Why I Think Path Of Exile Ice Spear Is A Bad Design
In general, ice feels badly designed in Path of Exile. Lightning and fire is designed to do more damage, lightning even has shock and fire at least has ignite (which may or may not be better after the skill revamp).
Ice has no added damage mechanics and their flat elemental rolls are lower on stuff like abyss jewels. You can convert cold to fire and physical to lightning via gems, but there is no gem that converts something to cold.
The advantage of ice is supposed to be freeze/chill, but the former doesn’t work on end game bosses (or Kitava/Argus) and chill is extremely weak due to the HP threshold issue. Even if you go elementalist, a 10% chill is nothing compared to 20% MORE damage dealt via shock. Go chill Elder/Shaper/Guardians for 10%, I can 100% guarantee you will not notice the difference at all.
Unlike poe currency buy, the only thing that makes ice stand out is GC due to shaper sticks + a physical damage spell. Every other ice skill is mediocre or just flat out terrible.
Can anyone think of a single build for end game bosses that is designed around freeze/chill for end game bosses? I couldn’t find any. I found ignite/shock builds though.
Cold snap: nobody uses this, its a spell to freeze enemies, but it does low damage hence runs into the HP threshold issue. You can’t freeze end game bosses anyway.
Vortex: Why chill mobs that you should be one shotting anyway?
Ice spear: Poorly designed. You want the initial target to take the most damage for obvious reasons (bosses), yet its the second form that does more damage. ??? And to top it off, even the second form does less DPS than Frostbolt, which is not a tier 1 damage skill.
Frostbolt: If you are going to use this, you may as well use something that does way more damage, freezing pulse would freeze bosses better (not that it matters for end game) and if you don’t care about freezes, GC would do way more damage.
Freezing pulse: Can’t freeze end game bosses anyway and GC does way more damage when abusing shaper stat sticks.
Ice shot: Nobody uses this in end game when you have tornado shot/barrage, and in the early game split arrow has better AOE and burning arrow has better single target DPS.
To top it off, there is a huge imbalance with elemental ailments. You know how some items give you a damage bonus for elemental ailments, like The Taming? Most of them require the target to be frozen to count. Except that, end game bosses are immune to freeze, while you can apply ignite/shock to them, they should at least change it so that you only need chill, not freeze, for the conditions.
