Honestly that goes for a lot of mechanics, basically all variations of stuns. Bosses I could understand, maybe even them and some enemies being resistant to it, but making most enemies immune to an ability is just... Why make it in the first place?
I feel the same but for instant death effects. RPGs specially love to have instant death spells that never work cuz every single being at the time you get it is immune to it
Death blight in Elden Ring be like. Even the npcs who are the only enemies capable of even being hurt by it have maximum resistance as a default so it's just useless outside of pvp.
Frenzy too but it's not instant death, however I still think it's dumb that only npcs can be affected by the frenzy status
Frenzy still has the benefit of doing other damage. Such as the flame of frenzy also doing fire damage as well as madness damage. Death Blight is just useless in any gameplay to the point I literally ignore its existence unless used on me
it's basically the same for every status effect in a lot of turn based RPGS. the trash mobs don't live long enough to bother with status effects and the bosses are almost always immune to any worth using, except occasionally poison.
Which is a missed opportunity. Since it would be really interesting if you had to do more preparation to get the instant death to work. It could be a nice risk/reward feature. Doing something really risky that could end badly helps balance the instant win.
Monster Girl Quest Paradox. There's 4 types of instant death. Interestingly some of the high tier instant death effects will always kill the victim regardless of resistance, but they need setups like applying certain debuffs to them in order to kill em.
The first 3 types of instant death are Death, Ascension (Holy counterpart of Death, esp effective against the undead) and a third one, that is literally "touching" the enemy till they faint (most powerful one but hard to access).
The 4th one, named Digestion (yes, that kind) is one of the signature traits of Slime type monsters. Few enemies are resistant to it, but you need to apply a certain debuff to them first, which you do through plethora of moves of the Slime race. It's mostly useful to kill targets that have too much HP to kill in 2-3 turns or getting rid of fodder if you have a way to slime and digest them in the same turn. It's consistently useful through the whole game without being downright broken
Yeah it’s really annoying when turn based RPGs just have instant death abilities where’s it’s a 2% chance to activate and 98% of enemies are immune.
It’s not fun or engaging you’re just hoping to hit a low chance that you might not even be able to make because they didn’t want to allow you to trivialize things. It honestly feels like lots of those older games added instant death abilities just so they could say they had them when comparing to other games
I remember playing the original ff7 and being amazed with how many options the game gave me for debuff status efffects only to turn out half of them are fucking useless becauses enemies have either high resistance to them or straight up inmune so why bother wasting a turn
Or they make a system where only elemental damages are good because of resistances and synergies and such and now every status effect except certain damaging ones and also physical are useless
Why freeze the enemy to make dealing damage easier when you could just. Do the damage
It's at least useful for breathing room, i.e. dead cells where you can freeze bosses even if just for a second when things start turning to the shit of whatever animal you happen to be thinking of
Literally responsible for all the bosses being immune to freeze due to otherwise being able to turn a 12 second vulnerability window into a 30s long window on every boss released before and for a good chunk after her, trivializing them
It's like that with stuns in Wizard101. 99% of the bosses are stun proof meanwhile at most a player can only get up to 20% chance of not being stunned.
Ice types are best as speedy glass canons like Weavile but they keep making slow, bulky ones that can’t actually take a hit because ice has 5 goddamn weaknesses
Wow, 184 defense what a tank! Ignore the 46 special defense, 28 speed and weakness to rock, fire, fighting and steel (some of the most commonly used moves in the game)
Wow 95 hp and 184 defence and 127 atk? ignore the 4x weakness to fighting and steel, and the new weaknesses to water, grass and ground, and the 36 spdef and 38 spd.
Doesnt mountain gale have a flinch chance. I think avalug was made for trick room (i dont think they succeeded tho considering ive never heard of it being used in trick room)
tbf it being faster doesnt actually matter that much since it's still slower than most other Trick Room mons. Only thing it's faster than is Stakataka but Kalos Coffee Table suffers from that issue as well anyway
One of my favourite cheese is mirror coat on it (with red card). Unless they are swapped for a dark type, they take an avallugillion damage and get KO'd
Same with Froslass in Pokemon Champions. I have a snow team that if executed properly can just start sweeping with Mega Froslass Blizzard with maybe an Aurora Veil in the snow.
It's still insane to me that Water resists Ice and not the other way around, not to mention every Water type randomly getting Ice Beam to both cover its own weakness and take a niche from Ice
Now with the new snow weather is actually somewhat viable, that one Articuno was a lightning in a bottle, but now with Mega Froslass we can say that there's definitely potential for more bulky ice types
Because GameFreak insists on adding slow bulky mons with the worst defensive type, but once in a blue moon they add mons like chien pao, weavile or alola ninetales who are actually viable (or calyrex ice that needed busted stats, busted moves and a busted ability to be good while being slow)
Some bulky mons like Mamoswine could make it work because their typing isn’t as bad, and they’re decently strong. Otherwise, being so slow with a glaring weakness just makes them useless
Fun fact: Mamoswine actually has the most diverse offensive STAB. Ice type hits 4 types super effectively, and ground hits 5 types super effectively. Just by its own typing, Mamoswine has a super effective option for half of all types of pokemon.
I mean, 110 HP/80 Def is objectively above average (at least for physical bulk). It’s just it’s an ice type, so investing in it is a moot point. Reuniclus is technically frailer than that, and it can feel near unkillable sometimes
Like half of the recent ice types have had 130 base speed or slush rush and a good enough speed stat to outspeed dragapult under hail. Plus you have the slower Pokémon that are still really good, like Baxcalibur, Darmanitan-G and Calyrex Ice. It's definitely more than once in a blue moon that GF makes good ice types.
It goes to a point were i can’t even bring my self to give an OC an abomasnow because i do like to at least try to give them a competitive team (i like trying to mix game strats with the anime)
I did give it to an antagonist and just made the abomasnow an outlier. Basically a ryu for a hypothetical urban war style pokemon free for all
Pokémon's take on the Frozen status is both the best and worst part of the Ice Type.
It's the most devastating Status Condition by a mile, but that also means that they can't give you a consistent way to inflict it.
The only moves with a chance to Freeze better than 10% are Secret Power (30%, but only when used in cold areas) and the Legends ZA version of Sheer Cold (Which has 150 base power and a 100% chance to Freeze, but is heavily telegraphed and takes forever to go off due to being a toned-down version of an Instant KO move).
As a result, Ice types rarely get to actually use their signature status effect or take advantage of their immunity to it.
I'm still confused why they didn't keep Frostbite from Legends Arceus.
I did an honor run a fire sorc with Hat of Fire Acuity
After casting Scorching Ray to bump up the Spell Save DC I could spam Hold Person/Monster with a guaranteed success and make every encounter trivial. Only time I was even slightly challenged was in the House of Hope as most enemies you encounter there are immune to fire damage
Eternal Strands bucks this trend. The bosses are all giant, Shadow of the Colossus style monsters and ice magic is one of the most effective against them because you can freeze their feet to the ground or freeze their wings and make them crash.
In Dead Cells, only five enemies are immune to freeze, four of which are bosses out of the total twelve bosses in the game. It just doesn't last very long on the bosses it works on.
Skyrim is one game where you can make a lot of things work if that's what you want to larp as. There are straight up immunties but they're relatively few and far in-between. They resist frost by 50%? Just do more damage and there are many ways to achieve that.
The game makes little real effort to balance the player.
I do not like playing op I try to be balanced, I tried to do a small restoration loop to make fairly good but not op gear the other day and I had to reset several times and do lots of experimenting cause it would jump from alright to can kill god in 4 seconds in like a single potion craft.
Can get... Radically out of your control very quickly because of stacking and interactions
And you soon learn that the game isn't as deadly as you are to yourself. You will obliterate yourself many times once you get the ball rolling on spell crafting.
Noita: the game from Finland loosely described as the masochist's Terraria, where instead of building terrain, you do object-oriented programming on wands in the hopes that you kill enemies and not yourself.
It's the most frustrating and rewarding game in my library.
Rukia and Hitsugaya from Bleach, Haku from Naruto, Frozone from the Incredibles, any waterbender in Avatar
I just hate trying to use it in RPGs and getting very little benefit when stuff like fire and lightning get very practical effects or are outright busted (SMT 1 lightning bullets stunning most BOSSES is actually insane)
frost damage in skyrim having the coolest (pun unintended) destruction spell in the game while having most enemies in the game be resistant or outright immune to it
Stasis in Destiny 2 currently dominates endgame precisely because it can freeze enemies in place, and you can't be damaged if the enemy is too frozen to pull the trigger.
Ice monkeys are the opposite of this tbh. They're not huge DPS, but the sheer amount of support, ceramic cleanup, MOAB slows and Debuffs make them insanely useful. Pair them with Silas and Primary Mentoring villages and Ice Monkeys can solo entire games by themselves
Counterexample: Frostbite in Elden Ring, dark souls 1 and 3. Reduces a set percentage of enemies' hp AND reduces their defence for 30 seconds, which is simply insane. Personally I prefer frost builds to bleed builds, even though the latter can technically get higher dps
Except for in the Metroid series where ice beam + missiles are required to kill Metroids.
Shoutout to ice arrows in Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time having zero practical use though (they can freeze Bongo Bongo but you get them after Shadow Temple).
(it's slightly off topic since she's been good to very good at various points in Overwatch's life-cycle and can freeze others, but I just saw Ice and wanted to glaze the Best Girl)
Her characteristic paired with Ailment Boost and Junpei basically guarantees Crits off of any ailment it’s insane. Worth keeping Fatal End and Neuro Slash on her just for that reason.
Warframe's ice procs are quite dangerous and against certain enemies they're the only way you can do any kind of crowd control since some enemies are immune to other sources of slow.
The only reason they're not top tier in warframe is the heinous nonsense that other status procs also do.
The reason people don’t use Cold more is there has only been 1 Cold Warframe (Until Nirin later this year) and Cold combines into Viral (The best elemental debuff) and Blast (A fantastic element for turning single target damage into AoE). As its own element it’s still easily one of the best.
Oh but bleed is always the devs fucking baby child....they always give the most love to bleed builds....99% of the entire games enemies and bosses are immune to everything else but bleed.
I want to be an ice mage without feeling like Im fighting a brick wall, not a anime katana dagger bleeding loser
I made a meme build entirely focused on Cold, down to all my weapons, my sentinel, even my archgun, shit freezes everything in a 12 mile radius in seconds
I mean you got pretty good bonuses for Ice in both Warframe, Destiny (yes I know Stasis ain't really ice, but it looks like one despite that) and Elden Ring...
If these can't freeze certain enemies, than there are still damage vulnerabilities for getting it to trigger
(WF and D2 can freeze almost anything, but in Elden Ring you lower the boss/mini boss's defense I think)
Remind me of Miyabi in ZZZ. She was so broken, especially when people discover her mono ice team (the strongest possible team for her and also arguably the cheapest) and extend the shit out of freeze time to the point that, at some point the dev just said fuck it: reduce all anomaly build up and gimp the shit out of all anomaly as an archetype. not enough? put ice resist bosses in all game modes. Finally they done the impossible of making her seemingly balanced, but fucked most anomaly units in the process.
I find it very fucking funny that if you played Monster Hunter World, the only way you could get an ice type weapon or equipment before Master Rank is beating up Legiana, or killing Diablos and upgrading it to high rank, since it gets ice element for some fucking reason, despite it being deadly weak to the element.
Capcom added way too many explosive weapons, and forgot to add more ice type equipment so they made Iceborne specifically for that probably.
That ain't the case in warframe, 2-3 shots from a freeze modded epitaph prime or nautilus and everything in your country will be freezed down to their ass
Destiny 2 is the only game I can think of that actually lets you freeze people in PvP. And it's ROUGH to get your ass frozen in the middle of a firefight. But it also feels balanced since all the subclasses can be crazy when you build them right
Destiny 2's Stasis on launch would like a word with you, cause that shit in crucible was actually ruthless.
Silence and Squall would chase you across the entire map, freeze you, and then kill you, only for you to respawn and have it STILL there.
Shatterdive was a 1HKO with barely any counterplay
Shadebinder would just roam the map locking you in place with their super, until the chose to free you from hell by shattering your binds of ice and nuking you.
The freeze turret warlocks had, along with their point and click melee stun which tracked you around corners was so broken it was EVERYWHERE.
And Titans got yet another roaming super to commit war crimes with.
Bungie did not get the 'ice bad' memo until half a year after beyond light when they finally nerfed it into the ground and restored balance.
In Abyssus, aspect of frost seems entirely useless. Compared to the other crazy aspects that clear entire rooms or give you thousands of health. Plus as guessed, bosses are immune to the freeze.
It just slows them down.
But it has an upgrade that makes bosses take 40% more damage, on top of one that does percentage damage every time you freeze a boss. 6% on freeze and 1% every second they are frozen. Making it literally the best boss killing aspect in the game once you start looping and bosses have MILLIONS of health.
Did I mention all of these are upgradable. I had it go up to 6% per second once.
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