconds from just passives (i'm not going to try and find relevant supports or quality).

stun requires between 50% of foes' hp to 12.5% of foe's hp in attack damage to have between sure chance and minimum chance, with no investment in stun threshold. this is just for the chance not duration. maximum stun dur i could come up with is 1.2 seconds rounded up (which doesn't happen). maximum threshold makes damage req 3 to .75 percent of foe's hp for 100% and 25% chance.

devs can confirm that neither will have reasonable effects on bosses due to thier hp pool (or es). but yes freezing has more... comfortable effects on normal mobs.

i'm trying to be neutral here but there is also no reason to think about nerfs.

Thanks for the serious reply. Yes, I am familiar with the relevant game mechanics.

Just for clarification, I can keep any map bosses and rares that I've encountered so far (on lvl78 witch) freezelocked. There's no big secret to it either, just the obvious resistance penetration and curses paired with high crit multiplier and high base cold damage. Judging from my cast time, my Ice Spear must be averaging over 700 ms freezes on bosses, which sounds about right, considering its damage.

I don't see any serious need for nerf either, but if stunlocking bosses was the reason to nerf stun threshold reduction as patch notes imply - what about Ice Spear? Am I missing something here or just misunderstanding GGG's intentions?

stun would've been always happening, period... for most people because of 100% threshold. while freezing depend if you even have moderately high crit chance and high damage. you're likely only freeze "locking" because of cast speed. you placed high investment to get what you earned. stun players before this nerf, barely needed anything (unless they were using a bow, then they needed every tiny bit they could get). dealing 1 damage (not really but thats all they needed) and stunning for between .6 seconds to 1.2 seconds depending on extra passives? um yeah... i'll personally miss it, but mace marauders will still be viable stunning for all but bosses (unless glass cannon and enough damage vs those high hp/es pools), just not bow stuns vs rare and above mobs.

btw "bosses" are end of act based mobs like mevile and oversoul. not unique named mobs or yellow mobs (rare) with tons of effects which are more commonly called bosses due to other games experiences (i'm guilty too =p).

ice spear OP nerf plox