Sacred 2:Ice Bolt

NOTE: The contents of this page are exclusive content found only by installing the player-made mega-mod Diablo 2 Fallen.

One of the first spells a Sorceress of the frigid elements learns is the power to summon crystals of pure freezing energy. When hurled at her enemies, these bolts subject their targets to freezing pain and impaired movement. This is a Spell Damage Based Combat Art. Aspect - Cold Spells Innate Abilities (Lvl 1) Damage: 25-25 Cold Cold Damage over Time: 8.6/s Opponent's Movement Speed -29.0%. Duration: 5.0s Regeneration Time: 10.0 seconds Modifications See also: Sacred 2:Combat Art Modifications Bronze Spell Flow - Decreases the regeneration time of Ice Bolt by 25%. Freeze - Further decreases the opponent's movement speed by 30% + 0.3% per level. Silver Constraint - Decreases the opponent's attack rating by 5% + 2% per level. Frost - Further increases the cold damage over time by 4.0/s + 2.0/s per level. Gold Ice Blast - Ice Bolt also hits opponents within a 3.5 meter radius around the target. Perpetuity - Increases the duration of Ice Bolt and all debuffs by 5 seconds + 0.2s per level.

Ice Bolt

Skills and Attributes

The following skills will affect this combat art:

• Cold Spells Lore - improves combat art damage, critical chance and casting speed, allows for modification points.

• Cold Spells Focus - reduces regeneration time and allows for higher level combat art without penalty, allows for modification points.

• Concentration - directly improves regeneration time

• Ancient Magic - directly improves combat art damage and lowers opponents' resistance to its damage

• Combat Discipline - will increase the damage of this combat art and lower its regeneration time if it is placed in a combo.

• Damage Lore - will improve the chance, duration, and strength of Freeze (secondary damage effect) triggered by Ice Bolt's cold damage.

The following attributes will affect this combat art:

• Intelligence will increase its damage and spell intensity

• Stamina will lower regeneration time

Usage Strategies

• Ice Bolt is best used for sniping. It has moderate damage, but compensates with a rather serious combat art range. Zoom out as far as you can, advance carefully and start sniping the enemies from far away. The reduction in movement and the damage over time stacks as long as the effect from previous casts still lasts (refer to the CA for duration time on that matter). Be careful with enemy groups where hitting one mob will turn all of them aggressive towards you. In those cases use a crowd control combat art instead.

• The flat cold damage can cause an additional slowing effect by triggering the Freeze secondary damage effect. This stacks with the built-in slow effect from Ice Bolt and can slow enemies to a crawl, and is enhanced by Damage Lore.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Both initial flat ice damage and damage over time have good values.
• Very long combat art range
• Great for fast sniping
• Does not aggro surrounding mobs as long as they are not a group
• Reduction in movement speed increases with consecutive casts on the same enemy
• The Damage over Time also stacks with consecutive casts and does not overwrite the DoT from the previous cast on the same enemy (as long as the previous DoT effect lasts)

Cons

• Does not work against groups of enemies (without Ice Blast mod)

Notes

• The duration increases with CA level (1 second every 50 levels), so at max level 200 the duration would be increased to 9 seconds. Taking the Perpetuity mod doubles the duration, resulting in 18 seconds at max level.
• The game has fixed value for maximum DoT duration. It is defined in balance.txt by DurationDOT parameter and has default value of 500 (5 seconds). So even if Ice Bolt has its duration listed as 10 seconds, it would only deal DoT damage over 5 of them.
• If Constraint modification is chosen, Ice Bolt would reduce target's attack value for the time listed as spell Duration in its description (same as the duration of movement reduction; initial value is 5 seconds).

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