Spiral Knights - Freezing monsters: useless in multiplayer.

Freezing monsters: useless in multiplayer.

9 replies [Last post]

Sat, 04/16/2011 - 17:50

CrashFu

Legacy Username

The freeze effect as it currently stands is a potent danger for knights, but when it comes to us freezing monsters, it is decidedly un-useful.

In single player, at least, a knight could use the monster's frozen stat to better position themselves while charging up an attack that would be hard to land while the monster is mobile, but in multiplayer? The freeze practically never happens. Since a single attack of any strength immediately frees the monster from freeze, and since multiplayer consists of everyone running straight up and spamming their basic attacks until the monsters are dead, nothing is ever frozen. Not even for a fraction of a second. And heck, when I'm using my cryo-alchemer gun, often the first shot in the 2-shot combo will freeze the monster only for the second shot to unfreeze them.

So I'd like to -strongly- suggest changing the freeze effect a little so it can be considered as useful as any of the other status effects. Maybe making it able to sustain a few attacks before the ice is broken (unless of course someone does a fire attack). Maybe it could be a timed duration instead of on attack, when it comes to monsters, and doing attacks would merely shorten the duration a liiiittle bit at a time.

OR.. keep it how it is except make bonus damage happen when the ice is broken. That way if my teammates can't stop flailing their dinky little swords around for half a second while I'm trying to lock a monster down with freeze, at least I'll have the satisfaction of knowing I'm helping them to do more damage, instead of having all of my efforts go completely wasted.

Sat, 04/16/2011 - 18:20

fryingfish99

Legacy Username

The point of the freeze

The point of the freeze effect gun is to reduce the load of monsters against your team. Why are you trying to lock down a monster with freeze on the one your team is going against? Using it offensively is a different matter so freeze shouldn't be a problem at all.

Sat, 04/16/2011 - 18:48

Negimasonic

You do realize whatever

You do realize whatever status effect that happens to the monsters also happens to us right? So if bonus damage is occurred when the ice is broken, then your friend trying to chop you out will then be hurting you. Or in the case of your other suggestion, it'll become harder to actually chop you out, wasting time. With the exception of spikes, everything that can happen to a player can happen to a monster on the same basis. Actually, we do have one advantage when being frozen vs a monster being frozen, if we thaw out naturally, we aren't hurt.

Anyway, the gun freezing and unfreezing simultaneously is a tad bit of a problem, but that's the way that gun works. You may consider a freeze bomb instead. Why? Because even if its broken for a few seconds the effect continues so they can be refrozen if they thaw out too fast. If you've ever faced an ice cube, you may have run into this effect yourself after killing one. Additionally, you can affect a larger portion of enemies at once, meaning you stand a better chance of at least a few of your enemies being able to stay frozen.

By the way, remember your first suggestions? Apply that to a bomb and see how broken that is.
They'd get damaged.
They'd get frozen.
They wouldn't be able to move.
They'd be damaged off of being unthawed which now would happen almost every time freeze hits them since you suggested attacks only decrease their thaw time by a little. OR They'd be damaged off of being unthawed AND thawed out, which with a freezing vaporizer means, I can set a bomb, freeze a crown, set another one, instantly thaw them out since they got hit, make them take damage for being hit and unthawed, and freeze them again.

Sure that'd be epic especially in the last case, but horribly horribly broken. I believe your problem is the way your gun handles the status more than the way we inflict it.

Sat, 04/16/2011 - 21:43

CrashFu

Legacy Username

@ FryingFish: I'm not. I go

@ FryingFish: I'm not. I go and freeze shot / freeze bomb the monsters they aren't fighting. But the second I freeze anything they always, always, always, ALWAYS drop what they're doing and go smack my frozen monster once. With a non-charged, weak little attack. Usually while I'm walking towards the frozen monster and in the process of charging up a BIG attack.

You'd think they already thought there was some kind of bonus damage for un-freezing a monster. \:I

@ NegimaSonic: You do realize that you are wrong and need to go read the spiral knights wiki, right? Seriously, go do that now. No wait, I'll just copy and past a quote from it: "However, breaking the ice early will incur extra damage on the player if freed by an enemy. Enemies do not take extra damage for being freed from freeze, but will take damage for defrosting naturally. Players do not take damage when freeze wears off by itself. "

Right now, NOT attacking an enemy who is frozen will deal damage, so there's absolutely no benefit to going up and smacking a frozen enemy unless you use a really big attack that you wouldn't have been able to land on them if they were moving, but it works in reverse for us. I'm saying they need to reverse it for monsters and make it beneficial to attack them when they're frozen... since clueless newbies are going to keep doing that anyways, and freeze weapons are COMPLETELY USELESS as long as they do. If I just wanted to deal elemental damage without any kind of helpful status effect, I'd be using a Prismatech instead of a Cryotech and doing a point or two more damage.

Who said anything about changing it so that PLAYERS will take damage if ANOTHER PLAYER frees them? Nobody said that. Where are you even getting that from?

Sat, 04/16/2011 - 22:32

Feynt

Legacy Username

I'd have to agree a bit,

I'd have to agree a bit, freezing enemies is useless in a multiplayer environment the way it is now. You freeze something, and someone will be there in moments to hit it. Even if you pick your own target (if you actually get that privilege) and try to freeze that, you're waiting around 3-5 seconds not shooting your target to potentially do as much damage as you would have done shooting (or less, if they're elemental weak). That makes it a strictly worse status effect than anything else you can apply. You can shock, poison, or burn a target and keep attacking it for more damage. At the very least, hitting a frozen target with more ice shouldn't break it free.

Sun, 04/17/2011 - 05:54

SirNiko

Legacy Username

I recently finished a run

I recently finished a run where one player had freeze bombs. Using a Calibur, it not only gave me a moment to charge my weapon, but I could manuever between the foes to hit several of the at once with the attack. Since they now all were targeting me, it was trivial for the bombing knight to set another ice bomb so I could lead to enemies into the blast and repeat the process.

I don't think freeze is useless as it is, it just requires some planning. If you're entering an Arena and intend to use them, stop and warn the other players before hitting the party button. You may be surprised to find they will accommodate you in order to not die.

Sun, 04/17/2011 - 08:31

DotCom

Legacy Username

Exactly SirNiko, Freezing is

Exactly SirNiko, Freezing is a great way for two or more people to control a crowd. Me and my guild mate ran a couple tiers and he mostly used the freeze bomb to grouped the enemies together as I charged my sword and struck them all.

Freezing really helps during tier 3 runs when a group of fire wielding zombies are after you. Whenever you jump into a party its always good to communicate with them. Just slashing and dashing will get you killed. You have to try and find out what will work best for that group. If everyone just wants to get to the next pit stop for recipes then you'll have problems and waste a lot of CE/Mist reviving.

So plan out, use freeze bombs effectively by planning out your runs.

Sun, 04/17/2011 - 13:14

Negimasonic

lol that's exactly what I

lol that's exactly what I said. I was reading from the wiki when I wrote that.
And to go in order as there are two suggestions here and to make it easier to point out which one I mean, the suggestion where you say "Maybe it could be a timed duration instead of on attack, when it comes to monsters, and doing attacks would merely shorten the duration a liiiittle bit at a time." is referred to as S1 and "keep it how it is except make bonus damage happen when the ice is broken" is referred to hereon as S2.

And as far as changing the way it affects us, like I said, anything that happens to a monster under a status effect, happens to us to make it fair.

A flaming monster takes preset damage. A flaming player takes preset damage.
A shocked monster gets jolted and takes damage at intervals. A shocked player gets jolted and takes damage at intervals.
A poisoned monster cannot be healed. A poisoned player cannot be healed.
A stunned monster moves and attacks slower. A stunned player moves and attacks slower.
Etc etc.

The only difference with freeze is we don't get hurt when we thaw out and they do. As well as the ability to cut each other out with ease. So that's two advantages we already have. They're not going to change it to give players another advantage over monsters. Otherwise everyone will be using freeze on all monsters (except cold natured ones obviously). So that means any further changes to freeze need to be applied to both.

Should S1 be implemented, that would mean players would be required to do multiple swings to free another player for it to be fair (we already have two freeze advantages).
Should S2 be implemented, that would mean if players broke the ice, we'd get damage for the ice being broken early because the monsters receive bonus damage from it being broken early.

However, in the second paragraph below, let's say they did add one of these suggestions regardless and didn't change the way it affects us.

As you can see from SirNiko and DotCom, it's fairly obvious that freeze is useful in multiplayer as I said before. But more so with bombs than guns since the bomb effect affects more and lasts longer. It is possible during the first few seconds of a Freezing Vaporizer bomb to hit an enemy (thus breaking the freeze) and it'll still refreeze them. This doesn't work the same with the cryotech. Which is why I'm suggesting if you must have a freezing effect, consider a bomb instead. OR consider changing your suggestion to something like change the way it works on guns.

Changing anything else to do with the freeze effect on enemies will make freeze bombs incredibly broken since they'd be able to deal damage, simultaneously freeze and unthaw (dealing more damage under S2), and stopping movement.
As far as under S1, basically you could just freeze them forever while your teammates whack at them. Technically you can do this already but the monsters are freed with a single whack making it a bit fair, but if that didn't exist, anyone with a freeze bomber on their team would never have to worry about being hit by noncold monsters ever again. Since all they have to do is charge and drop bombs, then their teammates could slash and slash and slash and the enemies wouldn't have a decent chance to escape because by the time they did break free, they'd be frozen again.

If you do consider freeze bombs for the future, you may be disappointed with the first Freezing Vaporizer but the second one is way better (I still liked the first one but it was a let down initially since the cold snap had a bigger radius). But maybe if you use one, you'll see how this can be easily broken.

Sun, 04/17/2011 - 13:20

CrashFu

Legacy Username

@ SirNiko and DotCom Not

@ SirNiko and DotCom

Not everyone is lucky enough to wind up with COMPETENT groups to play with, and as long as freezing requires every single member in the group to be fully coordinated before it gives the slightest amount of benefit, it will NEVER be as useful as other status effects.

The other status effects are pretty much ALL idiot-proof. I'm just saying, Freeze needs to be made idiot-proof as well, you know? I don't have ten minutes to sit and explain the nuances of the game to every new player who joins in the middle of a dungeon. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the newbies and I like helping them out; I just don't want to spend that much time doing it in the middle of a dungeon run, so unless they're going to add in a mandatory status-effect training course to the tutorial, well.. things should really be changed.

One of the core principles of game design is "don't make things counter-intuitive", and judging from what I've seen, a new player's first instinct when seeing a monster get frozen is to go hit it.

(Freeze IS really nice in single player, though. Wind up in a really crowded arena challenge by myself, toss a freeze vial at the densest part of the group and then use handguns against the ones that weren't frozen, letting the frozen ones eventually take that nice big chunk of elemental damage when it wears off.)

Sun, 04/17/2011 - 19:44

SirNiko

Legacy Username

Freeze isn't that complicated

Freeze isn't that complicated though, crash. I'm a little surprised you find my experiences to be so far out of the ordinary. The players I've met seem to be pretty competent and even when they err on the side of stupid a few words of advice go a long way.

Like I said, if you're uncertain, stop before the party button and give some instructions. If you do that and they still refuse to listen, then let us know. If you describe freeze and Crowd Control you're likely to spark some latent WoW instincts in those kids and they'll be more cautious.

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Freezing monsters: useless in multiplayer.