I’m not here to argue that Ice is S tier or anything, but simply to get this off my mind so people can stop making terrible Ice builds.
I’m probably a few months late on making everyone realize this but I can’t stop thinking about this and have a serious urge to vent.
Okay, so what people normally think about when making Ice setups is the frozen damage multiplier. Which is completely stupid, for several reasons. Sure, you can go Ice Iron and get an 80% damage buff by hitting a frozen enemy, but the problem is that you won’t. As we all know, Frozen can be cancelled by using any move, so it’ll really take only like 0.2 seconds to get out of it. You can’t even argue “just use a beam for your damage multiplier!”, because even if you use your fastest move, the enemy will still be able to high jump out (I also haven’t checked this, but I believe you can block while frozen). Frozen’s best synergy is ironically with Ice itself, since you can just use a multi-blast with Ice while someone’s ready to get frozen, and then freeze them while still firing +25% damage bonuses at them. So in other words, damage multipliers on Frozen will almost never come into good usage unless you’re bombarding one guy with five of your friends or the enemy has a lag spike.
So, now to explain to little timmy why Frozen isn’t completely useless. Well, simply put, a lot of people underestimate Ice’s most powerful interaction, that being a 40% bleed damage multiplier (yes, it’s getting changed to 30% in AO, I know that). This means an Ice user’s main strategy is going to be to get into weapon range, then swap between Ice and their weapon for constant bleed combos. With the right build, this literally does more damage than spamming Gold explosions at close range. Of course, most people overlook this aspect of Ice, because Magma does it better and has puddles on top of that, allowing for area control that can force someone into a specific spot before bleed comboing them.
So why does that make Frozen useful? Because you can freeze an enemy, then use that short time where they’re forced to cast to cast a spell to close the gap and get into bleed combo range. Easier said than done, obviously, but I feel like it’s just such a crucial part of Ice’s gameplay that everyone just overlooks. Maybe it’s because nobody uses Ice.
TL;DR, stop thinking Ice with Lightning or Ice with Iron is going to be useful. It won’t. Just get Wind or Water with it and pick whatever you want for your third magic. Maybe something with clouds or puddles for area control.
I don’t think you get that frozen isn’t to combo with, it’s to get free damage in. If I use ice on someone and then multi 4 blast them with wind while they’re midair it’ll do the same damage as if I hit 2 normal 100% blasts and also assuming they never escape, if they do escape it’ll be significantly higher damage where even if they countered I’d win the damage trade unless they were like Iron/Earth glass canons. Taking it to the next option of 5 blasts and 6 blasts it would be as if I did 2.3 and 2.4 normal 100% blasts so it’s better to just stick to 4 blasts.
You’re also forgetting Lightning/Ice/Wind remove every single status effect except for scorched.
Also they’re just straight up stuck for a full 2 seconds if they ran out of magic energy
Ice with Metal is still usefull because Metal does bleed dmg so if you can manage it you can switch between doing bleed with metal and then dmg with ice. Also if your opponent isn’t good with reacting to getting frozen its ggs with the iron blast. You have nice dmg and size with both magics aswell being able to mid range with ice and close range with Metal.
you cant just toss Metal to the side and say it doesn’t combo with Ice because frozen doesn’t work
Also if your good at reading people like Level said freeze them while they don’t have magic and ez ggs them with iron beams or something like that.
yes ice with solid magics don’t make good builds, they’ll only work against newbies and in that case you would’ve won the fight regardless of your build
but weapons don’t work well with ice either. the main issue with ice is how abysmally slow it is for what it’s meant to be used for. after hitting someone with bleed you have a 5 second time range to hit them with ice, a slow magic. and in that five seconds period time your enemy is most likely dodging or preparing to block cause we all know that they wouldn’t wanna get hit by an ice attack whilst bleeding.
so you might say “oh, use a beam!” but ice dmg is so awful that even with a bleed boost it still hardly dents the enemy.
like you said in the post, ice’s best synergy is ice itself, which is why i think water is the best option for ice since the first attack you inflict must always be water, and then you can use an ice spell that hits more than once on them to deal some good damage (especially easier to hit them with a multi hit spell whilst frozen since they won’t be able to move)
alternatively all this junk could be discarded by making ice actually self reliant and good on its own so people can use the builds that they want to use and not builds the game forces them to use
