Ice magic related thoughts and suggestions

[Melkhiresa]

Well colour me excited to try out the new popsicle form. As to the rest I look forward to seeing where you went with everything and find it pretty awesome that a lot of what I said aligned with your current visions in changes.

Now that you've done an easy skill, try something tougher: a similar write-up on the Deer skill!

Deer is both an easy and difficult skill to dissect and write about. A big problem I see with it has a lack of focus and proper synergies with anything but I digress I'll save it for the write up that I accept your challenge in!

To give an idea of how messed up Ice is currently : for the gloves I only required one or two ice mods if I remember correctly but most importantly needed to give the % damage to ice skills. Generally speaking the mod options for most of the skills were very easy to see that they were mostly either pure crap or led to a decent combo.

That's an amazing point and I hate that I forgot to bring it up in my above review. The balance of good to bad mods and where and what piece they are on is very very one sided. I know when I play rabbit/Ice if I die and my ring/necklace breaks I literally lose 75% of my damage where as chest, feet or gloves could barely matter. With the talk or lowering the number of mods in the future I really worry due to this. I feel you are better off just balancing all the mods as they are otherwise you will make a giant mess breaking skills and still then having to go back and rearrange or buff/merge mods to make things work. There is no escaping the work one way just causes mayhem and less options overall.

I used 4 single target abilities and 2 aoe abilities. Blizzard and Frostbite were the AoE's. Did you know by the way that frostbite makes for an effective single damage target power? What you missed is that you can stack these mods twice :
Frostbite causes target's attacks to deal -22 damage
Frostbite deals +154 damage and raises the target's Max Rage by 79%, preventing them from using their Rage attacks as often

I think you are mistaking Frostbite and Tundra Spikes. Frostbite as an aoe would be absurdly broken in it's current form with the randomized stuns. The numbers are a bit off on the mods too as I show them at -18 damage and 118 respectively. I will give you the point that double stacked the damage reduction mod might be rather nice but outside of a tank using ice or a full on support build I doubt it will find a ton of use. Beyond the fact it's single target with a 20 second cooldown doesn't make it easy to apply en mass. Effective can vary when one compares it to anything else. Compared to other Ice abilities yes frostbite with every mod, double ice armor ice damage mods, tons of +direct % ice on gear and either being a rabbit or having the mask with 50 flat ice damage and then the 88 JC craft ice ring it hits for low to mid 2k's. Thus higher for ice and meh compared to a lot of skills. The saving grace there is you can roll 33% twice and get 48%(2) added to the number with other mods. Still nothing insane but considering it's secondary effects a fair trade.