Glacial vapors and the water/ice tree...

[Delmuir]

Cold mages seem to be a bit under-powered although Frozen Ground is ridiculously powerful. With that in mind, I'd like to humbly suggest a tweak to glacial vapors which, to my mind, is the most useless of all of the cold spells.

Yes, its damage can scale and I even had it doing almost a hundred per turn at one point, it just isn't terribly useful because it doesn't compliment anything else well.

With that in mind, I'd like to suggest this:

1. Scale down the damage by about ten or twenty percent but increase the range.

2. Have it slow projectiles that move through it.

3. Give it a small, maybe 1% per level chance to freeze an enemy much like the Necro equivalent albeit it less effective.

4. Have it decrease fire damage within its area of effect but increase lightning damage.

5. Have it reduce melee attack speed of anyone in it.

This would make it useful and interesting... thoughts?

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

I like reduced melee attack speed. Not sure projectile slowing makes any sense, and I don't see much point in causing it to mitigate fire damage, as that would hurt archmages with fire spells.

Making it freeze might be too much, but it makes sense that muscles exposed to freezing temperatures would be less then perfect at delicate tasks, like swordplay. Just remember that it should apply both ways, as the spell is not friendly fire. And it should probably also nerf casting speed, if thematically, magic involves any sort of dextrous hand gestures. (Again, frozen muscles, not the best circumstances, etc.)

[HousePet]

Reduced attack speed would be good.

I'm happy to add it to Arcanum.

[StarKeep]

You gotta keep in mind, that this essentially transforms into an aoe regen field with Shivgoroth Form.

[Delmuir]

I rather liked the idea that it would hinder fire archmages... However, I didn't consider the Shivgoth-regen field. That does seem far too overpowered.

As for adding it to the arcanum... that'd be dynamite.

[HousePet]

As for adding it to the arcanum... that'd be dynamite.

As in blow holes in the code and make errors appear everywhere?
Quite likely.

[Atarlost]

To me the big problem with the cold tree is that freeze gets worse as you level it up because of the cooldown rising.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

So dynamite is the key to making the code do what you want!! Now it all makes sense!!

And to think, I was told you just bash the engine with a hammer until it works...

I wouldn't be averse to a testrun of reduced melee attack speed. If nothing else, it'll be a nifty sidegrade for arcane blade/melee archmage characters. I don't see a lot of the rest as being fantastically necessary, and some would overpower it (like freezing).

[Umbrall]

To me the big problem with the cold tree is that freeze gets worse as you level it up because of the cooldown rising.

At least Spellcraft's cdr can help a bit. But yeah this is really annoying

[HousePet]

At least that slows down enemies too.

[Hachem_Muche]

To me the big problem with the cold tree is that freeze gets worse as you level it up because of the cooldown rising.

The Freeze spell is designed to produce high burst damage. Both the cooldown and the damage increase so that the overall damage still improves, making it the ultimate nuke spell. (The 1.0.5 scaling changes include a limit on how high the cooldown can be.)

[Atarlost]

To me the big problem with the cold tree is that freeze gets worse as you level it up because of the cooldown rising.

The Freeze spell is designed to produce high burst damage. Both the cooldown and the damage increase so that the overall damage still improves, making it the ultimate nuke spell. (The 1.0.5 scaling changes include a limit on how high the cooldown can be.)

Except it's not just a nuke. It's a status spell and increasing the cooldown and duration prevents you from reapplying the status for longer if it's removed or if a higher priority target comes up.

[SageAcrin]

It's actually one of the most damaging spells Archmage has, at L5, though.

I fielded it on Nightmare solely for the damage burst, in fact.

There's nothing wrong with it having a dual purpose. Or it not being perfect at one of those roles.

[Atarlost]

It's actually one of the most damaging spells Archmage has, at L5, though.

I fielded it on Nightmare solely for the damage burst, in fact.

There's nothing wrong with it having a dual purpose. Or it not being perfect at one of those roles.

There's nothing wrong with a dual purpose spell being less than perfect at one, or even both, of its roles. There is something wrong with a dual purpose spell getting worse at one of its roles as you level it up.

[HousePet]

Putting points in it is optional.
So if you really want dps from it, just don't.

Its nice to have a choice about whether you want it more disable or more dps.