Ice/Poison

[Meknomancer]

So i was looking for the laziest toon i could find after a /bubs mm and i ended up with this. After playing it a bit i thought i'll see if anyones got any interesting slotting for one one the forums and ....... i could only find 1. @Nemufrom around 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mines so squishy and doesn't have enough slow resists and as you can imagine the damage is laughable. Its been 5 years or more and there has to be more players running the combo surely, so i'm looking for some help.

 

Should i be going the route above and just being as tough and defensive as possible, or should i be modifying the build i currently have. Limited experience with poison, i avoid it on mm's it sucks with no venemous and i only run it on an ill/troller which never has to worry about taking aggro and a couple of fenders with elec and beam blast, this feels different. With the others i can wup stuff, with this i'm just sitting in the mob (which was the aim initially) doing next to nothing. But i do need some damage, running tf's its starting to feel a bit useless when all i can toss out is the t1 hold and a couple of debuffs at the av fights. 

 

Advice appreciated. And where can i fit in more slow resistance. If it didn't look so damn good with Arctic Air and WoC running together i'd consider dumping it on a dead server and forgetting i had it.

 

Intuition and ageless and it needs more recharge, indom will isn't enough right now there's downtime and i don't have the new accolade yet.

ICE POISO - Controller (Ice Control - Poison).mbd

 

 

Ok so after playing the above build and getting some advice i decided to go back into mids and see if i could rework it and came up with this. Looks way squishier but hopefully will do a little more. Plan is to open up with a procced flash freeze as i jump into the centre of the mob and cross my fingers.

ICE POISO - Controller (Ice Control - Poison).mbd

Edited July 31 by Meknomancer
add build

[Nemu]

6 hours ago, Meknomancer said:

Its been 5 years or more and there has to be more players running the combo surely

Nope 😁

[Uun]

I haven't tried this combo, but I happen to like both Ice and Poison. Ice was buffed in i27p4 (since that build was posted), however, Ice is still one of the worst control set in terms of damage. I prefer it on a dominator since you get damage from your secondary (plus Arctic Air and Cold Snap benefit from Domination). You only need to take 4 powers from Poison, so you have a lot of flexibility to add pool powers. I would drop Psi Mastery and World of Confusion and switch to an epic that adds some damage (i.e., Fire or Earth). 

 

 

[SeraphimKensai]

I had one that I ultimately rerolled to an ice/ice/ice dom.

 

I love poison, and honestly poison was the selling point of the combo. Ice control provides decent mitigation, but it's pretty end heavy due to artic air and does minimal damage. World of confusion is also only an 8-foot pbaoe, so it doesn't really help much.

 

I'd replace psi mastery with either: leviathan or ice, but probably leviathan for a waterspout and coralax for more damage and you then have hibernate to heal/recover end.

[Meknomancer]

Interesting that psi mastery should go first, its the only epic with mez protection and psi defence and with ageless a force pick psi mastery feels like a force pick too because i can't take clarion- if i get mezzed i die simple as that.

 

Ice mastery i have taken before on an ice/dark troller and although i love the defence i don't like the options in it.

Earth mastery i'd only run on an earth/dark troller because it can skip the graphically awful toggle in that set. If we could get a minimal setting on rock armour i'd probably run it on almost every troller i have for seismic and fissure.

I like fireball but that's it for fire. I played and still mainly play redside and the patron powers are far superior i feel.

Levi is cool, who doesn't like waterspout, on a storm you can get it up pretty quick, without massive recharge and force feedbacks you can't sadly. And i don't have either of those on /poison. Unless i keep psinado.

 

Starting to see why there's so few of these played. And by so few i mean none. It seems despite ice's overhaul its still pretty close to bottom of the pile. Still. It is fun which is all that counts.

 

Edited to say yes i should drop WoC and its puny 8 feet radius but its got a purple set in for recharge and range and it looks so good. And i can't see a replacement. Because i can't see another option other than psi mastery, maybe i'm missing the obvious which is to drop psi and carry a tray of break free's. Or go cardiac/vigor and clarion.  

Edited July 31 by Meknomancer

[Frosticus]

WoC is basically a great melee armor that has a very low end cost. With arctic air gets you consistent boss confusion. While 8ft is small a huge amount of enemies will be in your face before arc air affects them unless you play very conservatively, which you probably wouldn't pick poison to do.

 

Mez protection is required to play poison imo, but there are other workable solutions if clarion and/or indom will is off the table. Cycling rune of protection with melee hybrid is decent. As is pay2win amplifier.

[Meknomancer]

49 minutes ago, Frosticus said:

WoC is basically a great melee armor that has a very low end cost. With arctic air gets you consistent boss confusion. While 8ft is small a huge amount of enemies will be in your face before arc air affects them unless you play very conservatively, which you probably wouldn't pick poison to do.

 

Mez protection is required to play poison imo, but there are other workable solutions if clarion and/or indom will is off the table. Cycling rune of protection with melee hybrid is decent. As is pay2win amplifier.

 

Hadn't considered P2W amp or even hybrid to be honest i so often just craft assault / support hybrids unless its a melee which i rarely play anymore. Rune i did for arcane bolt/enflame/rune of prot and i really wanted enflame and am looking for ways to fit it in but taking it means giving up stuff that will make it even harder to survive, i'm only sitting at 33% range+aoe and on the tf's i've run so far i'm often jumping into mobs first and mobs of av's on lrsf hurt...a lot. So i'm looking for everything. Mission Impossible= defence+resistance+sorcery pool+good perma mez protection+slow resists+at least not so embarrassing damage, although mobs do tend to melt eventually just sitting in them, when you are surrounded by 4 longbow wardens you have a loooooong wait. At that point i was praying someone would turn up with fold space.

 

Added 2nd build at the top in what i hope will be a workable toon , much squishier but may improve the damage output with minimal clicking.

Edited July 31 by Meknomancer

[tidge]

Late to this thread... because I have a Mind/poison not a Ice/Poison... but this jumped out at me:

 

On 7/30/2024 at 9:44 PM, Meknomancer said:

Mines so squishy and doesn't have enough slow resists and as you can imagine the damage is laughable. Its been 5 years or more and there has to be more players running the combo surely, so i'm looking for some help.

 

Should i be going the route above and just being as tough and defensive as possible, or should i be modifying the build i currently have. Limited experience with poison, i avoid it on mm's it sucks with no venemous ...

 

My experience with Poison (on Defender and Controller) is that Venomous Gas isn't worth taking, and I think the OP hits on why...

 

It is IMO too hard (read this as "the player has to give up too much else") to make Venomous Gas (and other PBAoE toggles) work... unless the players is pretty much exclusively fighting very small spawns at even-con level the hits will keep on coming! It is of course possible to dedicate slots to a toggle PBAoe and also try to increase (positional) defenses, but this is an example of throwing good after bad, YMMV, the debuffs and delays aren't enough to overcome large spawns (which still need to be defeated of course). If the spawns are +4, things become that much harder.

[Psyonico]

Going to have to disagree, @tidge

 

Venomous Gas is basically the reason to take poison at all.

 

I have mostly done poison defenders, so I don't really know it on controllers, but VG is basically the entire reason my poison defendets *can* solo.

[Uun]

I agree with @Psyonico, however, the issue you run into with Ice/Poison is that Arctic Air and Venomous Gas work at cross purposes. The -tohit and -dmg reduce the effectiveness of the confuse. I probably wouldn't run both at the same time. If I was going to skip one, it would be Arctic Air (which is much better on doms).

[Meknomancer]

23 hours ago, tidge said:

Late to this thread... because I have a Mind/poison not a Ice/Poison... but this jumped out at me:

 

 

My experience with Poison (on Defender and Controller) is that Venomous Gas isn't worth taking, and I think the OP hits on why...

 

It is IMO too hard (read this as "the player has to give up too much else") to make Venomous Gas (and other PBAoE toggles) work... unless the players is pretty much exclusively fighting very small spawns at even-con level the hits will keep on coming! It is of course possible to dedicate slots to a toggle PBAoe and also try to increase (positional) defenses, but this is an example of throwing good after bad, YMMV, the debuffs and delays aren't enough to overcome large spawns (which still need to be defeated of course). If the spawns are +4, things become that much harder.

 

I have a few poisons, trollers/fenders/corrs and i have to disagree with you on this, VG is for me the sole reason to roll as /poison along with its - regen debuff. I've run all the others through hard content and i just play them like everything else - as a scrapper, pretty much the same way i play this one. Just hop in the mob and they get their to hit and def debuffed, you do get hit but its pretty rare and never enough for you to faceplant instantly. Mez is always an issue, fenders and corrs i usually play with a lot of defence so they don't suffer as much.

 

Not sure what you mean when you say taking VG means giving up to much else, ice/poison works quite well its basically made to hop directly into the centre of a mob and do nothing.

You can just jump in and stand there and not have to click a button and mobs will still die. I ended up dropping flash freeze for stacked pbaoe holds if someone does toss something my way. And even if you do nothing your still helping the team, it really is the laziest toon i could come up with.

 

But i'll never say ' You must take this or that power'. I've seen all sorts of stuff i would never consider, fire control toons with no hot feet, petless mm's, all power pool toons, brawl only toons, whatever someone comes up with and somehow makes it work for them. If you have your /poison working for you without VG then i say , great , everyone should be playing the game how they want and i love to see out of the box thinking and different builds when i team.   

 

[tidge]

3 minutes ago, Meknomancer said:

Not sure what you mean when you say taking VG means giving up to much else, ice/poison works quite well its basically made to hop directly into the centre of a mob and do nothing.

You can just jump in and stand there and not have to click a button and mobs will still die. I ended up dropping flash freeze for stacked pbaoe holds if someone does toss something my way. And even if you do nothing your still helping the team, it really is the laziest toon i could come up with.

 

What I mean is that in order for me to leverage Venomous Gas I have to gad all-in hard on picking and slotting defense powers, at the expense of using slots and power picks elsewhere.

 

What do your power pools and defenses look like?

[Meknomancer]

3 minutes ago, tidge said:

 

What I mean is that in order for me to leverage Venomous Gas I have to gad all-in hard on picking and slotting defense powers, at the expense of using slots and power picks elsewhere.

 

What do your power pools and defenses look like?

 

On that troller? 33% ranged def with 75% s/l resists. VG makes up the rest once it tags enemies. That or a luck insp. Which i always forget to use, i tend to carry alot of break free's.

On the fenders and corrs i'll go much higher, 40% ranged or s/l defence minimum, usually scorp but i do like ice epic now it gets build up, with a t4 barrier to cover whats missing. Its a lot safer on a troller. Whatever primary you run the control will make you more survivable taking alphas. Even if that control is just arctic air. I run with fighting pool and have rune of protection as back up. Looks like this now i think ( i keep messing about in mids and writing over builds )

ICE POISO - Controller (Ice Control - Poison).mbd

[Nemu]

Congrats @Meknomancer

 

You now own the 2nd ice/poison ever in history. Welcome to the cool people club!

[Hedgefund]

I'm in the club.  I've got a lot of t4d no-compromise built  50s (> 100, < 200, I'm not going to get more specific) and if I were to rate personal damage, this would be last.  Great team contributor and (this is super niche) a great 2nd box follow character.  If I made another rating of all my characters by their contribution just by standing around, this would be pretty high on that list.

 

Looking at Mids, ranged def = 39, IW has high uptime (90% but not perma).  

 

Oh and as for skipping VG, build how you want but...  yikes.

[Nemu]

I guess we can allow a third person into the cool people's club...

[Hedgefund]

I took a glance at the second build in the OP, one thing stood out, Ice Slick doesn't need that Overwhelming Force piece.  Ice Slick is .5 mag kb, which is kd.  

 

I'd put a 2nd lvl 50 recharge (50+5, ofc) into IW for more coverage.

[Meknomancer]

1 hour ago, Hedgefund said:

I took a glance at the second build in the OP, one thing stood out, Ice Slick doesn't need that Overwhelming Force piece.  Ice Slick is .5 mag kb, which is kd.  

 

I'd put a 2nd lvl 50 recharge (50+5, ofc) into IW for more coverage.

 

Agreed on the OF i think i just tossed it in out of habit. Current build has 3 pieces in for the damage bonus, which makes no difference whatsoever but i had 2 slots for slick. When the damage is this low i have no clue if slotting slick for any damage at all makes any difference. 

 

30 minutes ago, Death2Tyrants said:

57 when this snapshot was taken 4 years ago.:

I don't think I've seen one in game besides my own.

The combo has improved since receiving buffs to Ice Control and the release of the the new pool sets.

 

 

I haven't seen another and was surprised to see ice/traps sitting bottom. Now i know what my next toon will be. How bad can it be really.

[Psyonico]

I love me some poison... I'm really tempted to build an ice/poison to see what it can do.

[Meknomancer]

15 hours ago, Death2Tyrants said:

I rolled Ice/Traps shortly after Ice/ was buffed up and shelved it in the high 20s but you may enjoy it more. It wasn't terrible but at the time Ice/Time and Ice/Rad captured my attention.

 

Later on Dark/Traps (has some decent control synergy) and Elec/Traps (allows for aggressive close in play), Arsenal/Traps were more enjoyable to me but Ill/Traps is by far my favorite.

 

If you are trying to DEF softcap /Traps is the better deal since you have a strong base to build from. /Poison has nothing to start with which means you are committing most of your pool picks and IO set slotting to cap.

 

IMO the big sell of Ice/Poison is to PROC it out. Softcapping and Outputting damage is challenging with Ice/Poison unless you compromise and stick to S/L or Ranged only (several Ranged DEF sets give +Rech as well). I get that Ranged and AoE cap with Res Shields is superior but you basically have to go all in to hit higher DEF numbers the other is a better compromise.

 

Some of the skippables in Ice/ and /Poison are suitable for PROCs and have decent uptimes. Layering Slows on top of your other controls and debuffs is what makes Ice/Poison work decently well and helps increases survival and with a PROC build you are controlling and debuffing as you are damaging foes. Recommend building out in MIDs and use the Test server export feature to create all the IOs you need and testing various builds out.

 

For Ice/Poison I think /Psi or /Earth are the better choices but I could see a case for /Ice and maybe /Levi.

 

 

100% agreed on the ill/traps, its far superior to my arse/trapper and the only things that come close are /traps mm's. I don't have a ton of traps toons especially with controllers, its never even crossed my mind to run with elec/ or dark/ , i can imagine an elec as i love to melee and have a ton of elec control toons, with dark i always feel like i have to take the aoe immob and its a cone so that puts me off, same reason i skipped cold snap on the ice/poison. It'll take 3 damage procs, 4 if you toss in the will of the controller but flash freeze has far greater proc options and requires zero co-ordination. I would of taken earth, seismic smash and fissure are fantastic but rock armour forces a hideous graphical effect destroying any costume you may have worked on. The day HC devs give us minimal fx for that i'll be respeccing it into a lot of toons.

[Meknomancer]

15 hours ago, Psyonico said:

I love me some poison... I'm really tempted to build an ice/poison to see what it can do.

 I find it fun, i love ice control and fun is the only thing i really care about when playing. I've stopped trying to mini max def/res and just toss in anything now with minimal aim at survival.

[Meknomancer]

13 hours ago, Death2Tyrants said:

@Dark Current doesn't actively posts here but he has a three part series on Ice/Poison/Psi:

 

 

 

 

Thats fascinating, i love to see other players builds and playstyles especially when they are counter to my own. The stop and check to see whats around the corner before deciding what tactics to use where i dont even look- just speed straight into the mob and then decide what i will do. While i love the build after putting it (roughly) into mids for the amount of procs @Dark Currentgets in and achieving some real damage out of this combo, theres just no way i could play it. No combat jump/no travel power/0 defence/almost 0 resistance/ 1 mistake and faceplant/1 team mate making a mistake and...faceplant.

 

Different playstyles, different builds. I do a lot of speed running and harder content as well as solo tf's. You cannot keep up on a speed run let alone survive with no travel and no def/res as there's just too much inc damage from uncontrolled enemy mobs. Its tough to keep it fun and survivable and get enough damage to make it playable. I'm a luck insp from ranged softcap with 75% s/l with 50% slow res and sacrificed almost all my damage to get there. And i'm running intuition and ageless. I wonder if i could swap in vigor and barrier, drop sorcery for some extra st dps and rely on indom will for my mez protection but that brings the problem of low recharge into the build even if i could get the ff+rech in psi nado to fire off at will.

 

Certainly gave me some ideas though, i will be going back into mids and having a look at what i can change (right after i decide if i like this ill/marine) as its a great concept and 2 fun powersets.

 

Thanks for posting the vids. I rarely if ever watch people playing games, i'd much rather play myself, but these had my attention.

[Meknomancer]

2 hours ago, Death2Tyrants said:

Same here. I can appreciate the time spent discussing build principles and presenting both solo and team play.   @Dark Current discovered Ice Slick + Poison Trap later in the series during team play vid but I think the challenge of playing Ice/Poison were well presented, especially dealing with alpha strikes. Ice/Poison is kind of schitzo playstyle where you are best suited in the thick of it but the drawback is PROC vs Survivability at higher settings.

 

Yup i can only play it smack bang in the centre of the mob with venemous to do the heavy lifting. Getting into the centre of the mob without dying thats the easy part. Its staying there without dying thats hard.

[Meknomancer]

2 hours ago, Death2Tyrants said:

Ice/Time can survive but you don't have the same debuffing capabilities of /Poison. Since you get both AoE toggles early on Ice/Time end management can be challenging for new start accounts. From personal experience if you plan on going with /Time, Fire/Time was the smoother gameplay of the two. Strong nod to Fire/Dark which has less challenges out of the box and is a strong pairing from 1 to 50.

 

I have fire/time and fire/dark, i may even have an ice/time. I've kind of lost track of the number of toons i rolled its probably over 6-700. I slot them get some incarnates and if they don't grab my attention right away they get shuffled into the pack or onto another server and i forget about them. The /time controller toons end up being so end heavy and i much prefer it on corrs and fenders and mm's. Ice/dark/ice and ice/storm/levi i do remember playing quite a lot, so slow to defeat mobs but steady and relatively unkillable. Maybe ice/marine....i haven't tried that yet.

[Meknomancer]

5 hours ago, Death2Tyrants said:

/Marine makes everything better and can carry weaker primaries to some degree. Ice/Marine solves the alpha strike problems Ice/ generally has with some good survivabilty to boot.

 

Not as many as you but I'm in the same boat with many alts sitting on the shelf. With Controllers I'm somewhere around 101+ combos out of the 187 that can be rolled. Some of the secondaries I will never play or roll outside of few exceptions. I try to play most of them through 35+ before shelving.

 

Well ice/marine isn't awful it turns out but it is still rough going. Slotted for 10 points kb protection and it can't even make it through a moonfire without faceplanting at least once....due to knockbacks. Does fit a lot of procs in but if your planning to run a 0 defence build and rely on resists and absorbs all i can say is good luck. Non stop mez without sorcerys rune/a tray of break free's, a couple of wolves hurls and your kb'd, a few archons in a mob and your immob'd even with combat jump and slowed if you haven't slotted for slow resist. The council got a serious bump and no lowbie can fit all that in by the mid 20's. And if you slot for that by 50 you'll be sacrificing all your damage procs for set bonuses. Think i'll stick with the ice/kin.