Ice Crash

gonna write a better report after using it more. but after an hour or two playing with this on my facebreaker i can only give it thumbs up.

I am trying to build my ice crash marauder around the staff below (i will be 5 linking it)




Questions:

1) Given the +2 for cold gems, would spending chroms to force 2 green sockets for the following gem setup be good: ice crash, add cold damage, cold pen, fortify, melee phys damage

2) I can craft onto the staff the 22-27% increased crit strike chance - given that staffs can get good crit, is this option worth pursuing

If you have other suggestions, i am definitely open to them

First, great work with the Awakening. I didn't think Path of Exile had so much more room to grow, but I am excited to see all the new possibilities.

Regarding the skill - Based on my initial impressions of using Ice Crash, I feel like it's very close to being the skill I want it to be.

When I read that Mulistrike could not support Ice Crash, I was under the impression that the skill would deal damage in waves that cascaded out from the center, with each pulse starting further away from the center and doing less damage than the last (similar to something like the Fire Nova Mine or an old version of shock nova with 3 delayed rings). This idea is supported by the animation and art of Ice Crash that is a progressive cascading ice explosion in a widening radius and it sort of delays the damage as the "crash" keeps traveling outward. I was conceptualizing a build that could actually utilize Knockback to push mobs out into the widening rings for bonus damage as they seemed to be delayed sources of damage. To me, this would be the trade-off for disabling multi-strike as a support. I was not expecting the skill to be limited in the number of hits the skill's rings/stages can deal to a target.

However, after experimenting with various setups/positioning and now reading here in the forums, this was not the way Ice Crash was conceptualized or implemented. As it stands, Ice Crash is still a very powerful skill but is a bit closer to Static Strike than I had expected. I had anticipated it to be a little more like Molten Strike where area damage could overlap assuming the right conditions ie pushing the enemies through hot zones or a few hits against larger enemies.

I will still likely create a build around the skill, that art design is just so sweet looking, but it is a bit less complex in its positioning mechanics due to the internal limits that were placed on it - I was hoping that the area effects would work more akin to Molten Strike. I enjoy the many skills in PoE that require inspection to determine the true power level of the skill and the combos that can be created from them. I was really hoping this was knockback's time to shine.

I don't think Ice Crash is good :(

I thought Ice Crash would be like Static Strike, but actually I don't think it is at all. And I think Static Strike is much better.

I used Ice Crash from level 31 until ~50 but now I've gone back to Static Strike.

Ice Crash just doesn't seem very reliable at causing damage - sometimes I spam Ice Crash in a group of mobs and hardly any of them seem to get damaged. I guess it's related to the fact that an enemy can only be hit by one stage of the attack.

As soon as I switched back to Static Strike, I instantly noticed how much easier it is to cause reliable damage with.

I tried Ice Crash with Hypothermia and Ice Bite but not many enemies got frozen. I think I was expecting that more enemies would get frozen because I thought they could be hit by all 3 waves/stages.

Hmmm... I think enemies should be able to be hit by all waves. Only being able to be hit by one wave doesn't make any kind of logical sense.

"

hurrak4n wrote:

Hmmm... I think enemies should be able to be hit by all waves. Only being able to be hit by one wave doesn't make any kind of logical sense.

Balancing reasons. That way it can still deal relatively high damage in immediate melee range but also have a large AoE (where it deals less damage). If you stack increased AoE not only does the total coverage increase, you also increase the area where it deals its full damage.

They could have done it another way. IC does 100% (s1) 80% (s2) 60% (s3) damage. They could have made the skill hit for 20% (s1) 20% (s2) 60% (s3) damage and allow for all 3 stages to hit. Maybe they avoided option 2 because of physical damage vs armor. Since the skill still does physical damage, 3 smaller hits would do less damage than 1 big hit for stages 1 and 2.

My only complaint would be "Why not for dagger and fist?". It's not a blunt skill because you can use ax's and swords so why not dagger? You can go un-armed so why not claw?

I personally find this skill really really strong, the huge multiplier it has (184.2 on lvl 20) is easily stacked with other multipliers creating a skill that does massive damage even while practially not even investing into offensive nodes on the tree (conc+wed+faster+penet)

I also find it kind of funny, how I have a 100% ice animation with 100% fire damage, but that is a whole different story. :D

The skill is also strange, because I use it with a blade, and I keep smashing the ground, ehh I don't know it's more of an aesthetical thing but I'd prefer it was only for blunt weapons.

Does somebody know or could GGG kindly confirm if Ice crash is affected by melee weapon or unarmed range?

It probably is affected, I should test it out though.

Vipermagi, this skill is placed quite a bit of units ahead of your character, I personally used this aspect of the gem to attack mobs around corners, so while it may not affect the range of the AoE, it may affect the position of where the AoE is placed.