Out in the cold

[drbuzzard]

I'm not sure why I had not looked closely enough already, and from seeing builds around here, I get the impression that nobody else has. Did anyone else notice that the ice mastery set does really nice damage? 

 

Sure, ice sword is no mind probe, but it still does reasonably good DPAS (damager per activation second) of 82 (mind probe is 90). Among all the epic pool melee single target attacks, it's only beat by mind probe, KO Blow, and Havoc punch (which is king). 

 

The real gem is frozen aura. That is a great power to take if you have a melee AOE nuke. It's got a recharge of 40, and does 173 in 10' radius to 10 targets. Couple this with your T9 nuke and you're doing well past blaster nukes on your nice short sentinel recharge. Sentinel nukes do about 193, blaster nukes do 250 (base without other stuff). Add in 173 on a timer shorter than the sentinel nuke timer, and you're clearing some spawns. Frozen Aura even has a fast enough animation that it is fairly high DPAS (77). 

 

So if you're going to be mixing it up in melee anyway, you might want to take a closer look at ice mastery. Actually I'm a bit concerned about posting this in case it gets a nerf because people notice it. 

 

 

[nihilii]

Frozen Aura does 86 damage rather than 172. The tooltip is bugged and copypastes the same lines twice.

Still a decent power, mind you. If you proc it out you can get it to the ~450-500 damage range, and like you said it comes up twice faster than a nuke. It's a solid mini footstomp.

[drbuzzard]

Damn, I guess I never noticed it at over 300 damage and that should have made me suspicious. Then again I'm usually fighting +4s. I'll try it out on evens sometime. 

[drbuzzard]

Ok, tried it out against evens and it does not do the damage listed. As you say, though, it's still a solid hitter with a fast animation for a PBAOE. 

[Underfyre]

City of Data lists that second round of 86 damage as being flagged for "raid" targets. This would be the second ability I've seen with this flag. The other being also for Sentinels, Chilling Ray. Obviously I'm more likely to see Sentinel abilities with the flag because I spend all my time with Sentinel data.