A Full Detailed Breakdown of Cold Stormweaver Spells

I've spent the last week or so testing different cold spells and interactions on Stormweaver just to get a feel for what makes them good or bad. Here's my take on all of them. Spoiler alert: They're nearly all bad.

Let's talk about the obvious "intended" synergies first and address the elephant in the room. Frostbolt + Ice Nova + Cold Snap.

Frostbolt: ONE projectile with a 0.8 second cast time. It FORCES me to take off movement speed or stutter step just to stay behind the projectile(s) if I want to use it with its intended Ice Nova/Cold Snap synergies. As for that synergy, the projectiles move too fast to be useful on melee mobs due to the INCREDIBLY slow cast time on Frost Nova while also somehow simultaneously being too slow to be useful on ranged mobs that shred you in 0.5 seconds if the projectiles don't "get over to them" in time. It is completely and utterly useless by itself and just feels clunky to play.

Ice Nova: The 1 second base cast time is WAY too slow and it has way too little damage by itself. This either needs its cast time cut in half or literally 2-3x the damage to make up for the fact that it REQUIRES AOE investment to be useful at all. Frankly, the best use of this skill is linking Energy Barrier because you have a near 100% chance of getting stunned while casting it.

Cold Snap: FINALLY a good skill. The lowest cast time, highest crit chance, and 2nd highest base damage makes it the only cold skill that feels good to play. It was obviously intended to be a combo skill, but it's easier to just freeze things with ANY cold skill than it is to pull off any specific combos.

**Side Note: The FULL Combo of Frost Bolt > Ice Nova > Cold Snap has a 2.3 second cast time against mobs that hit you and stun you, is directional and positional against mobs that move, etc. Since Spark is omni-directional, not positional, and simply does more sustained damage with less buttons in only 1.7 seconds cast time when used with Flame Wall, is it surprising the meta is almost entirely Spark?**
 
Frost Bomb: I really hate this spell, but I'm REQUIRED to use it as it's the only source of cold exposure. The damage is solid, but by the time it explodes, everything in range is either already dead or moved/teleported out of range so that's kind of a moot point. It's counter-synergistic with itself because you want increased duration for longer exposure OR shorter duration for explosions to trigger faster. Also, it has a REALLY long, annoying cooldown that simply just FORCES you to go slower 100% of the time.

Frost Wall: Oh boy, what a frustrating skill. In maps with EXTREMELY narrow pathways, tight corners, tiny little rooms, etc. here we have a skill with a hit box that doesn't fit in a lot of the areas you need to cast them, ALWAYS hinders your own movement, and has a 0.8 second cast time. You may get a full wall of exploding crystals that both protect you and kill your enemies...or you may spend 0.8 seconds just to get stunned or find out that your walls can't spawn because the area is too small. Every single button press spins the wheel of fortune. Will I live? Will I die?

Eye of Winter: GIGA high mana cost with base damage that's meh without ground effects. Flame Wall is fine for burning ground, but Lightning Warp is currently the only source of shocked ground, which does not work against bosses that don't have minions because you need to kill something to create the shocked ground. That's just weird. Also, ground effects in general are more useful against single target. Having this on a AOE skill with large coverage just again seems anti-synergistic.

Comet: 2 second cast time. IF you can actually self-cast this without dying or getting interrupted before it goes off, and that's a REAL big IF, the damage is fairly mediocre unless you've already prepped the enemy with exposure, curse, or are enhancing the damage in some way with power charges or crit. It is what it is. It's just OK.

Cast on Freeze: The nerfs to "cast on" spells absolutely nuked any and all creative uses of these gems and relegated them to just simply being used for "extra damage occasionally."

Elemental Invocation: The interesting potential long-term choice over "cast on" spells in general as more sources of shock and ignite become available, but it will also likely be nuked from orbit at some point too.

Freezing Shards (Staff): I really want to like this one. It's multi-proj. It's decent damage. Because it shotguns, it's fairly useful on single target. As a clearing skill, it just feels bad to play because the fan is too narrow. Again it just feels bad in comparison to Spark. If the projectiles pierced or chained without taking damage penalties, it might be OK.

Summary: Cold Snap is the only good cold spell. ALL the rest are off the mark for me. Even with 60% cast speed, Arcane Surge, and 125%+ increased Arcane Surge effect, nearly every combination of cold spells felt slow and clunky as hell to play. This would explain why FIREBALL is the best option for COLD builds (huh???) and Spark is absolutely DOMINATING the meta. It's not that Spark is that good. It's that the alternatives are just that bad.

I'm using EOW with snakepit for chain. That's my trash clear.

EOW -> mobility -> inspiration ->glaciation -> acceleration

Have EOW on left click and just hold it down as you move into packs. You'll need mana % on kill jewels - at least 2%.

Archmage

Cast on freeze -> comet

Arctic armor or font of mana and clarity if you have the spirit free

You want to use frost wall / fortress on boss and rares or high HP enemies that charge. Frost wall will stop their charge usually insta kill them. It will insta kill large size units (even some rares will insta pop with 3x ice wall on them)

Frost bomb only on bosses and rares. It's good to drop ice walls, drop 2x frost bomb (second wind) then step back until it all pops.

Sigil of power on bosses

Frostbite on bosses

-

I can clear t16 maps with bosses in around 10 mins

Freeze is a good defensive mechanic, but overall the build feels a bit squishy so I'll need to figure out some more defensive layers soon.

Currently writing my own novel on fire spells. Spoiler alert: they're also bad for basically the same reason. Also, lightning focus allows for double dipping in Archmage. This causes every build to become darkblue lightning, lightblue lightning, or red lightning. Also elemental conflux being the only other spell scaling makes me mald

"

Currently writing my own novel on fire spells. Spoiler alert: they're also bad for basically the same reason. Also, lightning focus allows for double dipping in Archmage. This causes every build to become darkblue lightning, lightblue lightning, or red lightning. Also elemental conflux being the only other spell scaling makes me mald

There's actually a bug affecting at least all of the non-hitting ignites (solar orb, flame wall, incinerate) where exposure doesn't actually increase the damage they take from those ignites despite the tooltips saying they should.

That definitely contributes to fire spells being lackluster.

In a game where everything the player does is slowed down, who knew that the fast skills would be dominant? As a warrior/cold sorc player I nearly abandoned the game. Two warriors and one sorc(stopped after the cast on nerf)...decided to finally make a Ranger and suddenly the game felt good. Later respec'd my sorc to spark and it also felt much better than cold.

I dunno what the devs "vision" is anymore, but at this point I'm just waiting for communication and/or the next big patch.

For Eye of Winter, you can use Frost Wall with Frost Nexus for a pure ice build. Is it convenient? Not really. But it does fix the issue.

Because of how strong the ground buff is I play Eye of Winter but my support plays Flamewall/Frostbolt for Chilled Ground. EoW had terrible clear until I got to 1400 Mana Regen and put Mana Flare/Minion Pact on it, now it's not as good as Lightning Spark but it does one shot packs, which is good enough for me.

"

SwabbieGaming#5830 wrote:

Freezing Shards (Staff): I really want to like this one. It's multi-proj. It's decent damage. Because it shotguns, it's fairly useful on single target. As a clearing skill, it just feels bad to play because the fan is too narrow. Again it just feels bad in comparison to Spark. If the projectiles pierced or chained without taking damage penalties, it might be OK.

I've been able to clear pretty well with Freezing Shards using Fork. It does have a major problem with maps like Lost Towers, though, with the tiny doorways.

"

Polantaris#1920 wrote:

I've been able to clear pretty well with Freezing Shards using Fork. It does have a major problem with maps like Lost Towers, though, with the tiny doorways.

Yea, but Fork also suffers the same 50% damage penalty. Just for the sake of argument, BASE damage on a level 17 Freezing Shards is only 44-66 cold damage. Now halve that. You don't really have much damage left to start with. No amount of scaling at all makes up that difference. This skill is really only USABLE at 20+ and +Cold Spell Skills mods on weapon are REQUIRED. There should never be a skill so bad that you are REQUIRED to have specific rare mods on gear just to be able to use them.

Also, add to that the level of Freezing Shards skill is based on the on the item level of the weapon and can't be leveled. So if you do happen to get lucky and find a staff with +6 Cold Skills but it happens to be item level 55, you'll only ever get that to level 20 Freezing shards because the weapon is locked at level 13 Freezing Shards, +6 from weapon, +1 from tree. So you REALLY need to find one that is minimum item level 78 AND has +6...and that's still only good enough to get to level 25.

"

Akyromancer#3815 wrote:

"

Currently writing my own novel on fire spells. Spoiler alert: they're also bad for basically the same reason. Also, lightning focus allows for double dipping in Archmage. This causes every build to become darkblue lightning, lightblue lightning, or red lightning. Also elemental conflux being the only other spell scaling makes me mald

There's actually a bug affecting at least all of the non-hitting ignites (solar orb, flame wall, incinerate) where exposure doesn't actually increase the damage they take from those ignites despite the tooltips saying they should.

That definitely contributes to fire spells being lackluster.

Oh look another chapter to add thanks for the heads up!

"

SwabbieGaming#5830 wrote:

"

Polantaris#1920 wrote:

I've been able to clear pretty well with Freezing Shards using Fork. It does have a major problem with maps like Lost Towers, though, with the tiny doorways.

Yea, but Fork also suffers the same 50% damage penalty. Just for the sake of argument, BASE damage on a level 17 Freezing Shards is only 44-66 cold damage. Now halve that. You don't really have much damage left to start with. No amount of scaling at all makes up that difference. This skill is really only USABLE at 20+ and +Cold Spell Skills mods on weapon are REQUIRED. There should never be a skill so bad that you are REQUIRED to have specific rare mods on gear just to be able to use them.

Also, add to that the level of Freezing Shards skill is based on the on the item level of the weapon and can't be leveled. So if you do happen to get lucky and find a staff with +6 Cold Skills but it happens to be item level 55, you'll only ever get that to level 20 Freezing shards because the weapon is locked at level 13 Freezing Shards, +6 from weapon, +1 from tree. So you REALLY need to find one that is minimum item level 78 AND has +6...and that's still only good enough to get to level 25.

Only the projectiles that generate from the first hit suffer the penalty. The initial hit does full damage. This is different from how Chain works, where the primary hit is also weakened. This allows you to clear the front line easily and what's behind is severely weakened by the time they reach the front, while also not hurting your ability to burst down rares/bosses.

I completely agree with the item problem, though. Right after I hit Endgame on my Stormweaver, I landed an amazing roll on a staff that has Lv.16 Freezing Shards. I can now consistently drop Lv.18-19 staves, but they never come close, so I'm stuck with 16 + 5 (my weapon's bonus) while players with Spark or other spells get 19 + their weapon's bonuses. That's also before you bring in the general rarity of the Gelid Staff, which drops far too infrequently for the rate that they are completely unusable.

There's also a really fun additional problem: Quality doesn't do anything for Freezing Shards. If you hold Alt while looking at the skill information, it says: "Quality bonuses for Freezing Shards:" and then there's nothing there. That's assuming quality on the staff will affect the spell, which I haven't seen proof that it does (Freezing Shards is the only weapon spell I've mained).

I'm not saying Freezing Shards is perfect, but it's definitely the most viable main cold spell available, especially if you synergize it with Flame Wall.