borat2 wrote:
ice is a better choice for int builds than str builds to be honest.
due to mastery limits you will have to choose the imbue that you will get all up to 90cap or even further.
taking ice as a pure ints does not lower your damage that much and the other skills in that mastery are considered important for you
taking ice as pure str lowers your already low damage and the buffs aren't THAT important, rather go for fire that increases your damage with the imbue and all buffs included can be taken to highest level of the game.
i have not found any information if they will change anything to the fireshield so guess they wont and people still will be immune.
What great timing is this topic. I was testing my pure int s/s character at lvl 43 with the ice imbue because there was so much talk about the mana shield and people dropping fire for ice and light; thought is worth it to waste about 1k sp to test this out rather than waste gold to delevel later. Anyways, I played between lvl 40 to 43 with ice imbue and light nukes.
This is my observation:
Compare to fire imbue, the light nuke dmg reduction by ice imbue exists, but
not noticible because nukes inherently fluctates a lot. At bunwang, 1600 to 2300 dmg. However, weapon dmg reduction
is noticible; for e.g. the 2nd book kd at lvl 41 with about 5-10% reduction in dmg.
Other interesting observations is that mobs freezes and froze bitten with ice imbue and nukes (of course, y'all know that); but more interestingly, the light nuke also transfers the freeze and frozebits. I find this incredibly useful against giants and being mobbed; whatever reduction in dmg seems to be worth it.
PvP with ice imbue and light nuke. Hmm... I'm still relatively low lvl at 43, but it seems nuker pvp trend is to win and lose quickly. Ice has a disadvantage here when it doesn't frostbit or freeze with the inital nuke. Also, as I mentioned before weapon skills dmg is reduced noticibly; at this lvl nuking is still the main way to pvp; but at higher lvls it seems people use more weapons; the reduction in weapon dmg might hurt in pvp.
Btw, I still can't decide whether to drop fire; the dmg with intermediate lvl nukes is simply not comparable. The 2nd book fire nuke is so much more powerful at 300% than the light one at my lvl. The difference should lvl off by lvl 50 once I have the 2nd book light nuke, which is also at 300%.
