Cold Spell Skliis (and probably other ele spell skills) need a rebalance

Me, ancient Blood Mage Cold Witch, running T9 currently and the more we progress, the bigger the gap is becoming. Already need about 25min per map, that is WAY to much. If I bother gathering all the items to sell for gold, for the next respec experiment, put another 5min on top.
But can't do sheets about it, as the skills themselves are deadslow and underwhelmingly weak on the damage site.
When running in a party, I'm just the decoration, putting a wall here and there if needed.



It's like "how many ice novas/frostbolts you need to kill a white, unbuffed lvl73 monster?" -> All of 'em! - As I need my whole 2k2 life and a few charges from my mana pot.
And the Notalbe Sanguimancy of Blood Mage still is bugged, or incorrect described.
So I'm left with comet, frost bomb and frost wall. Nova actually being nice to open all the pots, urns and whatnot...

When I saw Eye of Winter in the beginning I was super excited, but didn't read the full description at that time. When I finally got a gem to cut and try it,...dang, what a downer.
I had high hopes for a proper frost sphere, but yet here we are (again) with zero damage on that thing with projectile restriction along the way and the start, where they are needed the most. I don't need a quadrillion shards, 2km behind a monster...

The only skill actually being capable is comet, but is hardly fast enough to kill anything in time, before it just walks out of range. 3+ sec until impact... that's an eternity, maybe two.
And the latest rebalance of the Cast on X triggers, cold in my case, took away my only really reliable damage, cold snap.

The skills being deadslow and dealing "no" damage is one reason for not being albe to do breaches. Simply being pushed around/ getting swarmed, and die.

Comparing all of that to a friend on a merc, just blasting through maps, is frustrating, to say the least.
Another running with minions, same story.

Hope we caster will be able to keep up with the others, one fine day...

My Frosty experience is the same.
Stared POE2 without any spoilers or buildguides. Wanted to create my own build that suites me. I´m no pro but i ended with Frostbolt/Frostwall/Cast on Freeze Comet. To my surprise it was a really good build and after i saw similar build on YT i thougt it would be good follow my path. After the patch i ´m getting destroyed by normal mobpacks because this build became usless. Nearly no comet progs means no damage, because nearly none of the frost skills do enough damage nor is the freeze usefull for anything. Beside to get a second freeze on the same mob is hard enough to get.
Frostsnap is usefull on one mob and the explosion area is a joke r=0.7 even with gem its only 0.8. This skill has no clear potential. So i ended up plaing a fireball build just to have any possibility to play my sorc and not throwing this character into trash.
I don´t like the Fireball build. First because it looks awfull filling my pov with fireballs and second its not that much fun like my build before.
I´m hoping they balance the cast on freeze to a more usefull state

Playing a Sorceress right now. Started out Lightning, and well needlessly to say I switched off of it pretty early on. Made it to the Act 1 final boss fight, spent 5-6 hours trying with lightning aka spark, arc, orb of storms and simply could not get past the boss.

Respec into Cold, using Frostbolt, Cold Snap, Frost Bomb, Frost Wall and Hypothermia. This was before even realizing there was Cast on Freeze. Saw the nerf, but I still run it anyways with Comet. Frost wall is killer when it comes to the larger enemies that insta destroy it when cast on them taking good amount of damage.

I had high hopes for the Eye of Winter after reading the description. Was like oh sweet a sudo (Frozen Orb from D2). Kind of a bummer reading about your experience on it.

Just started in Cruel difficulty and the cold spells still wreck decent havoc on bosses and mobs. I still haven't even chose an ascendancy yet. I made it through the trial, and curiosity got ahold of me and wondered if I could just leave without picking. So I did and now I am curious how far I can go.

"

Shinduke#7315 wrote:

Spoiler

My Frosty experience is the same.
Stared POE2 without any spoilers or buildguides. Wanted to create my own build that suites me. I´m no pro but i ended with Frostbolt/Frostwall/Cast on Freeze Comet. To my surprise it was a really good build and after i saw similar build on YT i thougt it would be good follow my path. After the patch i ´m getting destroyed by normal mobpacks because this build became usless.

Nearly no comet progs means no damage, because nearly none of the frost skills do enough damage nor is the freeze usefull for anything. Beside to get a second freeze on the same mob is hard enough to get.

Spoiler

Frostsnap is usefull on one mob and the explosion area is a joke r=0.7 even with gem its only 0.8. This skill has no clear potential. So i ended up plaing a fireball build just to have any possibility to play my sorc and not throwing this character into trash.
I don´t like the Fireball build. First because it looks awfull filling my pov with fireballs and second its not that much fun like my build before.
I´m hoping they balance the cast on freeze to a more usefull state

That's why comet is my main skill, cast manually. And only having cold snap triggered puts the neccesary energy as low as possible (with supports for more gain/refund of energy spent), however, that is by far not enough. One upside on that tho, my mana-drain is more inconsistent now lol.
The max.Energy decrease per level of the trigger per cast time really helped, even to trigger more spells very fast, but it's gone now. And now I even know what frozen bosses look like... never seen that until that "patch".
Right now im using ColdSnap+EoW on cast on freeze, supported by considered casting, impetus and energy retention. Plays decent..sort of.

"

xzvo#1973 wrote:

Spoiler

Playing a Sorceress right now. Started out Lightning, and well needlessly to say I switched off of it pretty early on. Made it to the Act 1 final boss fight, spent 5-6 hours trying with lightning aka spark, arc, orb of storms and simply could not get past the boss.

Respec into Cold, using Frostbolt, Cold Snap, Frost Bomb, Frost Wall and Hypothermia. This was before even realizing there was Cast on Freeze. Saw the nerf, but I still run it anyways with Comet. Frost wall is killer when it comes to the larger enemies that insta destroy it when cast on them taking good amount of damage.

I had high hopes for the Eye of Winter after reading the description. Was like oh sweet a sudo (Frozen Orb from D2). Kind of a bummer reading about your experience on it.

Just started in Cruel difficulty and the cold spells still wreck decent havoc on bosses and mobs. I still haven't even chose an ascendancy yet. I made it through the trial, and curiosity got ahold of me and wondered if I could just leave without picking. So I did and now I am curious how far I can go.

Did play D2-LoD myself a lot too. And the orb was awesome! :D

Just for some frame of reference:
A single shard of EoW does avg 246 dmg for me. Skill being lvl20 (16+4), no supports. With a relativly generic crit tree, almost no ele-specific dmg.
Comet reads out at avg 9k4 (10k5 with supports). And most packs do survive an unleashed impact meanwhile (basically 2 comets at once.)

Good luck on your journey pal.
No idea what sorc's ascendencies might enable.

I love the aesthetic of cold sorceress and freezing enemies, but as of right now it's impossible to build a fully cold sorceress that can even attempt to compete with other builds. On bosses it's not bad, but for clearing maps it sucks. I don't necessarily think the damage of the spells is the issue, but more so the interaction between them that makes it bad.

Frostbolt barely does any damage. And this is ok, if it had some type of viable interaction with a high damage spell, but as of right now, it kinda doesn't.

Cold snap is ok for clearing, but it feels pretty terrible to manually press. Frustrating also to use cold snap only then for it not to kill a basic white mob. Having to then re-freeze and spam zero damage frostbolts into something doesn't feel great. It's ok when paired with COF but you lose a lot of boss damage due to the comet interaction with frost wall, as well as it un-freezing things which hurts the defensive aspect of a freeze build.

Frost bomb I think is ok, but it's crippled by the other skills, particularly on clearing.

Ice wall feels good. Interaction between this and other cold skills is the only thing keeping this build from being totally useless. Shines on bosses but for clearing can be a bit awkward to use, though.

Overall I think this build in particular just got gutted after the COX nerfs. By the time comet actually triggers with white mobs, everything is basically dead. The time when I needed the damage from comet is gone. Feels bad to see comet drop after clearing 80% of a white mob pack.

I understand that having comets drop after using one frostbolt on a white mob is deserving of some type of rebalancing. But for a 60 spirit investment and have zero triggers just sucks. 90% nerf on the build up was way too heavy handed.

Maybe something like a ramping up effect (more enemies frozen at any one time = more energy gained. 1 monster frozen grants 10 energy, next grants 20, next monster grants 40 etc...) could have been more appropriate. Or every other trigger, energy gain/damage is reduced by X%. I feel like both of these options would require some type of interplay between other skills rather than comets just raining down everywhere at least. Even a flat damage nerf when comet is socketed into COF, but this would significantly impact current damage on bosses/uniques.

And I don't really want to respec. While I'm not against lowering the cost for respec in EA and agree that they are currently too high, it just circumvents the problem with huge nerfs like these. It leaves potential viable builds in the gutter and inherently encourages people to follow meta build guides. I want to make some type of cold build work, not respec into something else entirely!

A ramp up actually sounds not too bad. Maybe with some loss over time, wouldn't be new, see rage - however, I don't know if rage here works the same as rage in PoE1.

Yea and I totally agree with the respec cost being too high, too. My Ele-Bleed experiemnt set me back ~300k gold (respec and re-respec). Would be more If I did that now.

But aside from CoF, all the spells feel off (EDIT: almost all. Frostwall actually was and is a game changer, more so back then during the 6 acts tutorial.). Just not a good experience.

It's just plain impossible to play, say, Frostbolt, as main skill.
Or Ice Nova, same story.
Likewise Eye of Winter, with the debuff being the only reason for it's usage/existence.

MAYBE we be getting some more decent supports in the future without that harsh downsides we now hve available (no crits, no ailments, harsh cast time addition, joke of a dmg inc).

I'm pretty sure a huge part of the outcry against the "Cast on" nerfs were cold based builds that after walking uphills both ways through the ice finally got something going on for them in the form of CoF Comet and thus were devastated when the gem was made practically useless.

It was already borderline not too good when you got it on level I feel due to a lack of good spells to proc from it (since Comet is higher level)

"

Stof_4269#4246 wrote:

I'm pretty sure a huge part of the outcry against the "Cast on" nerfs were cold based builds that after walking uphills both ways through the ice finally got something going on for them in the form of CoF Comet and thus were devastated when the gem was made practically useless.

It was already borderline not too good when you got it on level I feel due to a lack of good spells to proc from it (since Comet is higher level)

CoF+Comet sure was too strong, retrospectivly, because there was and is no cast time at all, means no stun, no downtime, you're free to move, free to use other spells/skills simultaneously, while watching that nice comet rain, if your mana could sustain that.

However, all that CoX-crying isn't helping. And I did accept that, though never used CoF+Comet (because Cold Snap is significantly stronger, costs less mana(+life)).
Yes, lots of builds were gutted here.

And CoF still works okay-ish, if you don't overload it with spells. Which brings me back to Cold Snap. Having the least cast time, thus the least energy requirement to trigger.

All I want is decent, actually playable cold spells. Casting a comet, or more, because it moves, on a single white mob, because there is no reasonable alternative, plays downright bad.
That's what this thread is supposed to be about, at least that was my intention.