Glacial vapors and the water/ice tree...

[Atarlost]

As it is it doesn't really fill the standard role. Most two tree elements one can base a character on with some early floated points in flame and lightning, but water doesn't really have anything to take over.

Mana/Aether:
tax | fast beam | crowd clearer | defense
broken | tax | buff | penetration

Fire/Wildfire:areacrowd clearer/debuff | area | short range
tax? | buff | defense/debuff | penetration

Earth/Stone:
tax | medium beam | area | defense
fast bolt | buff/defense | area/debuff | penetration

Air/Storm:
fast beam | area | defense | short range
short range | tax | buff | penetration

Water/Ice:
tax | slow bolt | short range | short range
broken | short range | conditional damage | penetration

Even Earth has a cone that reaches decent range and a beam and Stone has a good fast firing spell. Water has almost nothing for long range work and Ice's fast firing spell has cripplingly poor projectile speed for the sort of long range fighting the school is already weak at.

Freeze's starting damage is also worse than any of the other single target spells with a longer cooldown. Last I looked at the wiki it didn't have any of the scaling info so maybe it has magicarp scaling, but there's no sign of it and it certainly doesn't hold its own early like a tier 2 spell in a major basic category should.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

I'm sorry, but you call breach a TAX? It's hands down the best offensive spell in the arcane/aether set. It's an instant max.

[HousePet]

And there is no reason why all elements should play the same way.

[Atarlost]

I'm sorry, but you call breach a TAX? It's hands down the best offensive spell in the arcane/aether set. It's an instant max.

Arcane/aether has mostly crappy offense, but breach is a particularly unreliable configuration. One rad 2 ball per turn in a rad 3 zone is not good coverage. Aether suffers a lot from being new and trying to be different when the old trees have nice predictable balls and beams and cones. Different from simple and reliable is overcomplicated and unreliable. Not a good trade off.

Ice has some of this too. Ice Shards is seriously terrible. It has 400% movement speed in a game where stuff with stuff with 2000% movement gets dodged frequently and you can't even lead with it because it fires only where targets are. And just to add insult to injury it clips corners. Could have copied the Earthen Missiles setup or even properly copied volley of arrows with a typical missile speed, but nope.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Uh, Aether breach is meant for confined areas. At that point, those radius 2 balls have insane accuracy. It's also a call back to the classic Area/Armageddon spells of Thaumaturges/Runecrafters in T2. And back then, those were some of the most devastating spells around. Yeah, maybe not every blast would hit, but the sheer number of them dictate that a goodly number hit. Place breach in a relatively confined room, or on a crowd of enemies, and watch it rip huge chunks out of them. Place beam out there on top of that. Then toss out any other spells you want (Beams being an obvious choice, though aether stacks well with some other AoE effects as well.)

I can see it being weaker in say, wide open trollmire-type areas. But when crawling through dreadfell, that's an entire room of enemies getting shredded, placed properly.

[Atarlost]

Uh, Aether breach is meant for confined areas. At that point, those radius 2 balls have insane accuracy. It's also a call back to the classic Area/Armageddon spells of Thaumaturges/Runecrafters in T2. And back then, those were some of the most devastating spells around. Yeah, maybe not every blast would hit, but the sheer number of them dictate that a goodly number hit. Place breach in a relatively confined room, or on a crowd of enemies, and watch it rip huge chunks out of them. Place beam out there on top of that. Then toss out any other spells you want (Beams being an obvious choice, though aether stacks well with some other AoE effects as well.)

I can see it being weaker in say, wide open trollmire-type areas. But when crawling through dreadfell, that's an entire room of enemies getting shredded, placed properly.

Only if it's a small room. Most rooms seem to be larger than the bounding circle for the blast centers so there's no confining going on.

The reason it was so broken in T2 was that it could hit stuff through 1 tile walls and that it wasn't scaled correctly.

[Delmuir]

I can't speak to the technical part of it (as I don't have the time to spend understanding that part of the game) but I can say that Aether Breach works beautifully in contained areas. I just drop a freeze and an aether beam followed by a breach and even tough bosses go down quick.

It's utility in open spaces is severely limited as enemies can essentially walk out of its area of affect but that hardly seems to be a big deal as the cool-down is so short anyway.

I still agree with the principle that the water skill category is a bit weak. I still like the idea of slowing down melee attacks and think that would be a great addition but I also think it should slow down movement speed through it. Whatever...