I’m playing a Spellbreaker that’s heavily focussed on freezing and slowing mobs, basically kiting them around till they die. He’s really fun and works very well with normal monsters and heroes.
But what I don’t understand is why every single unique boss (and above) is completely immune to all slows and freezes. That makes the whole build unviable and just doesn’t seem fair for a build that has to make use of such utilities to work at all (since it doesn’t have the damage to just obliterate everything in a few seconds).
Hence I’d suggest the following:
Unique Boss: 50% resistance to freeze and slow
Nemesis + Ultra Boss: 75% resistance to freeze and slow
That way a level 12 Flash Freeze would freeze a Unique Boss for 1.9 seconds and a Nemesis Boss for just 0.95 seconds. I don’t think that would be unreasonable.
I get the feeling that Crate’s not for this. There are exactly TWO items in the game you can use to make Freezes work on bosses…That’s Shard of Asterkarn, and a Nightblade Amulet that I never recall the name of. As far as I can tell, Crate subscribes to the “Bosses are not allowed to be CCed because balance” game making style. It’s not just freeze and slow that don’t work, after all. So suggesting they make it viable to freeze bosses is unlikely to gain their agreement.
If that’s true that’s bad game design in my honest opinion. It’s basically like saying “We couldn’t figure out a way to make certain CC effects work with bosses in a balanced fashion so we decided to completely disable it for them, regardless of how effective each one actually is”.
I agree, but then…How many games have you seen actually leave bosses able to be CCed, compared to those that don’t? And of those where bosses can be CCed…In how many of those cases does it trivialize some/all of the boss encounters?
I may not agree with it, but I can see why they’d do it.
Personally, were I ever crazy enough to make a game…I’d just not include CC effects at all. They seem to be a balancing nightmare in every way.
For myself I think a system where Bosses/enemies/etc… could all be somewhat vulnerable to all CC but gain resilience upon getting hit by a particular CC.
So you could freeze a boss in which case they gain a stack of freeze resistance (or just general resistance vs all CC so you can’t chain different types of CC) for a duration which lowers the duration of the freeze. Chain freezing a boss would give multiple stacks in which every subsequent freeze effect becomes less effective till it does nothing at all.
Certain enemies/bosses that are thematically tied to certain CC (like ice enemies vs freeze) would have a base amount of resistance - but can still be frozen though obviously not as effective.
Otherwise it’s just frustrating to have CC that is 100% useless against certain enemies.
Diablo 3 tried that, and it’s pretty awful. There’s no reasonable way to make that visually clear, so you’ve no idea how resistant they currently are, or when that drops off. Also, you’d need to gain res to all CCs, or people could just swap to another CC while the first was being resisted.
You can’t freeze boss by Flash freeze that’s enough to tell you OFF isn’t worth to invest too many points in.
Cannot freezing boss isn’t mean it ruins your build. If you try and search for items you’ll have more ideas to do.
Freezing is the only disable CC in the game that can apply to boss. There’re many spellbreaker build in this section
Shard of Asterkarn(Weapon) and Night’s Embrace(Amulet) have ability to reduce freeze resistance. Those can make crazy perma-freeze combo. The new patch 1.0.0.8 is clear enough to explain that crate still want GD to be a single player and hard enough to challenge people. So it is reasonable to stay boss as dangerous and don’t get wreck easily by simple things.
OFF is not designed to be used against bosses anyway. I have a fire spellbreaker with 22/12 OFF and it’s great against literally all mobs and heroes, so it’s normal I have to find something else against bosses.
If I were a dev I would decrease the freeze and slow time of bosses to balance things out but i don’t like it if mobs are completely immune against parts of skills…
I agree and understand your point. If Ragox can find something else properly he wouldn’t make this thread.
Debuff to fire resistance will only apply when enemies get freeze.
If not for the build like KoalaeiO. I assume he’s convert cold->fire dmg from warpfire and make use of it in an exact way, OFF is worth only for effective radius.
Spellbreakers have better choice from ring of steel -> ring of frost.
Honestly, from my spellbreaker build. I felt it’s cheating to freeze bosses from the amulet (-50% freeze resistance) while other disable CC like stun/entrapment/petrify/slow cannot. Freezing is only thing can disable against bosses and nemesis .
If one would complain about CC, I’d suggest Stun/petrify/entrapment to get some items to reduce one of these resistance as freeze get it. For reduce slow resistance, I think range build should get it.
Disabling most CC elements on bosses because of potential balance issues, to me, doesn’t sound like a good game mechanic.
You can improve on the balance, if enough testing and work is done in that regard. You might not be ably to achieve the perfect one, but I think coming close to a reasonably good one is doable.
In my opinion, this mechanic won’t change, not in any future patches nor in the expansion. The only hope of seeing these things improved would be next full installment (Grim Dawn 2?)
As for giving suggestions how to improve it:
I wish they implemented mechanic where attributes determine certain cc conditions.
750 spirit will allow you to break freeze resistance on immune monsters, but duration will still be limited
Increasing spirit will add a multiplier to freeze duration
So a Battlemage with 800 and Warlock with 1500 spirit both with Flash freeze skill will be able to freeze Flesh husks, but while battlemage will only be able to do it for a second, Warlock will do it for 3.
Physique will determine duration of stun resistance, cunning will boost life leech or life steal.
In terms of main bosses and nemesis, perhaps adding a fallback to lesser CC effect.
Nemesis, bosses can’t be frozen, however while your freeze skill did not work, you apply next lower CC effect. So instead of Freezing you will be slowing and applying all debufs that come with the skill.
At the very least, OFF should apply debuff, damage, and TRY to freeze. It doesn’t make much sense that the entire skill only functions if ONE part of it functions, IMO. Because of that I never use it at all, I see no value in investing a DPS boost that doesn’t work on things that I actually need that DPS on.
…He has a point, technically. Hard to argue with that.
With that in mind though…Is OFF ONLY ever going to be good for crowds? Or is there an intention/thought/chance that someday, the RR might apply to everything that gets hit, frozen or not?
Currently I never use the skill because of that…Just want to know if I should watch for that to change, or just forever ignore the existence of the skill in all patch notes.
That amulet and that dagger are REALLY work wonders…
I think the fact that the rr is bound to the freeze is the reason it is so high; if it ever would work regardless off freeze then it’d most likely be toned down heavily cuz (up to) 125 RELIABLE rr on a single skill is just obscene.
