Ice Magic Feedback

- Freeze Solid is mistakenly classified as a signature debuff. Frostbite is the signature debuff of the class. This would line up with psychology skills Tell Me About Mother and Psychoanalyze effectively which are intuitively classified.

- Freeze Solid seems like a direct port over from Tell Me About Your Mother which is a great skill flavor wise in psychology but having the caveat that once it takes damage it breaks the mez doesn't make sense for Ice Magic. Being frozen solid imparts immovability, vulnerability, increased crushing damage taken and a rage reduction.

- Frostbite is an awesome skill mechanically and flavor wise.

- Cold Sphere fall into the unusable in groups category most other pets do but the short lived nature of these pets could have some use if some added benefit were imparted. Perhaps as an additional form of crowd control they could taunt the monster instead of detaunt with mods.

This is really spot on feedback. Frostbite is my favorite part of the ice magic toolkit, and giving it the signature debuff flag would make it stronger.


I think cold sphere could be fixed if they changed the re-cast time to 12 seconds and allowed the caster to summon multiple spheres.

I personally do not enjoy the skills that require and eat ice armor. One wish-list change I would add for the skills that use ice armor: if each cast shortened the Ice Armor buff duration by 20 secs, but still went off if there was less than 20-seconds left. It would be a game changer. As is, I really don't recommend anyone use Ice Veins.

Cold sphere didn't like it at all, for ice armor the only thing i would like is a longer duration maybe 60 sec and maybe a reduction of speed movement from -33% to maybe remove it completely , bramble skin and bile also the BC skin give you buffs but with no penalty.

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Originally Posted by Mbaums

I personally do not enjoy the skills that require and eat ice armor. One wish-list change I would add for the skills that use ice armor: if each cast shortened the Ice Armor buff duration by 20 secs, but still went off if there was less than 20-seconds left. It would be a game changer. As is, I really don't recommend anyone use Ice Veins.

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Shard Blast even with mods is incredibly underwhelming skill compared to Tundra Spike and Blizzard. I feel like Ice Veins should be a mod of Ice Armor. Once you reach a certain HP threshold your ice armor drops and you receive the heal.

Both the armor dropping abilities are mostly ever used out of combat to regain run speed which leads to the problem below. Justifying their slot on the hotbar is a burden making one of the class defining skills mostly unusable outside of solo play.

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Originally Posted by INXS

Cold sphere didn't like it at all, for ice armor the only thing i would like is a longer duration maybe 60 sec and maybe a reduction of speed movement from -33% to maybe remove it completely , bramble skin and bile also the BC skin give you buffs but with no penalty.

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I love the current power and flavor of ice armor especially with mods. The reduction in movement speed makes the skill unusable in most groups though. Trying to catch up to mobs for crowd control is nearly impossible. The power it provides does need to be balanced out some what but I think the reduction in speed it is too extreme.

Perhaps a middle ground can be met. Instead of a speed decrease being encased in ice would make it more slippery to get around randomizing your direction much like being drunk or you lose the ability to mouse turn while moving much like you are skating around.

Ice magic has an opportunity to be something special... When you are on fire you are just on fire, but when you are attacked by freezing temperatures, adding more cold to that should stack, creating further damage and CC

While there are treasure effects that add appropriate debuffs that feel like bad things that would happen to someone being frozen to death, it might be nice to see Cold Sphere add a %damage increase debuff to Ice Magic instead of being an Ice Mage version of Wall of Fire

Also, while being encased in ice should actually slow you way down, I question the mental faculty of the Ice Mage that came up with this version of this spell

"Hey check out this new spell I'm working on! You know how I can form ice with my mind and use it to attack people? I was thinking what if I did that to me?! I could just cover myself in ice like a crunchy, freezing cold shell and then swords would just bounce off me! ...and I could explode it all over people if I wanted, too!"

"Hmmm... Well yeah you could do that, but wouldn't it make more sense to ... I dunno... Form a see through bubble around you made of ice and use your electrical powers to move it around with you? You could still explode it and stuff, but you wouldn't be freezing yourself, making it really hard to move..."

"Oh yeah... duh..."

In another dev blog or somewhere, I recall reading that Geomancy/ Earth Magic ended up not being put in yet, and the skill ideas mostly went to Ice Magic. The Ice Magic armor buff is def. one of them, and I think Tuefax's idea would fit right in.

Another idea for Freeze Solid-- if it was a root as well as a mez, that would be something! Balance wise would probably call for the damage of the skill to be cut in half, but it really would be a much nicer debuff.