Cold Snap

I never used cold snap before the cool down was introduced recently so my opinion is without bias of prior experience with cold snap.

I chose it as a reward during one of the 3hr races and was sorely disappointed due to the length of cool down on the spell. I had to continuously keep an eye on the cool down (which I failed to do during the heat of intense battles). The freezing benefits and low damage of the spell do not support the high length of cool down.

I heard that cold snap was overpowered without the cool down however I have the feel that at present the cool down is too big a hindrance.

I have 2 suggestion: EITHER

1) Decrease the cool down from the present length OR
2) Remove the cool down but introduce to the gem a relatively high decrease in cast speed not unlike that of the Iron Will support gem.

I personally support option 2.

I have to add though that I do not have experience with this gem on high levels.

i want to support the second option, however it leaves people vulnerable to stuns and damage.

Long cast speed on a utility spell is a terrible idea and would probably make it unusable. If it's that big of a problem, the most effective way would be simply shortening the cooldown. I don't personally think it is, as a longtime user of the spell.

The spell is useless for my ice witch right now. If you have a problem with people using it as an attack spell put a .5-1 second cooldown max on it to stop it from being spammed and rescale the damage or freeze chance so its more useful at higher levels.

Just noticed that cold snap isn't working correctly with the trap support gem. The combination works, but it doesn't stock up the three traps that other skills do. I doesn't even have a number in the top left corner, either.

I been playing a new HC cold witch and carry this "new" cold snap with me. Personally I usually removed old cold snap from 8 hotkeys as soon as I needed a hotkey for something else but now I don't need it even sooner.

I only used this until I got to lvl 19 and attached LMP to freezing pulse. The spell was useful in combination with fire trap.

I didn't notice much freezing with it. If it has a long cooldown and weak damage at least give it better freezing (at low levels so it is useful, otherwise people are going to get rid of it and not use it at high levels if it is useful then).

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Caiada wrote:

Long cast speed on a utility spell is a terrible idea and would probably make it unusable.

An idea could be to decrease the cast speed if you start to spam it: a short "slow-cold-snap-cast-speed" debuff is added to our characters when the spell is cast, and the debuff is stacked if we continue to cast the spell... so that people can sometime use this spell several times in a row but to make sure most of the time it is not a valuable main nuke.

Hmm, cooldown makes it useless and plainly not fun to use. Instead, give it a slow cast speed (to allow speed improvements).

But the fact is, there is one big gap in a Ice Witch build, and it's long range low damage AoE spell. I had hope that cold snap would fill that void, but unfortunately not. Ice nova does what cold snap do, but better (no need of freezes if you use it as an escape skill, chilling is just fine).

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Divad wrote:

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Caiada wrote:

Long cast speed on a utility spell is a terrible idea and would probably make it unusable.

An idea could be to decrease the cast speed if you start to spam it: a short "slow-cold-snap-cast-speed" debuff is added to our characters when the spell is cast, and the debuff is stacked if we continue to cast the spell... so that people can sometime use this spell several times in a row but to make sure most of the time it is not a valuable main nuke.

i honestly love idea of "caster fatigue", first cast be nearly instant (2/3 a second speed?) as a player needs, but extra casts directly after 3 or 2.7 or 2.4 times longer to perform till the skill isn't touched for roughly same time as the current recharge (replacing the recharge).

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soul4hdwn wrote:

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Divad wrote:

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Caiada wrote:

Long cast speed on a utility spell is a terrible idea and would probably make it unusable.

An idea could be to decrease the cast speed if you start to spam it: a short "slow-cold-snap-cast-speed" debuff is added to our characters when the spell is cast, and the debuff is stacked if we continue to cast the spell... so that people can sometime use this spell several times in a row but to make sure most of the time it is not a valuable main nuke.

i honestly love idea of "caster fatigue", first cast be nearly instant (2/3 a second speed?) as a player needs, but extra casts directly after 3 or 2.7 or 2.4 times longer to perform till the skill isn't touched for roughly same time as the current recharge (replacing the recharge).

The dex spell Ethereal Knives has a mechanic like you describe... instant cast but with a kind of recharge slow animation after you cast it. So the "cast time" happens after the skill goes off. I really like it as a counter-measure to having a cooldown.