Cast on Freeze Nerf and Patch Changes

I’m struggling to understand the reasoning behind nerfing Cast on Freeze so heavily in a single-player-focused game. The recent patch has made my sorcerer build unfun and nearly unplayable. The mechanic barely procs anymore, and it feels like all the hours and money I invested into the game, including around $300 on support packs, have been rendered meaningless.

To make matters worse, there was no refund for passive respecs or any reduction in respec costs, which adds an unnecessary burden on players trying to adapt to such drastic changes.

What’s the point of balance changes that alienate players who are just trying to enjoy the game on their own terms?

If you’re affected by this nerf and share the same frustration, I encourage you to voice your opinion here so the developers can see how these changes impact the player base. Constructive feedback can hopefully lead to adjustments that make the game enjoyable for everyone again.

I don't mind the fact that a change was made. Cold Sorc was extremely powerful and if they deemed it overtuned, that's fine. But tuning should be done with a tuning fork, not a sledgehammer. As you noted, the build is basically unplayable now. I can freeze a pack of mobs 3-4 times without proccing CoF. None of the other cold skills do any real damage, so the pure cold Sorc is done.

Every time I play the game when I have free time, i'll start working towards a build. Next time I log in... that build has been hit with a wrecking ball of nerfs. It's gotten to the point I am not spending a dime on the game, and regret the $30 I already have.

Yeah the nerf was shit tbh. If that was something they were going to do to classes, they could've at least refunded the passive points. It's a struggle trying to get 4k a point to do a whole damn tree.

now u can delete cast on freeze out of the game.

sorc is glascannon. and yeah u put the canon away. nice balancing!


why do game makers nerf stuff to death... dont get it....

Same here, put in a lot of work and time into my COF build in the past few days, been struggle a lot before getting my lvl11 skill gem(so i can learn comet) even spend some orbs in trading with others. Complete my build this afternoon and DANG, nerfed. no heads up, no nothing. I dont even have the resource to respec(skill gem, support gem, gold, etc.). At this moment, i think the best i can do is to reroll something else completely, but i truely, deeply dont want to, getting all this time wasted is really frustrating.

They nerfed my two characters in a row, I'm starting to regret buying this package. I know it's a beta, but if I have to spend 5,6k gold/per node to reset the whole tree with a character that doesn't really work anymore, then.... lmao.


I'm giving up for now, if they change something in terms of a free/better respec tree in the beta I'll be back.

I genuinely dont understand the game philosophy anymore ffs...
The whole fun of POE to me, was the incredible mix and interaction between gems. Taking that away frankly makes this diablo 3 or diablo 4, gameplay-wise.... sorry to say.

Probably just need to stay the F away from EA from now on...

I made a own topic for this, but here's my idea how to fix it and make it reliable:

I suggest you'd change it to gather energy on freeze buildup instead of actual freeze. The higher your buildup is and more HP a mob has, the more energy it gets. Then scale it so it is realiable so that it can trigger multiple times against bosses before freezing it and reliably against groups of mobs. Upon hitting the "freeze" stage it could get large energy boost as well.


Maybe something like this:
Hitting a mob with any cold skill gives base 10 energy.
Depending of your freeze build up you get a multiplier X.
Depending of your damage you get a multiplier of X, which can be below 1 (to prevent using level 1 skills)
Depending of monster HP you get a multiplier X
Upon freezing an enemy gain x2.

Now just scale the multipliers so it's reliable at all situations. Not swarming down hundreds of comets, but constantly throwing one or two.

I understand why they decided to nerf Cast on Freeze (CoF); it was undeniably strong and could easily trigger on every single freeze. However, I think they overdid it. Right now, CoF feels useless. Doing the calculation for number of enemies needed for single proc explains why:

Number of Monsters = Maximum Energy [300 for Comet] / ( Energy Gained [10] * { 1 + Energy Gain Modifier [mine is 0.82] } * Power of Monster [0.5-3] * Rarity of Monster [1,2,5,20] )

- 17 average normal monsters
- 9 strong normal monsters
- 6 very strong normal monsters
- 9 average magic monsters
- 5 strong magic monsters
- 3 very strong magic monsters
- 4 average rare monsters
- 2 strong rare monsters
- 2 very strong rare monsters
- 1 unique monster


That's a lot of average enemies just to get a single CoF proc! Even with very strong rare, you are no longer guaranteed a proc!

Adding to the issue, there doesn’t seem to be a viable way to improve this through passives. The passive skill tree only offers a +24% energy gain boost across three nodes. Even with these nodes maxed, we’d still need to freeze 15 average normal monsters to trigger one CoF proc. This doesn’t seem balanced. To make CoF usable again, I think the energy gain needs to be at least doubled or buff the passive nodes to provide much more energy.

The nerf might have been fine if there were alternative builds that offered comparable big-damage output. But as far as I know, there aren’t any. Does anyone have plans for other builds to run after this patch? Or has anyone found a workaround to make CoF more viable under these new conditions?