Arctic Breath

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nikals wrote:

Arctic Breath is better in literally every possible way than Freezing Pulse

I just played Arctic Breath up to level 80. You should try giving it a shot on maps with very small passages and tons of ground clutter like Mine. It's hellish to use when you miss most of your attacks and can't hit anyone more than 2 feet away, and even then you better hope you're not desynced behind one of the millions of pebbles. I wished at that point that I'd also been leveling a second cold spell to use on maps where Arctic Breath is absolutely awful.

Aside from being pure poop on some maps where you miss 80% of your attacks due to always being a little desynced and it being hard to get good lines in the first place, it's an amazing spell. I love the huge blob of ground ice it drops.

I really do wish it wasn't stopped by ground terrain, though. There's way more of it the game than I thought prior to playing the skill. Some zones and maps are really frustrating to play.

Consider removing this skill or fix it so we can get more than 1-2 fps when this skill is on screen

I don't have time to read 20 pages of feedback, but all I can say is this:

I made a cold witch solely for the purpose of using Arctic Breath because I thought it looked awesome. There are several problems with this skill that I can see within about 10 minutes of trying so hard to like it, and the game doing everything it can to make me hate it.


a) This skill crashes into everything. The perception of the player casting is that it should be like Ice Spear, and it isn't at all. This hinders the potential of this skill in a massive way.

b) When Arctic Breath explodes, it murders my framerate. I'm on a shit laptop so I understand part of this is on me, but I can't IMAGINE using this skill with something like Chain for instance in its current state.

c) Lack of damage/piercing - Ice spear seems to hit equally hard or harder since it has its second form, and thus gains better critical strike and freeze potential. Arctic Breath has neither of these things going for it and sacrificing damage/pen for Pierce is just not worth it, it's just not good enough because it doesn't explode multiple times when it does pierce.



The cast rate is pretty slow also, but this could be easily excused if the above points were addressed. It's a package of negative aspects that drag this skill down, and I would love to see it improved because I see the potential and it could be lots of fun.

It looks like I haven't posted in this thread, though I thought I did.

Anyway, I've become fond of using arctic break + GMP + Spell totem as a way of locking down monsters and bosses. I initially used it for its innate ground ice on an avatar of fire character, but it's effective enough that I've started using it on other characters.

As a self-cast skill it's terrible - it explodes as soon as it brushes against anything and doesn't do enough damage to justify using over just about any other cold skill in the game.

They make nasty traps though - in Ambush I had a trapper that had Arctic Breath + GMP + Trap + Cold to Fire + Added Chaos + Concentrated Effect on an infernal mantle and it did (and still does) incredible single target damage per hit. I think that's a positive about trap rather than about arctic breath, though.





Tooltip, nothing, means, etc

Edit: GMP, not LMP

Not sure GGG checks this but i have a question.

Arctic breath seems to get caught on everything (rocks, sticks, etc) yet the srs from kaom it can not touch. It passes through the srs completely. Why?

Is it a ground projectile like spark? I'm not sure but cant spark hit srs? I'd think a giant frozen head can.

Obvioisly this is in the beta.

They should change this.
As a ground projectile, with his HUGE hitbox, it can't be used as a regular skill... And it's boring. should be used as a swap gem for bosses only?

Only tuning this skill needs is to be made an aerial projectile instead of ground. At current I find myself swearing at the monitor every time I attempt to use it.

Weird part is the skill travels up and down stairs, even weirder is the animation is an aerial skull -_-

Using LMP, the projectiles themselves can't collide with a single target now, but the explosions can still overlap right?