Frost Wall Nerf Killed Ice Sorceress

The latest patch that nerfed Frost Wall from gaining energy from other skills hitting it killed the pure ice sorceress build. It tanked map clearing speeds thay were already slower than meta builds and just plain hurts an already nerfed into the ground build post CoF nerfs.

I was under the understanding that no major additional nerfs were coming until season 1. So I invested time into my pure ice build. A lot of time. Hundreds of hours. And yesterday, I came online to do mapping and realized that frost walls wasn't working. This was the last remaining skill set up for ice only skills that made this build relevant for being somewhat efficient. I understand balancing changes need to be made but why is this happening now and not next season? And other out of control builds like lightening rod, spark, herald skills get untouched and they deserve nerfs by leaps and bounds more.

The reality is that I had an expectation and that expectation was violated and as a new poe player I'm losing trust in GGG. Do I really want to invest time into a game that destroys what I've built before I can even realize it's potential and enjoy it?

Sure you can say do other builds. Yada Yada yada. I'm a casual player that wants to invest in a build per season meaning I will happily explore new builds like Druid....next season. Not this season. I absolutely do not ever play meta builds in a game because they often require no skill and are boring. Yet that's the direction ice sorceress are being forced in if this frost wall change Is not reverted back at least until season 1.

Also, you could say "is this the intended use of frost wall?" Well GGG has had 10 years to figure that out. It's a fantasy game, anything can go. Not really a valid argument in my opinion.

My friends already quit due to this change and I've set my controller down as well but this is my last attempt to keep playing the game.

GGG, please revert this change or at least make it so ice skills can proc frost walls. Otherwise, RIP ice sorceress and RIP any chances to returning to this game.

-50 CAL

How did they nerf Frost Wall? You can't destroy Frost Wall with spells?

Frost wall can no longer gain energy from being hit with skills. This allowed ice sorceress to cast on crit (with comet) more consistently. Making it way way faster to clear maps and bosses. It wasn't super fast still and I wasn't 1 shotting bosses so it didn't need to be nerfed from my builds pov. Other builds who used frost wall with trampletoe are likely why the change was made and pure ice sorceress builds are just collateral damage. Unfortunate, but the change does make our builds completely useless, extremely slow, and lowers dps potential unless we switch to lightening skills.

Again, I want to remain a pure ice build. If you have an element based damage system then why nuke 2 of the 3 elements. No one uses fire and almost no one will use ice now. It seems as If they are pushing harder AWAY from being balanced.

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GOD OF 50 CAL#5760 wrote:

No one uses fire

When I played Frost Wall sorc, I had cast on minion death + SRS with Infernal Legion + Solar Orb with +1 to limit and duration and used Flameblast on Solar Orb to break my spell echoed Frost Wall. Solar Orb 2x would constantly summon new spirits with each pulse and they would quickly die. I'd get a Comet on every pack, it was much better than cast on crit in my experience.

There was multiple problems with frost wall and cast on crit:

The amount of energy you gain depends on how much damage you do vs the enemy's ailment threshold (basically their life).

So when your main skill does 50 damage against a 100 hp enemy, you would gain a lot of energy, but if you do 3 damage against a 100 hp enemy you barely get anything.

So normally you are fighting bosses that have 10 million+ HP and need your main skill to hit pretty hard to get a bit of energy.

Queue frost wall: An enemy with very low HP (something like 600 HP at level 8, people used a lowest possible level to exploit this) and that you can even lower more with supports and passive tree. Your cast on crit now instantly gets insane amount of energy.

Now that that was not enough you can have many frost walls at the same time, getting you that insane amount of energy from multiple frost walls.

When the intended mechanics for cast on crit was that you where just getting energy from the boss itself.

This lead to players being able to pretty much 1 shot the hardest difficulty bosses with almost no investment in their characters.

I would rather they just buff the energy gain for cast on crit instead of letting things like frost wall give energy.

Fair points. Again, the point is the timing of the change. Not the rationale for the change. Why frost wall and not meta builds that are WAY more broken?

Without this cast on crit function/energy gain. Ice builds are dead. They need to rework ice builds completely then and this change should come then otherwise they kill ice period. No one has addressed this comment either.

I appreciate the cast on minions advice. Not really looking to lean towards minions. That doesn't make for faster clearing from what I read but correct me if I'm wrong. I should state that I have temporalis. So maybe pure ice build and temporalis is just not a match made in heaven now.

Another piece of feedback to GGG is to look at the amount of +5 cold wands being sold before and after patch. It literally went up 5-10x after this and that is just from players who didn't quit right away. This has to be telling when you can get Mirror tier wands pre-patch for 50 div or less now.

In the last two weeks it became Meta, many builds included the one shot mechanic

Actually the DPS wasn't the issue, just the crazy chain reaction it caused, as far as I understand this change

It probably caused severe performance/instance issues at higher scaling so instead of bringing down the top end they go ahead and gut the entire thing. This way they can then justify doing it before economy reset patch because it was "breaking" things. It is a very classic way of dealing with these things from GGG.

I'd rather see them do balance patching during EA and take away the silly builds killing bosses before boss hits back/bring up builds that spend 30 mins killing same boss. Waiting for economy reset is madness.

I wasn't 1 shotting bosses so i guess I don't understand the new mechanic that did this. Why not tweak things so it couldn't pop off that crazy but still be relevant for the many builds that don't abuse it? And why not wait until next season like they all but promised? I can think of 4 other builds that can kill a boss in 1-2 seconds that didn't get touched. I'm not seeing the reason for why now. It's not the only mechanic that needs work. They just know if they mess with a meta build everyone will be in an uproar. Well hundreds of hours later and at least a mirror later my build is naturally what gets destroyed even though it's wasnt broken on my end. It's just my luck. I digress. Seems like people don't understand the underlying issue here. If you nerf 1 then you should nerf them all. Or hold true to your word that no major nerfs would happen til next season. That's all I will say. I'll just keep sounding like a broken record if I keep going.

Thank you all for your feedback.