Love for Lightning and Ice

My suggestions for the game (this time) mostly focus on the elements of cold and lightning.

Things that should be added in my opinion:
Avatar of Cold
Avatar of Lightning
-We have Avatar of Fire, so where's the love at? I'd love to try and swing some interesting build with a freezing Incinerate or maybe a thunder-licious Magma Strike toon.

Channeled Cold Skill
Channeled Lightning Skill
-Half of the channeled skills are fire (Flameblast, Incinerate, and Scorching Ray), then there's a physical (Blade Flurry), and two Chaos (Blight and Wither). If we're making channeling a mechanic that is meant to be used, why not make it a bit more varied and add even a single cold and a single lightning skill. Hell, wouldn't even have to make a new skill for lightning, just tweak lightning tendrils and you've got your channeled skill right there.

Hopefully my suggestions are met with positive results, since I love this game and think that fire in video games tends to be the widely more tailored-to element. If we're going to boast build diversity and making wacky builds, let's include more of our damage types to the same shenanigans fire gets to have mostly to itself.

I am a cold remotely casting build. ( I can't imagine to play anything else actually ).
And I am strongly about expanding the Ice stuff in all directions.

Cold is my life, cold is my soul, damn ! such a cold world !

If you would have used the search function you would probably have found out that there is a direction of how conversions apply.

You can convert:
physical to lightning
lightning to cold
cold to fire and
fire to chaos
You can also "jump" over some steps so it's possible to convert physical directly to fire or chaos.
What you can't do is convert in the opposite direction like fire to cold or chaos to lightning. There is also a logical reason for this: if you allow backconversion you end up in an infinite loop. Imagine having 100% Cold to Fire and 100% Fire to Cold conversion. What's the result? A random element? 50% of each? Just not converting? The game freezing by trying to solve the conversion to calculate the damageoutput?


So Avatar of Cold could only be possible if you completly remove fire and chaos damage (including burns and poison). (Remember that Avatar of Fire also just removes all chaos damage you can inflict!)
Avatar of Lightning wouldn't even be able to use cold damage so everything it would do is converting physical damage to lightning damage.

I mean... You can do your Shocking Molten Strike already. Using The Three Dragons helm, makes your fire damage Shock instead of Ignite (Also makes your Cold damage Ignite and your Lightning damage Freeze)

Outside of that, you're pretty SOL due to how confusing multi-conversions would work. Also, if Avatar of Cold/Lightning DID exist, what happens if you picked all three in the same build?

More channelled skills could be cool.

So long as they had interesting mechanics with them and weren't just "Incinerate but a different element"

So off the top of my head something like:

Blizzard - Big PBAoE channelled skill doing Cold damage. Thinking maybe like Vortex. Though, dunno about hit type (Perhaps it could be degen, but with occasional hits in a random pattern a la Firestorm/Icestorm. Simulating the chaos of a full on Blizzard)

Tempest - Channels a Tempest at the target location that fires chaining lightning bolts at enemies within. Thinking sort of like Wither style targeted AoE that essentially casts Arc on enemies in the radius (But with much less chaining obviously like 1-2 baseline).

On a side note, I still want Cyclone to become a channelled skill... But I know it'd be too OP...

IT S SAD icestorm is not a gem.

I wish we had water skills tho

This would require a rework on damage conversion rules cause now they are are unidirectional Physical → Lightning → Cold → Fire → Chaos
But I really whould love avatar of ice and completely support this idea

Cold synergizes well with hatred. Lighting would be helpful if there was a way to avoid getting stuck with flat elemental damage instead of gaining a portion of physical damage as lightning other than physical to lightning gem.

While I think that would be nice. With the infinite loop problem, it's not going to happen. There is never going to be identical behavior for elements. I don't think there's been any mention of a physical to fire gem or physical to cold gem. Hatred provides cold damage based on physical damage while Wrath provides flat lightning damage. Herald of fire provides fire damage based on physical damage while herald of ice provides flat cold damage. I already asked for equality in a separate thread for Wrath, physical to lightning and so on. There isn't going to be true equality probably.

About the infinite loop problem there's a number of ways to deal with them most of them is not so dificult

Perhaps fixing the Ignite double dip and giving all the elements a small buff will fix the issue. That and perhaps couple new tasty Ice and Lightning skills.

I suppose I didn't really think about the conversion infinite loop, whoops. Adding more methods of conversion is trickier than I first thought about. Wonder if there would be a way to fix the issue. Only way I can really think of is to remove all methods of damage conversion and have the three Avatar keystone passives be the only way to convert, though the big hit to damage would make that a pretty rough way to do it, and that still wouldn't address the issue of having more than one of the avatar skills.

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Tarille wrote:

Blizzard - Big PBAoE channelled skill doing Cold damage. Thinking maybe like Vortex. Though, dunno about hit type (Perhaps it could be degen, but with occasional hits in a random pattern a la Firestorm/Icestorm. Simulating the chaos of a full on Blizzard)

Tempest - Channels a Tempest at the target location that fires chaining lightning bolts at enemies within. Thinking sort of like Wither style targeted AoE that essentially casts Arc on enemies in the radius (But with much less chaining obviously like 1-2 baseline).

Really like your channeled skill ideas, I didn't even consider a wither-style targeting for one of them :)

Also, I would totally play a Blizzard build to death. Ice is love, Ice is life.