Ice Control

I hope you'll pardon me for assuming that many people with knowledge on the matter believe Ice Control is under preforming. I know I've seen it mentioned more than once.

My question is, what do you feel should be done to fix it? For example, I've noticed Ice's sleep has double the recharge (90 sec) of the non-damaging sleeps found in Mind and Plant (45 sec). It seems to be closer to Sirens Song in Sonic Blast because it does damage and can't be stacked. But it's damage, duration, and recharge (20 sec) are all less than Sirens Song.

It just seems to be the worst of both worlds between non-damaging sleeps and damaging sleeps.

Are there other things that could be done to help bring its performance up to some of the other control sets?

If it were me, I'd do one or all of the following:

1) Make taking and using both Frostbite and Ice Patch do something. Right now, Frostbite negates most of the benefit of Ice Patch. With how containment works, this makes the Controller either sacrifice some potential AoE damage or control.

2) Give Shiver some sort of secondary hard control effect that has a chance of occurring.

3) Increase the confuse duration and/or chance to occur in Arctic Air.


I think that doing any of those things would help it out, and if you did this, then you could remove the damage from Flash Freeze because you won't need the trivial amount that it does. If you don't want it to stack with itself so that the Controller can sleep bosses, then flag it not to stack. Having it do damage really messes with stuff, especially Interface damage procs.

These are excellent points.

There's certainly something very unfortunate happening between the rooting effects of Chilblain and Frostbite when Ice Slick is introduced, as the rooting protects targets from being knocked down, even if they have a protection against Immobilize (such as bosses, ghosts, warwolves). Adding some type of combination effect when both are present would be much more beneficial to all parties than, for example, removing the rooting effect.

Shiver could also be considered a problem area. Global slow debuffs are less useful against enemies with more abilities, making its immediate benefit limited. A secondary hard mez, like stun, either at a small/moderate chance of occuring, or a short duration high chance could help boost it's protection. Alternately, secondary survival debuffs could be introduced instead, like a to-hit or damage debuff. If nothing else having some of its core stats adjusted would be a boon, like a reduced end cost or recharge time, heightened duration, or boosted accuracy (such to the point that it's chance for missing is either eliminated or greatly reduced).

With Arctic Air, I believe I see the confuse proc often enough. And adding in the spreading confuse proc IO takes that a step much further. I believe the problem would only be in it's duration. I often see the confuse proc in between a higher ranked enemy's attacks, only to have it's duration expire before the enemy attacks again. A two second boost in Arctic Air's confuse would likely be enough to allow it to stand on its own merits, without making it overpowered with the presence of the confuse proc IO.

I have an idea for Ice Slick, though it may require them tweaking recharge times on it. What if, when using frostbite/chilblain on enemies currently on an ice slick, it has a "Freeze Over" effect, and does like a mag 3 hold on any enemies that it catches on the slick? Perhaps with some special cold damage, too.

As for shiver, maybe some -defense or -regen? A small boost to AA would be nice too, but it's not as necessary as it works pretty well as of now.

That's exactly what I was thinking, Daemon. Give Ice Slick a chance to apply a small Hold or Sleep (4 seconds or so?) to immobilised targets, using the Block of Ice/Flash Freeze graphics.

Make the hold duration the same as the duration of the knockdown animation, and the chances the same, and you lose nothing from applying the immobilise over the top of the slick. Or, if another player spams their area immobilise, it doesnt gank your control.
(This could also give the set another place to slot Basilisk's Gaze, which is always nice)

For Flash Freeze I'd remove the damage and reduce the cooldown a lot. 30s base wouldn't be unreasonable.

The hold sounds nice, but keeping in mind that the knockdown from Ice Slick is just a chance to knockdown and the recharge on Frostbite can be considerably reduced, you could perma-hold entire groups indefinitely, boosting the effectiveness of the entire set by an enormous amount.

I don't know if that's overpowered or not. You'd pretty much have to just spam the same AoE immobilization over and over again and nothing else. It would seem to me that if any set would have the ability to do something like that, it would be Ice Control. After all, in video games/fantasy ice is usually associated with freezing targets.

A problem with ice slick isn't just frostbite. It's nearly all AoE Immobilize powers that have a -KB effect on them. Most of the grief I get from ice slick's limitations aren't from my own controller, but another member of the team who uses immobilizes frequently.

Rectifying that situation is hard enough. As much as I would like to have a "check" for ice slick, throwing that onto every immobilize in the game is quite work intensive. I don't have any particular solutions for this, though.

If such a tool were given to Ice Control, they would be the only ones that would need it. Immobilization from other characters wouldn't matter if the Ice Controller is holding the group standing on Ice Slick with it's immobilizations (other than to boost the mag higher against enemies that have protection from immobilization to insure the Ice Control's immobilization would proc the hold).

It would be an effective counter to rooting effects from other characters, but maintaining the effect would require spamming the Ice Control's immobilization, limiting their effectiveness in, for example, support or damage dealing. Whether or not that's a fair trade off isn't for me to say, but for what it is it seems like a fairly solid idea.

I think giving ice slick a -tohit debuff between 10 - 30 would be a good and simple fix to the power.
With the tohit debuff it wouldn't make the power pointless when other immob powers are used, and I think -tohit would work well with the sets - rechrge.
It also makes sense for the power because your attacks aren't going to be hitting very much if your slippping and sliding on a patch of ice

I had a quick though, inspired partly by the new stacking effect used by several new powersets. The idea is this: give all Ice control powers stack a "chilled" status on enemies. The duration of these effects could vary by the speed of the power, but once an enemy had a certain number of stacks of "chilled" on them, all ice control powers could freeze a target solid with an additional mag 3 hold with additional cold DoT. This hold removes previous 'chilled' effect, so additional ice controls would be needed to stack more chilling on them.

The idea is that any ice powers could freeze an enemy solid who had been sufficiently chilled, giving both reliable but not constant hard control, along with a bit of extra damage to the set.

I was specifically speaking of support in the order of Controllers and damage in the order of Dominators. Though you are right. There should be time enough to slip an alternate ability in between each application of, for example, Frostbite.

I'd be fine with a simple to-hit debuff as well, but it would have to be a mag high enough to have a real impact on survivability.

The gradually greater chance to hold the target would be pretty cool as well.

These are all good ideas.