Freezing Pulse

Excellent skill for when kiting enemies that ice spear would miss, but only useful at close range. I eventually replaced it entirely with ice spear, and now use cold snap for when spear would possibly miss due to its slow speed.

I suggest increasing its damage at close range, and reducing its damage at long range by about 20% on both ends, making it the ideal skill to use at point blank on multiple mobs, and less effective at long range which feels like the way the skill was intended to be used.

As a shotgun skill how effective is this? By that I mean loading it up with multiple projectiles, when I was using it in conjunction with the Lesser, so long as I targeted behind the enemy I was able to always get all 3 shots to hit, boosting the listed damage to 3 times listed at all times.


After fooling around with it and using it mostly as my main nuke on bosses/uniques I have to say I can't wait to combine Greater and Lesser projectiles, It just remains to be seen if the spread goes insane with that many projectiles.

Since it's also an AoE I wonder if I could use enough AoE radius buffs to hit a sweet spot with all the shots in front of me.

Link this skill to lesser, greater, and increased projectile speed.

The result goes from a short blue beam to an avalanche half a screen wide, flying an entire screen in length and half a screen in width.

LOL it's mad fun, but it turns it into a utility spell.

Fun spell, unfortunately, it doesn't work too well through doorways. It often ends up colliding with the sides of the doorway and not making it through.

I've been using this since the 0.9.9 update. This combined with Added Lightning Damage has been devastating in Act 2 normal. But there is one problem that Kldran mentioned. There are times when it snags on objects in the game world that other spells don't. For example, there are times when I can fire Ice Spear just fine past the corner of some obstacle, but Freezing Pulse just dies at the obstacle.

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xenogfan43 wrote:

Excellent skill for when kiting enemies that ice spear would miss, but only useful at close range. I eventually replaced it entirely with ice spear, and now use cold snap for when spear would possibly miss due to its slow speed.

I suggest increasing its damage at close range, and reducing its damage at long range by about 20% on both ends, making it the ideal skill to use at point blank on multiple mobs, and less effective at long range which feels like the way the skill was intended to be used.

The problem would solve itself if point blank worked with spells!

Witch, lvl 29

Worked excellently in normal. Damage falling off in Cruel a bit. I really like the range tradeoff mechanic. I'm sure its damage will be fine again once I can lay hands on a cold dmg and lesser multi support.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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LagMasterSam wrote:

I've been using this since the 0.9.9 update. This combined with Added Lightning Damage has been devastating in Act 2 normal. But there is one problem that Kldran mentioned. There are times when it snags on objects in the game world that other spells don't. For example, there are times when I can fire Ice Spear just fine past the corner of some obstacle, but Freezing Pulse just dies at the obstacle.

That's because freezing pulse is a significantly larger object in the game world than ice spear. It also hits more monsters due to it's extra size than ice spear would.

But that's not true at all! Ice Spear and Freezing Pulse have the same size in practice since they both require Multiple Projectiles. Multiple Projectiles with Freezing Pulse has no downside since all the projectiles overlap, and greatly improves damage. Similarly, Multiple Projectiles with Ice Spear also greatly improves its damage. However, ice spear wins out in the end. It can get piercing and a large effective hitbox at short range just like Freezing Pulse, on top of the huge crit chance bonus at long range which far outdamages Freezing Pulse. That's all on top of its ability to hit at long range on its own, which is absolutely invaluable at the highest levels. It has everything Freezing Pulse has and more, and the base damage difference simply doesn't make up for it.


EDIT: Ok I take back what I said. I still think the hitbox is of minimal significance since Ice Spear pierces any enemies running at you in a straight line (i.e. all of them) and often hits random off-screen enemies, however the higher base damage, higher cast speed, and lower mana cost of Freezing Pulse does offset the huge crit bonus of Ice Spear, especially if you have a high quality freezing pulse for the improved range.

That's only at lower levels though. Once shit hits the fan in chaos, the range on freezing pulse just doesn't cut it.

Just a random idea I had. I don't know how feasible it would be to do this with the current engine, but here goes.
I think it would be a nice addition if a small obstacle wouldn't kill a single pulse completely, but would only remove the portion it's blocking. So in a way the pulse could propagate like waves do IRL: possibly something a bit similar to e.g. this.

I don't think this would make the skill too much more powerful since there's falloff in damage anyway. Moreover, this would fix the situations when you are battling mobs in e.g. the prison and you can't hit someone just next to you because the edge of the pulse barely hits the edge of a doorway or something similar, which is quite annoying.