Another part of the game that is rendered useless when enemies have a bit more health later in the game, is freeze chance. I like builds who can use crowd control to their advantage and do it fairly consistently. I fully support the idea that you shouldn’t be able to permafreeze bosses, as it would just feel like cheating. But I do feel like you should be able to freeze bosses with a low consistency.
In the examples below I am using Primalist skills and pets. As a mage you might have a slightly better chance to freeze some bosses, but it’s still really low.
Example 1: https://imgur.com/a/RRxcWSC
Here the enemy only has 1000 health, and without any investment, you gotta be really lucky to freeze them. But if you make an effort into getting freeze chance increases, it is possible to freeze the enemies, with a fairly low consistency. So already freeze chance is looking rough. A 1000 health enemy is pretty low.
Example 2: https://imgur.com/a/4yDgsBn
Here I increased the enemy health to 10k, which would probably be a boss early on, later on I think bosses have several 10s of thousands of health. This means that without any investment into freeze chance, none of these skills will likely ever freeze a boss, with just 10k health. Then if you invest time and effort into getting increased freeze chance and attunement, you MIGHT have a chance to freeze a boss, with your Sabertooth, and even that is a very low chance.
I’m not sure how this could be improved, but I hope it will. Again I don’t want to be able to permafreeze bosses, but some improvements should be made, so you can at least freeze bosses sometimes. With the current state of freeze, it is even hard to freeze most normal enemies consistently and I think that’s sad. Crowd control is another defense you can focus on, but it should also be viable to focus on, and currently freeze is not viable to focus on.
Maybe freeze chance shouldn’t take into account the max health of an enemy, but maybe only 25%. That would have it a bit easier to freeze really high health enemies, but still keep it grounded. Maybe freeze chance should take into account how hard you hit with with cold damage.
I think one way freeze could work better against high health enemies is to scale the duration as opposed to the chance - you could freeze a boss, but not for the full duration. This is what Path of Exile does.
Today I saw something very interesting on the reap tree, that I thought was really cool. https://imgur.com/a/N4jWrng
Something similar could be applied to either the calculation of freeze in general, or each skill that has a freeze rate could have a different interaction with Intelligence/attunement. I know some skills scale with attributes already, but this is only the modifier, which we know is really bad from my calculations. The part we should work with is instead the freeze rate base.
Base freeze rate is increased by 50% of your Intelligence/attunement.
Skills with freeze rate have +1 for each 2 points of intelligence.
It could also be more specific to each skill with freeze rate. Some skills get +1 for each point in Intelligence/attunement, some get +1 for each 2 points in Intelligence/attunement etc.
What do you all think about something like one of these? It would still require a lot of investment into Intelligence/attunement as well as increased freeze chance.
I hope they take their time with freeze. The options people present here are nice but there is a pretty small gap between good enough freeze rate and to much freeze rate from my point of view. Sure they could gove enemys more CC resi but this would be a bad move because you don’t need it then anyway :D.
Right now we don’t have all equipment implemented into the game and maybe the rates increase much further later on and freeze is in a bad state because of this? I don’t know for sure but debuffs and the ability to CC seem to have heavy requirements. So maybe this is intentional? Don’t know.
Thanks for compiling this data on freeze chance (and on shred/penetration in the other thread).
We were aware of the difficulty of keeping freeze chance high as enemy health scaled up rapidly at high levels, but this chart really helps visualise how severe the issue is. We’ve discussed this quite a bit internally since the thread was made and have decided on a systematic solution to the problem with scaling. However that’s unlikely to be ready for 0.7.3, so in the mean time we’re planning numerical buffs to several sources of increased freeze chance to alleviate the issue.
I’m glad to hear that it’s had an impact and I will look forward to hear/see what how you rework or buff these mechanics in the future. I just want more build options to be viable and fun.
As always I really appreciate how well you take feedback from the community. It matters a lot to all of us.
I played Horizon Zero Dawn recently & they have a simple & effective way fo implimenting CC effect like freeze, build, shock.
Basically as you deal an elemental damage, say ice, a small icon on top of the enemy will fill, when it reach max, the enemy fully frozen. More damage, fast the icon fill. Simple & elegent & make so much sense.
