A Chilly Guide to Everything Ice

Happy Release Day my Ice brothers!

I would of rather waited another week but them's the breaks I guess.

Everyone be sure to report bugs after go live so we can keep the devs hard at work on fixes!

I am downloading it as well...if there are any changes to Ice Tanking worth mentioning, I will let you know

Thanks, and if it makes it any better I don't think your end of it was ready either. Still a few bugs need to be worked out from it mainly, but there is still stuff that needs to be changed with Fire.

Lol remember months ago when we all told ourselves this wouldn't happen with our update.

Well Jr is now an ice dps

Final patch notes:

Well christmas is here, Im happy but its gonna be a painfully long download for me, for some reason this game's update's always hours to download

Am testing out some of the stuff now...

Looking through the patch notes though, it says this about wintery tesmpest "The initial damage will now hit eight enemies near the caster"

how many did it hit before? lol.

I could sometimes get 4, but it's not very often you'll have more than that in the area. Now the real question, does the initial hit split?

Edit: Also, you suck. I still got 15 minutes lol

Lol had to rub in that I was already online =).

There is a fire guy right next to me at the sparring targets and his stuff looks crazy lol.

There seems to be a serious increase in damage output across the board for ice O.O.

Peace you're gunna have to change your sig from "last" to "last Original" lol...

Ice got HUGE upgrades in dps. Chill effects is where its' at. My planned loadout/rotation so far is:
Reflection, Cold Snap, Ice Bash, Ice boulder strike, Frost Snipe, and last is kinda up in the air (maybe a SC or impailing ice).

Rotation I'm thinking I want to max ice armor asap (why I have cold snap). Getting the 50% and then spamming Frost Snipe, clipping Boulder with Ice bash when bash is up and using boulder on larger groups.

So Cold snap/ reflection/ Ice bash -> weapon combo to start, then frost snipe or ice boulder clip until Ice bash pops again, I plan on always using ice boulder clipped with ice bash when bash is up. Same for Reflection. Should be in Ice armor at this point so forget about cold snap. When Ice armor drops again work it into a clip of Ice bash/reflection.

So basically my plan is to keep Ice bash on cool down. Use reflection/Cold Snap to get Ice armor then abuse the fact that I'm at 50% modifier with spam of Frost Snipe.

I'm not a fan at all of the Frostbite PI, I think it lacks in many ways and every time I tried to play with that tree I could not consistently get all of the PI damage. it's simply not meeting the expectations I have for a PI. And if you're not able to rely on the PI, well then it's not really changed.

Overall I'm still a bit disappointed. Leaving the Rooted PI on snowball was wrong IMO. Storms tree has THREE channeled powers. There is no reason we need that many options for basically the same thing. None of them front load damage so jump canceling is pointless, 2/3 don't apply PI on jump cancel also. Frostbite PI is fickle, not something that can be easily ensured.

The upgrades were HUGE but I feel it'll still fall short slightly, moreover the storms tree feels like the TK tree does to me. it just doesn't fit together in a way that can be competitive. Don't get me wrong, I'm able to beat people with Ice before the update so more is good. It's just that when all things are equal I feel the storms tree can't live up to the cryo tree.

Well tonight I was using 3 from Storms and 2 from Cryo. Sometimes I would take my SC off as well.

Cryo is definitely the Tree you want to utilize if you want a single target build though, this is where the best load-outs in PvP will be.

Storms is all AoE, all split damage.

I'm still playing with the right rotation but I think it's great how the update has Ice DPS thinking again.

BTW, I was with 4 Ice players in Prime and we all ended up getting the Immolation effect, anyone else notice this yet?

Yeah the ideas I'm toying around with is using res gale in there as a big AoEer. As you said with ice bash clip it's not bad, without it is ehh. Wintry tempest also isn't bad.

My loadout is definetly more single target focused, but ice boulder strike isn't bad, slightly long animation but still not bad. That last slot I may put res gale in for heavy AE situations.

My only problem would be having a clip for Gale and one for Tempest. I could run with Reflection in and use one for the other but then I'm only stuck with 2 powers left. Impaling is going to be one and the other is up in the air.

Oh an FYI for everyone on SC's. Blizzard splits damage but I don't think it has a limit to how many adds it hits, VB is still the better SC for multiple adds. Freeze Ray is great now with the consistent DoT. Don't touch Deep Freeze, like ever, totally serious about this.

4

Yeah I'm kinda unsure on impaling, it's nice, but with quick clips of Pi empowered frost snipe, is it still worth chance of inturrupt? You can get the hand mods but control effect seem to still inturrupt and that's my concern more so than the splat. Definetly something I want to work with a bit more than I already have.

I don't think I even want to try Gale and Tempest, but I think I may give res gale a whirl. I still like wintry tempest but I just don't find it consistant, not bad but not a huge fan. I can't see setting 2 of my powers just to set up a bonus damage on 1 target when I use Res Gale.

Big fan of freeze ray though. Love that it won't split damage with stuff. I can burn the thing i want to for 35% supercharge. i really like Ice's single target potential

Still downloading. Anything for tanks? In particular, I want to ask about Hibernation. Is it still bad for tanks?

Hibernation is still useless for PvE, slightly better than before for PvP as you can't be picked up now.

For the tank side of things, Shields like Bitter Winds, Winter Ward, and Shatter Restraints are all buffed up to absorb roughly 2000 damage for a full T4 Tank. Also, the issue with Ice Armor and shields is now gone.

I don't think Bitter Winds got the advantage of 100% Dom and Resto Score

finally got done downloading and i gotta say Resonating Gale is looking pretty good in Tank Role, & im not like the inconsistency of freeze wave to set the dot field, seems clunky but RG set the dot field pretty damn easy