Freeze Mine

In my opinion this skill is useless, because you must waste time to detonate, so it is better to spend the time doing damage...

This type of skills are good only for last hit, and freeze mine is no damage...

I'm playing a spellcaster Shadow using Ethereal Knives, Power Siphon, Blood Rage, and various traps/mines for CC. I'm basically just trying to play without minions, and it's not going very well. I find myself ignoring the traps and mines, and instead just kiting everything around.

The mine mechanic is pretty fun. I like having to think ahead rather than just summoning stuff on top of an enemy or throwing a grenade trap at his face. I wouldn't mind sacrificing some of the raw efficiency of other playstyles and other types of crowd control, but the implementation of Freeze Mine really is a disaster.

It's pretty much limited to white enemies; against anything else, the freeze time is literally shorter than the detonation animation. Put simply, I need to be able to control crowds, rares, uniques, act bosses, etc. with Freeze Mine at least well as I could with Cold Snap and other cold skills. If anything this skill should be significantly better for CC given that it doesn't do any damage.

The fact that all of your mines are detonated at the same time also hurts the skill, because you can't re-freeze an enemy. The detonation key/skill should only detonate mines within a small radius. You could add a special support gem to greatly increase that radius, or simply detonate all mines, for people who'd prefer the current behavior.

The freeze effect needs to benefit from all passives and other bonuses that deal with cold damage and freezing. This is absolutely necessary if you want Freeze Mine to be a useful skill. The skill also needs to be able to crit, which would increase the virtual cold damage and make the freeze effect stronger. Generally speaking, every skill in the game that has a damage or healing component should benefit from crit chance/mult.

I just found a pretty useful way to use this gem, but sadly as a support only.

If it is intended as a support/secondly skill, it work pretty well.

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likwid wrote:

The time to drop and detonate the mine make this near useless. When I'm trying to run off and freeze a mob, the last thing I need is to have to stand there while I press detonate. Should just be another throwable trap IMO.

Exactly what I was going to say.

Unfortunatelly I must agree with this skill. The whole procedure of setting up the trap slows gameplay. If you try to jump inside the mob (with let's say flickering strike) there is high possibility to die. And if you want to pull your enemies into the traps it take too much time in mmost cases, and you can just kill them with other skills. The trap is only useful against flickering strike opponents, when you set up trap under your feet.

After some testing, I'm not altogether certain about whether a detonation mechanic is useful here or not. What I am fairly certain about is the interaction of this skill with supports.

It doesn't seem to have many real options in this department. You can't add damage to it, since it doesn't do damage. From my testing, there don't seem to be any supports that will increase the duration of the freeze (which is the only thing it has, really). I'm guessing that "Increased freeze duration on enemies" passives will help, but there's a grand total of +30% on the passive tree, and I think to even consider going for those you'd have to have some synergy with other abilities, and then you'd probably already have a more effective way of freezing mobs.

PvP may add a few wrinkles that will make the skill useful, but for now I'm having trouble finding any reasonable applications for this one.

I'm thinking the only way to use this might be with the trap support gem, so you can place them remotely.

If a skill is not going to directly help you kill or directly help you defend, it had better be very good at that role.

In this regard, freeze mine fails.

The skill minimally effects enemy mobs, has a small radius, and is a mine. Mines are a very awkward weapon, to the extent that I think it might be balanced if dealt substantial cold damage.

There are other ways, of course.

It could have a unique debuff on the enemy (interacts with Increased Duration).

It could just barely and technically apply damage to a large area, so that Added Damage effects influence it. Perhaps with a More Damage effect (from being a mine) of 30%. Perhaps in a larger AoE than currently exists.

Those are all that I can think of off-hand, but it really just needs work.

Did anyone try to combine this skill with Elemental Proliferation?
If it works with that it would probably be a good combo (+ trap support so we don't waste time detonating it).

Does this skill count as a trap?