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Frost Revisited 3/3/2014


[DE]Rebecca
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No worries. I should have clarified myself. I meant that a Frost could lay down his one snowglobe, armor up his teammates, then run ahead (himself armored), place another snowglobe, repeat. Of course, there are other factors this doesn't take into account, like nearby Napalms slamming the ground to knock him down, or running out of energy (which in turn could be circumvented by laying down an energy restore in the globe before moving on.

The Armor lasts X unmoddable seconds (I was thinking perhaps 6, but my fault for not mentioning it) which would make it hard to "abuse" the skill via "pitstopping", but I totally understand where you are coming from. Had the Armor lasted, say, 20 seconds, your point would totally nail a hole in my idea.

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Just wanted to add my support to the non-timer contingency. If we aren't going to make it invincible, we can at least make it immortal. Like Rhino's Iron Skin, I say it should last until it's depleted. My feelings are less strong on the armor issue - and personally, I prefer the proposal that Player character cold damage strengthens the armor. I think the globe should be highly damage resistant to enemy cold damage too, though as of yet, this shouldn't make much of a difference outside of conclaves due to the paucity of enemies capable of doing cold damage.

 

Oh also the globe should also get extra armor/health on the frozen cold levels that lower shields.

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The number of snowglobes that can be set down at once ought to be limited.  In response to the skill becoming weaker, almost every Frost I have played with has taken to spamming the ability, turning my game into a slideshow.  The skill ought to be powerful enough that it only needs to be used once at a time anyway.

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After playing long, long hours of frost and his powers I will give you my observations.

 

Freeze:

-Pinpoint accuracy

-No aoe

-Slight travel time

-Negible Dmg

-Good single target CC

Conclusion: Freeze needs sniper-like accuracy in order for it to be effective, this of course, makes it troublesome to use or even worthwhile instead of shooting. While using shotguns, rifles and other guns that need not perfect accuracy, this actually becomes a hassle and more often than not, it will be ignored as a utility. Utilities are usually easy to pick up, give some time to breathe and are easier to use than guns. Freeze has none of these things. 

Reccomendations: Make freeze act like an ogris rocket. It explodes on impact, deals damage and has a 100% of freezing the targets. Adjust the aoe radius to your liking/balance. 

 

Ice wave:

-incredibly narrow range

-good travel distance

-often "misses" targets eventhough they clearly hit the model

-tricky to use with different height levels (platforms)

-good soft CC

-enemies recover slowly from said CC for no apparent reason

Conclusion: Like freeze, ice wave is unreliable but just slightly less than freeze. It can hit a few enemies and its CC is descent, however, it's still unreliable due to the fact that it's unpredictable in the sense that even when targetting right at enemies, it misses. It does have travel time and it acts wierd with obstacles and holes, making it a gamble to use at times. Also the animation will often get stuck, not letting you shoot (for a few frames) and it's quite a very long animation too. You'd think that if you cast it while sliding you wouldn't lose momentum, but actually you finish casting while you're near a stop, making it have very little flow and often it feels it interrupts the flow of battle. The numbers are nice on the spell, and ice damage is not bad in terms of bonuses but even with the CC it's barely useful on tight hallways and even then it may and will often miss enemies in said hallway. With stretch mods it still feels narrow and frost can't afford to use overextend. 

Reccomendations: This power needs more width and maybe a slight tweak on damage. It barely competes with some 1 spells out there and due to its linear nature, it's hard to use (situational). If it's going to be a 50 power spell with only soft CC that is hard to aim at groups then it definately needs a damage buff. See volt's shock for example, it can hit more reliably and has hard CC. 

 

Snowglobe:

-Negatively affected by + range

-Slow effect doesn't stretch out

-Deals no damage

-Little use outside defense

-Offers too little team utility

-Useless on infested missions

-Is affected by range, duration, power and efficiency (hard to mod)

-is BORING

-Offers barely any defense to frost

-Is the only defensive skill on a tank

-Poor scaling

-Stationary

-Explosion clipping inside

-Near useless against melee

Edit:

-Blocks ally fire

-FPS troubles

 

Conclusion: Even in its own niche, snowglobe is lackluster. Usually CC does the job infinately better because it releases stress (damage) from allied units. Snowglobe merely blocks it and does a poor job at it. On top of that, defense is pretty much the only place it can be effectively used because of all the negatives the skill has. Shooters inside still hit, explosions still hit, meleers still hit, the slow is set at 5m, it breaks all too soon under heavy fire. This skill was overpowered for what it did before but it had it's real downsides which people ignored because of the good side it had. Now that the good side is gone it needs to get rid of it's negatives as well. 

Reccomendations: Change the whole snowglobe mechanic to not BLOCK bullets but absorb damage of those allies inside it. That way, if you're not being hit, then the globe doesn't die. Snowglobe actually takes much more damage than anybody could ever because it would get hit by even the most unnacurate guns, thus, 3k was short and if it were to be buffed, then low level defenses would be the same as before and snowglobe's core problem wouldn't be solved: uselessness outside defense. So now that snowglobe isn't a "wall" it can actually benefit from range mods. Along with this change I would suggest to fix the area of effect of the slow and also give the whole spell more base range. That way people wouldn't be confined to a tiny bubble and would be more free to take cover to actually not burst the skill too fast. Edit: Also this would end the problem of ally fire and hopefully fps. 

 

Avalanche: 

-Relatively fast animation

-Instant damage

-Buggy

-Low range

-Good base damage

-Lack of CC 

 

Conclusion: There has been a bug around frost for a long while that freezes enemies if, and only if it has range mods on it. Now this is quite a cool feature, however, it's clearly not intended and it's the only thing that makes this ultimate worthwhile. 

Reccomendations: Make the CC an actual feature, not a bug. Change it so it deals damage upon freezing enemies, not after the CC ends (like rhino stomp). 

Edited by Zephyric_Reaper
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Unlike everyone else here, I think you should pay more attention to other things besides SnowGlobe. Make Freeze more damaging, IceWave wider in length, and Avalanche do more damage. I would rather think of Frost as a CC BattleMage than a 1 trick pony. I'll write more as it comes to me.

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Unlike everyone else here, I think you should pay more attention to other things besides SnowGlobe. Make Freeze more damaging, IceWave wider in length, and Avalanche do more damage. I would rather think of Frost as a CC BattleMage than a 1 trick pony. I'll write more as it comes to me.

 

Yup, most(not all) of his power already got buffed a few weeks ago (except his Snowglobe)

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I think that the snow-globe should have some form of health, but not like a normal unit.

What I think would let it to scale into late game would be to allow it to take X amount of bullets/ hits before it runs out instead of just a flat health pool . This will allow it to scale into late game, and not disappear in 5 seconds.

 

Edit:

Number of hits dependent on power strength.

Duration dependent on power duration(super cheap snow-globe without penalty would be too much).

 

Same thing as post #103

Edited by ScorpioEric
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1) Have the Armor value apply to health of the Snow Globe

2) Remove Duration timer from Snow Globe

if we are only allowed to have 1 of the following above as a buff.

 

#1 would be better than #2.

cuz #1: have a slight damage reduction applied to snow globe.

#2: is basically no buff at higher level, in which each enemy' damage is that of level 40++? (current patch)

 

me vote for #1.

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Remove duration, limit the number of globes to a reasonable amount, apply the armor thing to it, and please let allies fire through the globe, its annoying when someone places them just so you can't shoot or any other trolling reason. Also displaying its current health would be a good idea

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1. Give Freeze a small AoE on impact that slows (ice proc) enemies within range, something as short as 3 meters would still be good. That way it counteracts the tiny projectile and slow flight speed.

 

2. Ice wave is perfect

 

3. Snow globe with armor would be great. Have the current snow globe despawn when a new one is activated since there is no duration.

 

4. Have Avalanche freeze or slow (ice proc) enemies that are not killed.

 

Make Frost king of slowing enemies, making him very versatile. Offensive with a great defense and decent CC  with all the slowing/freezing capabilities.

Edited by HandsOfnArtist
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I like the armor idea as well as removing the timer. Make the HPS and armor based on the frames stats.

 

However I'd like to make one caution. Any change made for the sake of 'Troll' prevention is not a change worth making.

 

If you're worried about 'trolling' then give the squad the ability to vote someone out of the mission. Don't balance for trolls, they will just find another way to troll and what are you going to do then? Rebalance/Change the skill again?

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Freeze needs to be buffed into a defensive ability as its supposed to be. Giving it more single target damage did not solve its problems. It needs some form of AoE crowd control, even a small 5-8 meter slow proc on contact with an area/enemy would do. 

Snowglobe needs to be one or the other, health or duration on timer. 
Since you're all in for health(I disagree, but oh well, might as well help make it a decent option), Put in a globe limit and have new ones replace old ones, I don't think we'll ever need more than 4 any ways, or make it follow Frost around like an AoE Iron Skin. 

You've made Frost an offensive powerhouse, but forget he is supposed to be our frame of formidable defenses too. Maybe even give him a bit of an armor boost as well to emphasize this point. 

Also, I'd like to ask to have the numbers of Avalanche and Ice Wave checked. As our power efficiency increases, the numbers of Ice Wave just don't stack to Avalanche. Both feature comparable utility, but Avalanche has a better shaped AoE, along with more area and damage per energy point. As it becomes less of a drain on our supply of energy to cast avalanche, Ice Waves niche just melts away. Since we're further removing duration benefits to frost, making Fleeting Expertise free of pentalty, I'd say this is even more important to look over. 
Ice Wave also needs to have its width visually increase with range mods. 


 

Edited by LukeAura
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Frost buffs I'd get behind:

 

Freeze -

slightly more AoE on it; currently even at max it will still only freeze a single target when launched into a crowd, so giving it an increase so you can hit more than one enemy with it would work. If there is an AoE on it that is of significant size and I've just been using Freeze wrong the entire time, probably should ignore this one.

 

 

Snow Globe -

+1500-2500ish HP at max level (increase to 5000-6000); the scaling with Snow Globe is fine right now towards Power Strength, but stacking 155% power strength just to get the most out of it can cripple your Frost in terms of energy requirements, especially when the snowglobe gets taken down pretty easily by heavy units or swarms in the higher ranges.

 

Snow Globe takes on 35/70/105/150% of the Frost's armour rating, scaling with Power Strength - this can work with or without the above HP buff, just so the Globe has more resilience, especially against the higher level enemies. The Power Strength scaling is just so you can have the globe getting legitimately stronger as you mod your Frost (and due to how Armour works it won't get over-powered, since the scaling starts to receive diminishing returns pretty quickly).

 

Doubled duration for Snow Globe, not infinite duration - Infinite Duration Globes is just asking for trouble with trolls or frame rate issues, but the duration could be doubled from base just so it's not as major a concern, and so in missions where the Snow Globes get burned down quickly the Frost player hasn't wasted 3 slots modding for a Duration that's never reached. Can still have the duration affected by mods,

Avalanche:

actually freezes enemies after casting instead of only freezing during the casting animation, just to give it a bit more CC power - the Freeze could still work like the ability Freeze (breaks after damage), but right now Avalanche, in a rather hilarious fashion, is made worse as a CC power by mods like Natural Talent, since it only CC's during the cast animation. It doesn't need a long CC, but just something so that if anything survives the Avalanche they don't start immediately ripping the Frost/his teammates apart (and so Avalanche can compete with the Rhino in terms of CC as a tank Frame).

Damage on the ability is perfectly fine though.

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Enemies are scaling! That means at a certain point the enemy will simply one shot the globe. That makes high level defense much harder (i mean the dev's could've seen it by looking at the weekly leaderboard ~50 waves). Letting the enemy hit the pod not even once?! 

this itself is another probelm which should be solved by converting the amount of damage deal to cyropod into number of hits.

 and cyropod' hit cap limit should scale by wave & difficulty & faction type.

 

for example, grineer lancer's shot does normal (scaled dmg) to players and does, "let's say" 1 hit worth to cyropod, in which explosive does more.

in other words, this "hit" worth will replace cyropod' current health system. and mission fails when reach 0.

 

this allows Frost to be removed from the "Required" squad list in order to play high-level wave defences.

 

you should not fix another' problem and solving it by buffing a particular key. (in which is frame)

Edited by low1991
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make cold damage regenerate globe health

As I'm sure many people have quoted this already.

I agree with this statement.

While I dont think all cold damage should.

I feel frosts other abilities should heal it.

Or make it so casting his first ability on the globe heals it.

But you have to be on the out side of the globe sense you cant shoot in.

If this was implemented I feel it would need a buff to the skill.

Making the ability a 5m Aoe freeze instead of a sniper single target freeze shot.

Edited by ExplosiveFuel
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Reading through the comments, I'm actually concerned people are okay with the current state of snowglobe and would be satisfied with just "power" buffs. Making snowglobe tougher will not make it any more viable outside defense, when I used my frost pre nerf I rarely even touched snowglobe aside from the occasional T3 (m)def or alert, or reviving a partner (and even then rarely). I really wish frost not to be that one trick guy again.

I stand my point on saying frost's globe needs a rework for it to be usable outside a select few missions and even then, not being all that great. Making it too strong will bring back the old problem and making it too weak makes it useless.  

Edited by Zephyric_Reaper
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My ultimate suggestion list for snowglobe:

 

1. Size based on health, with a minimum somewhere between 10% and 50% right before it dies.

2. Snowglobe health  can be replenished if it is hit by any frost skills, probably at a rate of 2x damage for attacks, and combining globes if cast inside.

3. Snowglobe health can be replenished if it is hit by cold-based friendly fire, at a rate of 1/8th damage.

4. Snowglobe health regenerates slowly as nearby atmospheric humidity condensates and then freezes.

5. Snowglobes healed beyond 100% health are set to 100% health and bonus health is translated into ever increasing regeneration rates.

6. Snowglobes have finite lifespans based on time of last contact. If a globe has not been healed for X seconds, it begins to melt(lose HP, while shrinking), until it collapses and breaks.

 

Of note, for the "hit by" healing, anything that heals it touching the perimeter, from either side(inside or outside) would count.

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