Olexra’s Crystal storm - In a 4-6-8M radius for 3-5-7 seconds (1/12/22), unleash a frigid blizzard that saps the heat from the air, applying a debuff applying 5-85-225 cold damage and -5%-30%-40% Fire resistance and 5%/-20%/-30% physical resist. 10 second cooldown.
Absolute Zero - Upon casting Olexra’s Crystal Storm, in a 5-15-18M radius, freeze all targets for 2-4-5 seconds, dealing 30-300-700 frostburn over 3 seconds.
This gives Arcanist a debuffing skill where skill modifiers can be granted to Arcanist to give resistance shred application methods, makes Olexra’s Flash Freeze into a skill that can actually work vs bosses, and can make for fun dichromatic builds for Templars where you do a dual destructive aura type of build. But it also allows you to keep the big AoE freeze, to a weakened extent to account for the fact the base skill has been buffed to actually function vs bosses, while still allowing it to apply the Frostburn to bosses even if you can’t proc the freeze on them.
i’m not sure crate will agree. crate has repeatedly insisted OFF and blade trap as crowd control exclusive skills in past discussions. i do agree that both of these skills need some sort of effect (even if its little debuff/damage) on cc immune enemies.
The main issue with that is the fact that crowd control as an exclusive function is worthless in this game. Why build around killing trash that you 1 shot with your incidental AoE procs anyway?
And there are methods to make Blade Trap work at least somewhat vs bosses (Rimetongue set, using it as a burst DA shred to make the following hit or two a near guaranteed crit), but nothing makes OFF effective. If you go Mageslayer set, you have to be able to freeze the target before your freeze resist shred can apply to the target. If you go the one amulet for Nightblade, you can get like 2 micro freezes every 24 seconds.
Like, it was fine before they got rid of the freeze resist redux aura on the one weapon that had that, but now that that isn’t a thing, it just doesn’t work in the end. Moving OFF away from being this trap skill into a fairly useful independent skill would just help improve the health of the Arcanist class as a whole, AND give Crate a way to enable Arcanist to have stacking RR shred that is dependent on being part Arcanist at the very least. It also ends up being a far more impressive move if done right IMO. A twisting, swirling blizzard vfx cutting through the nearby enemies would be quite satisfying, and the increased consistency of working on targets and enabling Arcanist builds would make the class healthier.
Many people in the past have often asked for improvements in CC skills (OFF, BT) as you desire, but they have not changed.
It’s a pity, but that’s their answer.
P.S.
I think it would be better to remove some of the boss-class or higher enemy resistance passives and instead use buff aura to neutralize CC.
Disable that aura with Cleansing Waters and Nullification, and allow them to condition.
Is it abused? No. Their aura only needs to be activated as it receives a condition and it should last for a certain period of time.
I have a better idea. Add a new off-hand that gives a new OFF. Olexa’s Blizzard or something, I suck at names, no h8 plz. Skill would behave the same way as OFF, but instead of freezing will deal pierce damage, basically cold/pierce OFF (I kinda went here with icy shards in mind). What will it fix? OFF will be good no matter who you face. Players will be happy. Done.
No freezing, no RR, just pure KABOOM. Okay, maybe a touch of RR.
That does literally nothing to fix the actual skill though. Which is sort of way more important, considering the actual skill is the one needing help. Having a strong powerful castable on an off-hand is fine, but if anything the current OFF would make the most sense on such an off-hand. A tool that is added onto a build that adds some extra trash clear, but isn’t a skill point investment. For a cold build that has the off-hand open and wants a trash nuker skill. Could see a caster Infiltrator enjoy that for instance.
Making AAR pierce and making OFF work on bosses, or just CC in general, are two completely different things. The former is incredibly easy, while the latter can possibly break the game if not balanced properly, leading to possibly several updates of balancing.
I don’t think the reason is in the engine.This skill is quite strong as CC,especially early on,later lose it’s power.But is designed to control crowd and not work on Bosses.Imagine OFF with insane Fire RR debuff and Aegis!
Could the RR be divided then, like half applying on cast and the other half only applied if the Freeze goes off. So, Bosses will still get affected by the RR, just to a lesser amount.
Or maybe a straight up nerf to the RR in return for making it work without the Freeze requirement. Maybe as a transmuter to keep everyone happy.
It’s not strong early on. Most enemies like aether crystals don’t even take damage from it, heroes and bosses take minimal to no damage. It’s broken since it’s inception and you can see that by crate not making Judgment conditional to any CC (Trap for example) like this one. Same with blade trap.
Cutting down RR to 15-35-45 would solve the issue and let chillsurge apply to all enemies.
Its rr should be greatly reduced if it changed to work on bosses to be in line with other rr skills. In its current state whats use has the rr? Enemies that can be affected by it die fast enough already even without the rr. The same can be said of the DA debuff of bladetrap.
I agree with your statements,guys,but is discussed multiple times and at this point doubt that will be changed.The best for OFF is to freeze yellow mobs,but freeze to be the CC and RR to be smaller,but universal not depending,whether enemies are frozen.
