Ice Melee

[Midnight]

So, one thing to consider, and it's a bit nasty, is that many of IM's powers have a built in Slow effect which always lands. Most other Tanker primaries secondary effects are on a Chance basis, but also tend to be more binary in nature -- Stun, Knockdown, etc. This stacking buff is a strong form of mitigation, which adds to the Tanker and his teams survivability. While no penalty per se is applied to any of IM's powers due to this, it makes improving those powers problematic.

Lack of damage stems from another source: Two of the damage powers are long, slow DOTS. Frost and Freezing touch both do their damage over a 5 second period, rather than up front, all at once. This can result is wasted damage, especially on teams.

The last aspect which contributes to IM having low damage is Ice Patch and Frozen Aura each having no damage component. This results in the powerset having fewer damaging powers overall, when compared to other sets.

Adding damage to Frozen Aura is easy (look at the Training Room in the near future, in fact...) but addressing the rest of the powers is NOT as easy as you'd think. Front loading one or two powers so they perform better than they "should" is an option, but I'm hesitant to do so.

Anyway, just wanted to poke my head in and give a brief glimpse into the thought process, and to give a bit of advance warning on the FA thing.

Source

[Verfall]

Meh, the only person I know this effects is Ephy. The rest of us aren't crazy enough to play Ice Melee  :lol:

[Ephemeris]

Make Frozen Aura into an icy footstomp or Ice Sword Circle and they may have something...otherwise they're just peeing into the wind.

[Bugbear]

Ice Sword Circle ftw!

My very first toon ever was Inv/Ice.  Still only lvl 31.

I know I'm not the biggest number cruncher out there, and I often tend to discount the value of slows and other hard to visually quantify debuffs... but... Energy melee has TWO Extreme Damage attacks.   TWO!!!   Yes, you heard me right.  Freaking TWO!!!  Plus the rest of the attacks (except the tier one) do credible damage as well.  In addition, I'd be willing to bet that the "chance" of stunning opponents with EM attacks results in far more damage mitigation that whatever tiny amount of slowing the IM attacks do.

Seriously, IM is so totally gimped, how exactly would it be problematic to buff it's damage?  Is it anywhere near in danger of becoming a dominating build?  What exactly would they have to do to make Ice Melee an attractive choice for new Tanker toons?

At least they're looking at it, but c'mon.  EM vs IM is one of the biggest "within AT" powerset imbalances going.  The only reason you don't hear more whining about it is A) Many Tanker players don't care that much about their damage, and B) No one plays IM.

-BG

[Bugbear]

While no penalty per se is applied to any of IM's powers due to this, it makes improving those powers problematic.

Wait, so if IM's powers haven't been penalized to compensate for the stacking slow debuff... then what exactly were they penalized for?    :banghead:

-BG

[Verfall]

Well technically, every AT that has energy melee, except Dom's, has shown that energy melee as a whole is ridiculously over-powered. Blasters, Brutes, Tanks, Stalkers, all of them tend to have large populations of energy melee toons. Hell, go into a PVP zone, almost every person you see using one of those AT's will be energy melee. Imagine if the scrappers get their way and get energy melee. I don't want to imagine a critting total focus or energy transfer.

As far as I can tell, the only people who ever took ice melee were concept users and fire tankers trying to recover from the burn nerf. It's quite funny how ice is the dominate blaster primary for single target damage, but at the bottom of the pack for tanks. Seriously, ice slick does not make up for fact you take eons to kill a minion.