[Official] Ice Bolt | Ice Lance

[twinsbuster]

reasons:
-this card is underused
-the freeze effect does nothing when target players
-obviously weaker than fire bolt and drain bolt
-lot of substitutes to freeze creatures
-the freeze is not 100%
-freeze effect overlap with the damage dealt as creature control

suggestion:
-increase the chance of freezing
-freeze weapon and shield slot when target players
-freeze some of the hand cards when target players (cannot be played)


Discuss!

[Malignant]

Freezing some of the hand cards....sounds great .

[twinsbuster]

I think it would be great to give water some source of permanent control, but in weaker form
(only for shield and weapon, temporary disable for 3 turns, possibility to miss)

[theloconate]

i like the idea

[lava golem]

reasons:
-this card is underused


suggestion:
-freeze some of the hand cards when target players (cannot be played)


Discuss!

Agreed that it's underused, most people rather congeal over ice bolt, 4 turns of stall for 1 water quanta is much better when compared to ice bolt's effect.

Although I think hand control would be a cool addition to the game, some people disagree to Hand Control. I saw somewhere they think the hand is the only place where nothing cant really affect it. I'm a bit half/half on that situation though. 

[ddevans96]

I think this thread has been created before, but here's an idea I like: If used on a player, have a 50% chance to freeze that players weapon.

[TheonlyrealBeef]

Must have..... images

I agree this needs to be buffed, I honestly am not sure whether it's already the case, but I would like to see that for each 2 damage it deals to a creature, another attempt is made to freeze it, so that the freezing chance scales with the amount of water quanta you have.

Furthermore I really like the idea of freezing the opponent's weapon slot when targetting his/her health. Otherwise it's just a wasted freeze effect. With this I would like to see that same freezing percentage as I mentioned earlier

Assuming a 30% to freeze that would mean:

Water quanta	Chance to freeze in %
0-9	30
10-19	51
20-29	66
30-39	76
40-49	83
50-59	88
60-69	92
70-79	94
80+	95+

[Hyroen]

I've said many times before that this card seemed a little UP especially when targeting a player. Fire Lance clearly has the damage advantage against both creatures and players.

Yes, Ice Lance has a strength in that if it doesn't kill the creature it might freeze it, but if you were looking to freeze it, just pack Congeals. Plus, you shouldn't need too much quanta to kill the creature anyways.

In my honest opinion, with the introduction of Voodoo Doll, it only makes sense at this point to let Ice Lances have a chance of freezing the player, which using Voodoo Doll terminology means freezing the weapon slot, which was my vote.

[Uppercut]

I could get behind freezing the opponent. It keeps the game consistant.

[wizelsnarf]

Agreed and voted with most of you. That would make this card way more used...

[legion_bre]

Lets first compare the  icebolt with its equivalent in other marks:



Icebolt does 2 damage per 10 quanta, which is similar to a few of the other cards below, but the special effect - that it may freeze the target is not very strong in comparison with the other effects, especially as these are most commonly used to kill the target, rendering this effect

Drain life has the same principle - damage according to quanta, but it both does damage and heals, effectively doing 4 points of differential damage between you and your opponent per 10 quanta.

Firebolt again does damage according to quanta, but it does more damage than icebolt. As this effect is cumulative over the quanta range, it makes quite a differences at the extreme end, doing 24 damage instead of 16 when quanta is maxed out.

Lightning has no requirement of quanta other than its cost to use and deals a decent amount of damage sufficient to killer most creatures in a single hit. To get a comparable effect with ice bolt you would need 20+  .

Thunderstorm does damage to all creatures on the field which is far better than a single target of the icebolt.

It seems that the damage is reasonable - especially as  traditionally does more damage than over marks, and so it would be unfair to increase the damage to 3. The main problem is that the special effect is mostly useless in practice - the possibility freezing capacity. The only use for this is when it targets the player and has the chance to freeze the weapon they are using. If you were to make sure that it froze (3 turns), then this would render the card freeze useless. But if it were to only freeze by 1-2 turns, then this would seem like a fair compromise. A consideration was as ice is penetrating, it might both kill a creature and pass on its extra damage to the player. This would make it slightly more powerful. Finally another option would be to cause half the damage deal to the target to the adjacent creatures. This seems reasonable, as it is case-dependent to prevent it being OP and conceptually a cold attach could affect adjacent regions.

[ColorlessGreen]

My thoughts:

(1) When it comes down to it, I don't actually care about ice bolt being less powerful than the other bolts due to the fact that it's water, which is less of a spell-damage element thematically than fire (or dark, for that matter), and already has access to extremely effective CC (squid, congeal, permafrost shield to the extent that it counts).

(2) With that being said, it is less powerful. I think it should remain less powerful, but there's room to boost it and still have it weaker than the other two.

(3) Splash damage doesn't make sense to me thematically, whether splash to creature or splash to player. If we were going to add splash damage to one of the bolts, my vote'd be fire bolt.

(4) Splash to player wouldn't be that bad, but it'd be more of a buff than I'd really want to give the card. I would see that effect as quite strong, because it would functionally mean that (assuming you had quanta), the card would be "kill target creature and do ~10 damage to player".

(5) Splash to creatures is interesting but complicated to implement, and actually kinda weakens the bolt, since you are no longer able to easily take out creatures with any reasonable amount of HP without saving up a lot of quanta, assuming you meant that it splits its damage. If it doesn't split its damage and just does 100% to target and 50% to each adjacent creature, you've buffed it way too much, since it does 133% of fire bolt in total damage and becomes the highest-damage mass CC card in-game by a wide margin.

(6) The buff I like is making freeze guaranteed but for a lower number of turns. I'd be fine with guaranteed two turn freeze, but something I thought of that I kinda like better is a randomized freeze chance - something like 50% - 1 turn, 30% - 2 turn, 20% - 3 turn. That'd work out to 1.7 turns on average, but I'd be open to plenty of other breakdowns (provided there was a quite low chance of 3 turn freeze so as not to step on the toes of the freeze card). This also keeps some of the chance-of-freeze flavor of the current card.

So, basically, I'm gonna vote for the guaranteed low-turn freeze on the poll, but I think it'd be more interesting if it were a randomized duration (weighted to average low-turn) rather than a flat amount of turns guaranteed.