Ice Crystals (Glacial Bolt, Ice Wall) should have the hazard tag.

Been messing around in HC SSF before the new league start, been playing Glacial Bolt + Frag Rounds and its weird to me that Ice Crystals aren't hazards.

They're physically placed, enemies can interact with them, enemies are hurt by them, enemies (and you) are blocked by them. It just seems pretty 'hazardous' on the face of it. The only thing they don't/shouldn't do is re-arm. They deal damage when they explode, but giving them the hazard tag would open up some tree nodes to consider if you're using them as a main damage skill.

Glacial bolt is amazing, even dealing 80% less if destroyed quickly by enemies, the skill can still shotgun HoI pops. It looks like if the skill puts an ice crystal directly beneath an enemy, then it is destroyed and deals its explosion damage with the 80% less (I could be wrong, but you can certainly see that putting down the crystals they sometimes pop instantly and an enemy is frozen without any other source of cold damage).

Yes, Ice Shards are hazards, Ice Crystals are walls. Why not both? "Ice Crystals Cannot Re-arm" would be acceptable as a compromise, it wouldn't give them all of the tech of other hazards, but would still open up some options for Glacial Bolt given the hazard nodes in the SE corner of the tree.

They would need to be changed to scale with your weapon damage instead of a % of the slain enemies life in that case.

I've played frag/ice Merc and I didn't really find the ice crystals from Frozen Spite all that useful. They would just leave pretty crystals on the ground exploding after everything else was already dead. Even if there was a straggler mob or two alive, the delay on the ice crystal explosion was long enough for me to finish them off myself before the crystals did anything.

In theory, I imagined the crystals would be useful for "finishing off" a tanky rare monster that the explosions didn't get rid of who was also nested within a freshly-demolished pack, but it was never really the case that it worked out like that.

It felt better to increase the damage/AoE of the frag round bolts/explosion directly.

Maybe it feels different with glacial bolt over perma-frost rounds but I can't see how.

The ONLY time I found ice crystals useful was doing essences where I'd lay down a field of ice shards right before popping it - the crystals from the side-kick mobs would sometimes finish off the essence mob while I stayed far away.

Might be a good idea. Glacial bolt is one of those skills I have tried multiple times but it never quite seemed worthwhile compared to Permafrost rounds.