Hello, I’m new to Last Epoch but I felt like I was losing my mind during my first playthrough when it comes to using Snap Freeze. When it hit it felt amazing, but it seemed so inconsistent. After spending a good 10 minutes with the End of Time target dummy here is my little summary for what does and doesn’t make sense for the skill. I declared an ability a “hit” if the Frozen Ground DoT ticks on the dummy when I use Snap Freeze. To avoid confusion I’ll describe the orientation of things using a compass face as a reference. So the dummy is positioned in the middle and I move around the outside at the noted directions
Test 1 - Define the hit box
Setup: Stand directly South of the dummy
Findings: This is the base case for how the skill should work normally. Obviously if you point your cursor towards North the skill hits, but also at the very edges of the cone as expected. You only have to position your cursor about 10 degrees North of true East or true West to have it hit. Also important to note if you draw a line from the cursor to the character this marks the approximate middle of the cone for all of these cases, which makes intuitive sense.
Test 2 - Oddities with cone drawing
Setup: Stand directly East (also applies for West) of the dummy
Findings: This is where things start to break. The first thing you notice with this orientation is the cone is now drawn pointing much further South than where you click. If you place your cursor on true West it makes intuitive sense that the skill should hit the dummy since it is standing directly between true East and true West. But this doesn’t happen. You’ll notice if we draw the same line from the cursor to the character this now aligns with the top edge of the cone. So the resulting cone points more Southwest opposed to true West (where I aimed). You can even target true North with the cursor and log a hit. Part of the seemingly different cone layout is due to the top down perspective of the camera, but the cursor is definitely not the center of the cone as seen in Test 1. Ideally this should be more consistent. As a basic rule there shouldn’t be an enemy between my cursor and my character that gets missed by my Snap Freeze unless they are so close they sidestep the the narrow point of the cone.
Test 3 - Complete blind spots
Setup: Stand Northeast (also applies for Northwest) of the dummy
Findings: This is where things start to get wild. Not only do we have a Southern tilt to our aiming (since we are still horizontal of our target) but we actually never see the hits land. I challenge anyone to stand in this orientation and actually hit the dummy. Plus I confirmed this was the source of 90% of my misses against monsters. Even true North I can’t get the ability to hit most of the time.
TLDR Forming of the cone should be consistent and intuitive. Drawing a line from the cursor to the character should be as close to the middle of the cone as possible since that is likely where the player meant to target. Blind spots to the NE/NW of enemies should be addressed since clear visual overlapping of the cone area still doesn’t result in DoT damage or freezes.
Hope this helped illuminate the issue. I’m really enjoying playing so far!