Frostbolt

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Azorien wrote:

Suggestion: reduce projectile collision box to something like arrows have (and make it look like an actual frostbolt while at it).

Its somehow related to projectile having very large hit box that sort of compensate for its innate slowness.

I am atm seriously tempted to try new treshold jewel with sire of shards.

Quad totem hierophant with sire and vortex totems.

Totem will negate the issue with hit box. Votex generates source of chill for bolts hipotermia. In theory it could stack pretty insane amount of cold damage per bolt.

SKill would have been awesome if it exploded with an icenova effect on hit.
The use of nova + bolt is clunky and kind of crappy.


Skill kind of lag when used with fast casting + jewel+multiple projectiles.

I am playing a Cast on Crit Dual wield Cospri Malice, lvl 94 atm.
(characters are open in my profile if you wanna check)

Frostbolt is AMAZING with the new jewelS (putting that in bold because people sometime don't noticed that you can put 2 of them maximum.


Combined with a Dying Sun flask we got : 7 projectiles by gem, considering you can put 3 gems by sword, you could potentially spread 42 frostbolts projectiles in a single Lacerate hit.
Of course this is not efficient as damage output, that's why we prefer only 2 Frostbolt gems + 2 freezing pulses for single target.
Those gems linked with life leech gems = the best instant leech I have ever seen.

This jewel is not expensive and make frostbolt a really good fast clearing spell.

yeah viper u r right, i overlooked the +1gem gear i had frostbolt socketed in :/

This skill is so much better than Ice Spear. More damage, 100% pierce, less mana cost. It even has a powerful jewel to support it.

GGG where's da balance at?

Change this skill to channel or add a cast when chilled support gem to synergize this with vortex. They are designed to synergize with each other but nothing is viable.

I am a huge nut for cold skills, and I have tried making an ice nova character many times. With the 40% buff given in 3.0 to casting on frostbolt, I really wanted it to work out. The problem I had was purely mechanical. I expected ice nova to go off on the nearest frosbolt ANY time i cast it. Once I discovered that the cast is based on mouse-hover it made it mostly useless. I cannot reliably know where it is going off, because I click to move. I cannot click to move AND click on the area of attack simultaneously. Sadness.

As others have mentioned, this skill needs some love.

It's a LOT of fun when you CAN use it; having relied more or less exclusively on it for Harbinger League, it's a lot of fun to shatter whole packs of monsters in short order, and Frostbolt does that in ways I've never seen a skill do before.

But as others have already mentioned, it has a HUGE problem with its collision. It's large AND wonky, to where I don't even always see it properly TOUCH walls before it crumbles. To see what I mean, get +4 projectiles, then fire it off against a flat wall at an angle; while in theory the end of the 5 projectiles should form a straight line parallel to the wall, they don't, with some ending even further away from the wall than others.

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Genmaicha wrote:

This skill is so much better than Ice Spear. More damage, 100% pierce, less mana cost. It even has a powerful jewel to support it.

GGG where's da balance at?

It's like a LOT of skills GGG has put out; basically a "2.0" of an older, existing skill, that, as you mention, is basically better in every way. Scorching Ray did this to Incinerate, and Frostbolt does this to Ice Spear. Even counting the pathetic INCREASED (not baseline) crit increase for all hits, it still always yields substantially less single-target DPS than Frostbolt under the same passives/gear.

And then you add that Frostbolt gets the jewel to have 5 projectiles without the damage reduction of GMP, and also always gets 100% pierce at max damage (You gotta invest to get that for the crit form of ice speak) and it's just not even comparable.

In 3.0 / 3.1 this is my favourite skill gem. Frostbolt is fast, frostbolt freezes.
I made the Uber lab with it (first time) and got my witch to level 90.
Frostbolt got me killed in doorways a few times (big collision box -- no projectiles hitting monsters), not something to worry about.


Frostbolt's 2 support gems are a must have: greater multiple projectiles but with damage BONUS.
Spell Echo + Ice bite makes for amazing cast speed. Effectively a 9L.

Dual curse and frost bomb deal with resistances neatly.