I have been using an Ice build on Crystal for a month now, and I’m really liking how it performs.
Simply looking at my DPS chart, it may appear to be an average powerset, but there are few tricks it can pull.
First is the Ice Form passive. On critical hit, it grants Cold Snap, which buffs a few ice powers. Of note is Ice Blast, which has its charged damage increased by ~40%.
Second is Ice Blast itself, which has the Hard Frost advantage that makes it hit even harder on Chilled targets. In Cold Snap, a Rank 2 Ice Blast with Hard Frost should hit almost 8% harder than a Rank 3 Ice Blast. During Cold Snap’s downtime, the gap increases to 17%.
Third is the out of set power, Fire Snake, which increases Elemental damage done to its target, including Ice damage, while applying a DoT itself.
Combining these three together, the unassuming Tier 0 Ice Blast becomes freezing beam of death.
A nice side effect is that Ice Form and Fire Snake work nicely with Gas Pellets and the Ice Grenades device as well, so it can perform well even in AoE situations.
The main drawback of is that Ice Form makes a character very squishy. I skirted around that by taking aggression stealth and threat wipe powers to keep my aggro low so that things rarely look my way even when I’m freezing their guts out. “rarely”, not “never”, as I pulled aggro a few times.
