Ice Manipulation

I'm an Ice/Ice Blaster. When I reached level 38, I chose;

Frozen Aura
Your mastery of cold enables you to dramatically lower the temperature immediately around you. Foes near you when you perform a Frozen Aura will be caught in a fragile casing of ice. Frozen foes will break free if attacked. Frozen Aura deals no significant damage.


Now I'm 42, I've reached 3 slots in it. If I remember right, there's 3 x level 40 IO Accuracy enhancements in it. If I'm reading all the paragonwiki pages right, that puts me over the 100% accuracy cap where anymore would have seriously diminished returns.

I solo most the time - and most of the mobs are in 3's or less. I start a fight with Bitter Freeze Ray on one of the mobs, then freeze ray on the 2nd and by then the 3rd mob has reached me and gets a punch of Freezing Touch in the face. That holds em and allows me to cycle my damage spells and re-freezing where necessary till they're all dead.
I chose Frozen Aura really for emergencies when my freezes missed, or when I ended up with 2 packs of mobs.

The problem I'm finding is that Frozen Aura just never does anything except look cool when you use it. Rarely in packs of 6 will I manage to freeze one mob. The mobs are not dot'd or anything to break the sleep from Frozen Aura. I just find it doesn't work right.

Am I the only one with this problem? Does it have some really lame rate for affecting mobs?

I'm just wondering if I should respec it out and take Ice Sword for an extra damage attack instead.

Frozen Aura is a sleep, isn't it? It's possible some of your other powers might be accidently waking up mobs. Let's see...

10ft radius <-- range is pretty tiny for a level 38 power
mag 2 <-- does it affect lieutenants?

Or... it could be you're just not close enough?

Either way, I think it's one of the purposely poo powers which you won't feel bad about skipping to get something else. Almost every powerset has a poo power or two to balance it out and allow some power pool choices.

It has a fairly small 10 foot radius. Is it possible that you're just having trouble getting more than a few enemies within the radius? One thing I'd definitely do is look at my To-Hit check channel when using it. It should list one check per enemy in the radius, so you can make sure that the accuracy is what you expect and see exactly who it's hitting. With that slotting, I'd imagine it's at 95% versus most things within several levels of you. It's also only a mag 2, so lieutenants and bosses will be unaffected unless they're already under a sleep effect.

I've also found that PBAoE attacks have difficulty deciding what's in range if you fire them while moving. If you haven't come to a complete stop before using it, there's a chance that it might be deciding that nothing's in range, even if you're bumping into them.

If you attack someone and miss, there will ALWAYS be a "MISS" over their head. If you're using the power and seeing NOTHING, no damage, no miss, nothing else over their heads, then they're "not in range", and you're suffering from the problem I mentioned.

Frozen Aura was the bane of my Tank's life for a long time. I was very, very surprised that they didn't change the Blaster version of the power when they gave Tankers damage in it. It's mostly just a waste of a power except to look cool.

You can take a trip to Perez Park to test it out. Stand in the middle of a large group of Hellions or Skulls and activate Frozen Aura. Since they're all grey, your accuracy shouldn't be a factor (other than the ever present 5% chance to miss). See how far the power has an effect by which foes are put to sleep.

Tangent:

For my Ice/Dev Blaster, I chose the Electrical Mastery epic pool. The Static Discharge attack synergizes very well with Frost Breath since they're both cones. Static Discharge does slight less damage than Frost Breath, but it has a much wider cone. It's a quick one-two punch that seriously damages everything in front of you. On teams, I have been able to get the entire spawn to turn around to check me out even after the Tank has them taunted. I always felt a little underpowered with */Dev, but Static Discharge changed the game for me.

Are you sure you're actually missing? There's a bug at the moment that causes Sleeps/Holds to display as if they were Stuns, IIRC.