Whispering Ice "Icestorm" discussion about 3.12's big changes...

You do realize that a 5 storm cap is absurdly low right?

You need 5 cast in its entire duration to get to this cap, and if you use spell cascade then you need a whooping 2 or 1 casts (for the awakened version) to arrive to the cap.

With around 1000 int (a really low number for a stat stacking build), you would arrive to a 2 second duration, with no modifier.

2.5 casts per second is quite easy to obtain for a self casting mage, and any int or duration increase will make the required casts per second even lower. You only need faster casting and increased duration to arrive to this cap, anything else from gear or passives is wasted.


If there was no cap then you could make the discussion, since you are going from 19% chance to hit (unmodified) to 75% chance to hit (unmodified) but you are also losing 2/3rds of your potential hits, so you really only have 30% increase in overall DPS if you don't decrease your area of effect at all. (Thanks to LiNGeN for his excel)

30% increase at low investment is a great buff, but having such a low cap effectively murders the skill as a main skill. I suppose you can still use it as a secondary spell that you cast once and forget about it, but that is really bad for a skill that requires a unique item and a full build investment in stacking INT to do any relevant damage.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

I've been posting about this one alot today as there are whole bunch of maths failures going on but you need to go post post the chance to hit bit over on reddit so they will shutup about it being an 80% nerf :p

That aside I think its better to break it down into usage scenarios, however realistically there isn't any point the new one comes out ahead in any setup until you get to high cast rate, small radius single target setups with extremely high int.

if you only use WI as a boss killer with pinpoint storms expect a big nerf, anything else should be pretty good from eyeballing the numbers.

People on reddit are talking about an 80% damage nerf after factoring in the increased chance to hit.

This is largely because OP glossed over the loss of around 8-10+ ice storms active on the highly optimized end of playing this.

I didn't gloss over anything. With my play style I feel this is likely to be a buff since I rarely if ever got more than 10 storms stacked on top of any high end boss. I have to kite to survive those types of battles.

I guess the players on Reddit are comparing their 50 Exalted builds that are face tanking the top bosses and stacking Icestorms to the ceiling. That isn't what most of us more casual players are doing.

Not only that but over on Reddit they are calculating bosses as being size ten. Monster maximum size in this game is 5. This is throwing off their hit calculations by a lot. Worse yet they are assuming that bosses and monsters are going to sit in a hit box for seven seconds without moving out of the storm. This just doesn't happen a lot in this game. It does for a few bosses but not many. And... the way the game appears to be moving in 2.0 it seems the bosses are much more mobile than we currently see.

I said in my original post that the stack change was going to decrease damage on the high end in some situations. We will see tomorrow how this will play.

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DaleDVM wrote:

I didn't gloss over anything. With my play style I feel this is likely to be a buff since I rarely if ever got more than 10 storms stacked on top of any high end boss. I have to kite to survive those types of battles.

if you are hitting 10 storms on a boss then you are still getting a nerf in damage, and you are outright banning yourself from using spell cascade or the Cast X supports since linking them will make you get past the cap immediately. You definitely don't need 50 Ex gear to start getting hurt by the DPS loss.

Hell, the main advantage of fire and ice storm is that you could scale it up with 3 different stats (damage, cast speed and duration) and that helped you get the most damage out of your investments, you can get great amounts of damage with affordable gear, gem and passive choices before you hit the diminishing results wall.

You are also still having issues when kiting bosses, they moving outside of their area is something that the changes actually make worse, since they have half the hit rate and you cant just leave your storms around the map so the boss can still get hit while it is moving.



Honestly, the only thing that GGG has to do is to remove or raise considerably the storm cap (like 50, so you can still keep the interesting interactions whiout melting the servers, which seems to be GGG concern), and then we would have Icestorm back in track as a fun but not broken skill.

I think if someone does play icestorm, it might be something as a burst spell + something else to spam inbetween.

Icestorm + unleash support -> When it run, use another spell.

I am telling people this right now. The hit math that was done on reddit is just all wrong. I cast ice storms for an hour yesterday counting hits on an object of size 2-4. The hit probability is absolutely nowhere near what reddit is claiming.

Not only did they assume that monster's hit boxes were more than twice as big as they actually are. They also did the math assuming that a shard's entire hit area falls within the storm. In reality a projectile can fall all the way to the maximum storm range which makes 50% of a shards damage area fall outside the outer range of the storm. This results in WAY less hits both before and after the patch.

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yakri wrote:

People on reddit are talking about an 80% damage nerf after factoring in the increased chance to hit.

This is largely because OP glossed over the loss of around 8-10+ ice storms active on the highly optimized end of playing this.

nah they didn't, they just multiplied the first numbers they read together and said its garbage, the reddit approach for literally every skill since forever.

Its a discussion populated by people that don't play the skills giving their random views on x y or indeed z.

Well, people do seem to be glossing over my post explaining that the change in area of effect is not a case of simply looking at the radius before and after the patch.

The area of a circle is:

[pi times the square of its radius]

So going from radius 10 to 16 equates to an increase of 156%. See my post above for calculation.

I have no interest in this, I was only trying to help people get the numbers right.