Freeze sadly does not shatter enemies :(. Feels bad man. Please add that sweet crisp shatter sound and visual to the freezed mobs like some of the ice mobs. I wanna see tons of frozen body parts melts on the ground.
Also, boss need a nerf in their freeze avoidance or adjust the max hp formula in the freeze formula. Playing freeze multishot marksman with 700% freeze mult and 120%chance frost bite, I can freeze most mob in a hit, even the big ones. But the act 8 second and last boss only got freezed once for 0.5~ sec in my long fight. Make sense that bosses should not be cheesed but, still disappointing that freeze is useless on bosses.
I have not tested the freeze rate on chill stack affix yet since I haven’t seen one drop.
I have no experience with freeze marksman in particular, but I can say that freeze is very reliable and works fine on tougher mobs and bosses(on a plethora of builds)
So it’s not the freeze mechanic itself that is the issue.
Maybe the cold conversion marksman is just under powering potentially?
I mean it’s a non-standard playstyle that get’s enabled with uniques right?
@TriKster or @Tunk probably have more expertise and insight on that topic in conjunction with marksman.
But generally freeze is pretty easy to scale contrary to stun, since stun also requires good damage per hit.
In regards of shattering I totally agree, a good death animation and sounds helps with how good that kind of builds can feel, if it’s not over burdening and annoying.
That affix is super good, but not accessible to Rogue, except on the 2 uniques it’s on, since the affix is a Mage/Primalist class specific body armour/helmet affix.
The uniques that have this would be the Amulett from Formosus or the random drop Oceareon Ring, which both have semi synergistic stats for a Rogue.
Yeah the trash mobs are not a problem to freeze, its really the high hp monsters making freeze rate feel not worth it sometimes. Multishot is probably not the best marksman skill to go full freeze/cold support in general. With Detonating Arrow you can already get an additional 460% freeze rate just from the skill, 260% from Hail of Arrows. I tried a perma freeze marksman build around 2 uniques:
My goal was to apply as much Frostbite stacks while doing the main dmg with Hail of Arrows cold version. This is probably the best Marksman mechanic to apply the best freeze chance possible, because you can use 2 skills at the same time. For me it worked pretty well on a boss that we all hate: Lagon, i had absolutely no problem against him because i go freeze him quite alot to cancel his attacks.
Puncture+DA at the same time felt aweful to play because you have to switch between them to both do dmg and to apply frostbite. But the frostbite conversion for Puncture didnt feel strong enough.
Tunk made this Cold Marksman, which is not really the type of cold marksman that you expect. Its more a mechanical playstyle around many skills to buff Hail of Arrows dmg which i consider probably the best Marksman build atm, combined with BowMage, Lightning DA and Crit Multishot:
I would also say that its the freeze formula making it hard in high endgame content like empowered mono or high wave arena runs to freeze enemies.
Ah yeah. I am also using the detonating arrow build with with the troaka unique and another set item with frostbite that I can’t remember the name of. Slip of tounge there on multishot skill. I didn’t use hail of arrow coz I hate the cast speed.
Can I know what is your freeze rate multi for Lagon to occasionally freeze? The 700% I mention is from the char sheet. I respec my marksman after the first mono so maybe I just give up on it too early.
Since I am a sucker for cold dmg and freeze since D2 days, I have been reading up on freeze mechanic
And now have a biased opinion that cold ailment as an element is undewhelming compared to other elements other than necrotic
Lightning has shock for scaling lightn damage n stun chance for crowd control
Fire has ignite DoT that scales well into late game due to infinite stacks
Physical had bleed DoT that scales well into late game with att speed or stun as cc
Poison is a DoT that scales amazing into late game with scaling damage per stacks
Void has time rot for a mix of cc and damage, and decay for true DoT and a slew of other unique mechanics
Cold has chill for cc and freeze for another cc and frostbite for DoT which is hard to scale since the affixes for frostbite is rare.
Perhaps it needed a round of buffs to differentiate from other skills? For example
Damage-wise, shattering and/or hit on freezed enemies cause shrapnel area dmg based on enemy max hp (more rewarding for successfully freezin hard to freeze enemies).
Chance-wise, it would be great to increase the chance of freeze and nerf in other area, eg freeze base rate on chill stack is now inherent to freeze skill, but after being freezed, enemies gained more freeze avoidance that decays over time. Hence freeze would be easy to proc but harder as more of them proc. Maybe a slight reduction to freeze time to compensate.
This opinion is from my short time in LE and after some readings so might be inaccurate. What do you guys think?
And Time Rot currently is quiet unique, but still very situational and not good for any damage.
But we already got a teaser of time rot getting an overhaul with the next patch… (apparently it will stack 12 times. This would be the first ailment that has a cap higher than 1 or 3, but is not infinite)
Also it sounds like you did research on it, but haven’t tested it yourself.
I can savely say that freeze (even without major frostbite stacking) is very strong and reliable
By stun chance, I am more referring to shock being able to increase stun%.
And yes, I admit that I have not tested it. With limited time, I can only read between spare time at work. So I had my fun theorycrafting on cold mechanic.
Noted on freeze still being very strong n reliable. Its current state might be satisfactory, but I still opined it can be spiced up further with more interesting aspect rather than freeze just a longer stun (with delicious visual n fx hopefully), chill a stronger slow, and frostbite a weaker dot n freeze boost. Even if it meant a nerf in other way. This of course if it is not too troublesome for the devs to develop n balance with other things in the priority list.
I have also noticed that freeze does not interrupt some bosses’ attack for example the black sun boss’ pizza skill and also his throwing small purple toppings skill. Not sure if this is intended as it reduces the usefulness of freeze ailment on boss.
Also, not sure if this applies to stun ailment as well.
That probably depends how they’re coded. If they’re coded as a skill that’s cast then they wouldn’t be interrupted, but if they’re coded as a channel then they would be.
