Currently Cryomancer is not fit for either PVE nor PVP and it’s performance is heavily tight to Ice blast interaction with ice wall, which is a skill that hinders your entire parties performance because of its AoE defense ratio and movement blocking.
I do believe though that giving Cryomancer a unique gameplay that involves playing around ice structures and ice blast is DEFINETLY the way to go. And so I’ll explain what i would do about it in the following post.
Ice Bolt: a simple freezing tool for ice blast which relies on CONSTANT use. No class should ever have a skill that requires being used every very few seconds while also having “burst” windows that also prohibit you from casting the skill at all.
What i would do is, keep ice bolt the way it is and change vaivora - eternal frozen land effect at level 1 to:
REMOVE current GUST and Ice Pike + 3 skill level .
New:
Icecicle Shower
Ice Bolt is transformed to Icecicle Shower. Cooldown increases by 15 seconds up to 20. No longer causes freeze or chill state. Number of hits changed from 2 to 15. When it hits a target under Freeze or Chill debuff it gaines +50% critical damage.
This option would give us another way to play around freeze / chill debuff on top of ice blast and would make ice bolt a playable skills in my opinion.
Ice Pike:
Change from Targeting a specific location to be casted around Caster (like flame ground). Works the same way as it currently does BUT Ice Pikes remain on the field for 10 seconds.
Ice Pikes can be destroyed with ice blast to deal 1 extra hit to surrounding targets. Enemies standing on top of ice pikes continuously receive chill debuff.
Ice Wall:
Give Ice walls 0 aoe defense ratio, allow characters to move over ice wall, while moving over ice wall target enemies receive Chill or Freeze Debuff. Ice Wall duration in raids no longer halved.
Duration 10s cooldown 30 seconds. When casting Ice Blast destroy up to 3 ice walls, causing +1 extra hit. Does not stack with ice pike.
Ice Blast:
Change it to become Ice Blast: Break by default, then remove attribute.
Frost Pillar:
For as long as frost pillar is on the battlefield, Ice Wall and Ice pike structures duration is not consumed.
The gameplay for cryomancer would, therefore, consist on managing ice pike and ice wall structure uptime according to Ice Blast and Ice Bolt cooldown. Being able to use on or the other at different times and keeping them up with Frost Pillar.
I believe this would give the class a more unique style while also improving it current performance since, on raids, you can only have 1 ice blast with double performance per minute in our current patch.
Thanks for reading.