Frozen: what was all that fuss about?

So, as far as I am experiencing, the Frozen effect has had zero impact on the game…

Since 109 hit, I have unlocked three hero weapons, so I know I’ve played over 750 games… and likely more… and in this time, I have had a troop of mine frozen twice, both times by hitting a Bone Dragon with its third trait… and on both occasions, the frozen effect didn’t cost me an extra turn at all… (my Gorgotha was frozen, but still happily matched 5 blues and went on stomp everything with my Behemoth)

So the hilarious fuss when Frozen was first announced has left us with a minimal impact effect that no one is bothering with at all… Its only marginal appearance seems to be from the third trait of a legendary, very hard to unlock, and most people wouldn’t put the one Bone Dragon high in formation as you want it to live long enough to cast its (still rather OP) spell…

Great, well done to all those panicking dissenting voices… maybe Frozen will get un-nerfed back to its intended effect now that we know it’s achieved absolutely nothing so far…

Or do we have other views out there? Frozen ruining the game for anyone? Or turning out to be mega useful for managing the meta-triffic Goblins?

Hmmmm…

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frozen was changed after the initial pass. originally it was supposed to stop ALL extra turns, not just the color of mana from the frozen monster.

this was seen as a more balanced and less over Powering option. it stops my gobbies occasionally (im about lvl 700 and have done about 25 lvls in 109) and it does change the way i have to play some of my teams.

I Have about 600 games under my belt since the patch, and I have been frozen twice, by an Ice Witch and Frost Giant. It seems useless to me. I still get my extra turns. Barrier and Disease are far more tangible.

Also, your defense team is a monster. I love playing it!

I know that, this is why I wrote this thread…

By a very noisy minority… I suspect the original version would have been far from Over Powering… but people might actually use it, or notice that they had it…

I honestly think Frozen hasn’t been distributed enough to really tell how strong it is. Either that or I run into almost no Frozen troops for some reason.

I’m using to great affect with the frost giant and Valk combo for soul farming.

i would see a bunch of bone dragons if everytime i hit it, it would freeze the whole team. that would be SO over powered.

My thoughts mirror Jainus’s OP.

It was only on three troops initially anyway though, from the preview/teaser. And that’s what I and some others were saying, no one was going to gravitate to those three troops to the detriment of the meta.

Level 189, I’ve only fought 30 or so PVP matches with my gobbos, maybe faced 3? teams with a Frozen troop, was actually frozen by a Frost Giant once on my Boar Rider, effect wore off the next turn (lucky!), so it has had zero effect on me so far.

I think the majority of the fuss was the “Logic” how one member getting frozen can affects the entire team.
The current effect makes sense to me, but I wouldn’t mind if there’s an added effect to have frozen targets getting “shattered” (lethal) when taking skull damage. Somewhere around a 10% chance, maybe? I think that would add some exciting element to the effect.

Also, on the same note, Death Mark feels kinda useless too. I saw it once, and then promptly finished the game before it does anything.

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In its current form, there are times when its kinda helpful and other times where its a game changer.

I think Bone Dragon is the troop that has the freeze when someone hits it, and it stops a sheggra, bone dragon, or keeper team pretty darn quick.

It also has great utility against other themed limited color teams.

I think frozen is balanced the way it is now. I think the original functionality would have been a bit too over the top.

yeah, but true data always trumps “logic”. I think the whole point was people were theorizing what would happen instead of waiting to see how it actually played out. Obviously, we’ll never know how the original incarnation of Frozen would have worked but still, on three troops? Still probably not as game-changing.

I have not run into frozen much, but in every instance I have it has absolutely cost me the match. Most have been against bone dragons in the first position with their trait in play. The most destructive hits have come when using my slime team which is completely dependent on extra turns from both skulls and blue both of which shut down when the reactive frozen hits. Since it was refreshed every time I matched skulls against the bone dragon I was forced to either leave skulls on the board to be killed with, or allow frozen to refresh constantly. I have never had it expire in any instance, it always either refreshes before expiring, or the troop it is on dies (and the next skull match just puts it right back on the next troop).

The only thing stopping it from being a bigger pain right now is that few people that I am matched against have that third trait on their bone dragon. As to the mobs that utilize the frozen troops, I haven’t seen many uses but the ones that do use it have been equally devastating. The main difference is I can sometimes wait out the effect, though the slow down it costs is usually still a death sentence.

With my slime team a successful game is over in roughly 15 or so of my turns (counting extra turns from 4 of a kind transforms as separate turns) with about 5 to 6 turns on the enemy’s side while I ramp up. Frozen forces way more handovers of the turn and thus costs me the game. My goblin team fairs slightly better, but since it relies on generic 4 of a kinds a lot less it is less impacted. The slowdown is still brutal, but I can at least see a path to victory even if I have not yet realized one.

So yes, Frozen does exactly what I thought it would, it is incredibly powerful against teams that rely on skull 4 of a kinds or whose front mob shares an important transformation color. If not changed from its original form it would absolutely be everything we thought it would. In its current form it destroys certain types of teams pretty much utterly (especially since it was added as a reactive to bone dragon) and hinders others.

Once people begin unlocking it more on bone dragon and once teams are built around it a little better, it still has the potential to become a major factor in flavor of the month teams. As a specific team counter I wouldn’t say it is overpowered in its new revised form (and I never said it was going to be post revision). Powerful yes, but not overpowered. In its original form it would have been completely ridiculous. And powerful vs overpowered aside, it makes the game suck exactly as I thought it would. No strategy, no intelligence, just make horrible matches that you know are going to power up your opponent with nothing you can do about it. You know you are going to lose, but you can’t do anything about it, you just have to keep playing. Thanks to it being reactionary on bone dragon, you can’t even stall waiting for it to expire. The absolute worst kind of debuff in any game. The kind that removes a player’s ability to play the game. I am glad it was changed, but I still think it was a horrible move to include it in the first place.

Do you really believe it was ever going to be on only three troops? You think all the legendary traits were reworked in the 3 weeks before release? I seriously doubt it. Those traits were in the works long before we were shown the frozen effect. Just because it was initially discussed with 3 troops never meant it was going to stay there. Seems clear to me the legendary rework was still secret at the time which is why the bone dragon wasn’t mentioned. I would say with the benefit of hindsight the plan was never to leave it only on 3 troops.

[quote=“Jainus, post:4, topic:4703”]
By a very noisy minority… [/quote]

You know better than this Jainus and shame on you for acting like you don’t. The devs have never caved to a “vocal minority” not on this or on any other issue. They listen, they investigate and they make decisions. If they caved to every vocal minority we would have a very different game. They took our discussion, our examples, our concerns. They ran new tests and they got answers they didn’t like as much as they thought they would. This caused them to change the way it worked. Does that mean we presented scenarios they hadn’t thought of? Did we show combinations they didn’t forsee? Maybe so. Maybe our scenarios and combinations were exactly what they thought of, but focused testing yielded different results. Either way the decision was made after they dug into it more. Yes, they noted that they weren’t sure it would cause a problem, but clearly they were also not sure it wouldn’t. You can assign whatever secret motives you want, but lets not insult the devs by insinuating that they lack the spine to make the game they want the way they want. There are plenty of examples of this not being true. I expect better of you especially based on past behavior and support of the devs.

-Razlath

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TL;DR (much)
Frozen is very strong at the moment, it’s just that, as you said, only Bone Dragon benefit well from it (well, him and maybe Lady Saphira), but both of them are hardly a front line.

The effect itself is VERY strong, and just because I might encounter a Frozen unit, I try to add some cleanse all in every deck of mine, and even with that, when I do fall against a Bone Dragon front line, I feel like having a cleanse all is not enough in the deck, that I should also have an impervious frontline.

Meanwhile, Frozen has been nerfed even before it was released ! Otherwise, it would be stronger and would also be played on Frost Giant and Ice Witch (and maybe it’s not much played on Ice Witch yet because there hasn’t been any purple / yellow week event so very few people traited her. Same could be said about Saphira…)

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in arena where your surges are not as often as in pvp, those x4 and x5 and an extra turn make a big difference. I had the storm giant, it made arena much easier.

Not my experience so far… I guess it really depends on strategy, if you really DEPEND on control and holding the board, then it might cause trouble… but even then often not, as your first troop gettin’ frozed for touching the bony dragon only stops those colours (and skulls), so control matching 4s in other colours works fine… e.g. Abhorath (to tank), Alchemist, Eternal Flame, Rocket… Abs get frozed, who cares…

eg: green seer, gob shaman, green slime… oh my - those are really decent tanks, but they make green or purple for the rest of the group… now having 3 or 4 almost 4’s for the other guys… well… its as bad as a bone dragon backfire.

I completely agree with what @Jainus said.
I personally rate the current incarnation of frozen as the weakest of all status effects with the recent buffs to burn and poison(both the ability to kill and its interaction with barrier). In all cases i have encountered frozen it had an absolutely minimal effect on the outcome of the game, even as the legendary trait on BD which basically makes it a passive i rate it much lower than other legendary traits that have another status effect being made basically passive. Generally even if you don’t want to skull hit a BD that is in first place(i don’t see a real reason for this, as it hurts the BD more than me^^) just kill it off with 2-3 spells and continue the game

As i predicted Frost Giant is still absolutely useless with its Frozen being random target, which is a shame cause troops only get reworked every so often, and Frost Giants turn to be reworked left him still a very weak troop which he will stay now for quite a while. Ice Witch is ok now as an efficient troop, but there are still a lot much better troops to fill her spot, so we won’t see much of her either aside from theme teams.

Well that was what was officially announced with the first frozen preview, and no i don’t think ALL legendary traits were reworked, just the one of BD, or maybe BD was the unknown third troop to get frozen in the first place.

Re-reading the whole darned Frozen peek thread again: 1.0.9 Sneak Peek- Frozen - #105 by Razlath, I count only 3-4 voices openly against the proposed freeze-all-original-effect, of which only you @Razlath posted much, with at least three wall-of-text posts which attracted much disagreement and criticism… and I count at least that many voices saying it’s fine, and very many saying can we at least wait and see… So I do believe that it was a minority crying out in terror, and we get this neutered version of the effect instead…

Maybe someone can analyse the number of speakers for, against, neutral… I don’t have the time or patience… In any case, my experience in 109 now is that frozen may as well not exist in the game…

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Well, yeah, some, not all decks can handle one frozen unit.
None the less, to answer your topic the way Frozen was first designed (and so “what all the fuss was about”), one frozen unit was the same as having all your team frozen now.
The deck you mentionned would be completely powerless against that.

And a lot of people rely on their frontline not only as a tank but also as a part of a combo. Chances are they mass produce the mana color of their first line at some point in their combo. So it does break the combo.

The thing is, each status effect can have a very different impact depending on your play style.
Combo users : silence / frozen / disease counter
Skull matchers : entangle / poison / burning counter
Raw spell power : silence / disease / poison / burning counter

Hunter Mark counters no play style, Death Mark is effective against all

Status effects wear off after average 3-4 turns… that’s not that long to bide time and play differently… or bring a Cleanse… the AI will not consistently reapply Frozen, and if it’s a first place Bone Dragon, stop hitting it!

EDIT: but let’s not speculate on what might have been a huge problem, or might have been a minor inconvenience… in any case what I am seeing now is no change in the game at all…

or hit it harder ^^

Well the only thing we know is what the Devs said in frozen preview version 2, when they gave in to the critics but officially stated that the first frozen worked and felt great in testing. A frozen that would have been only on two troops we know of, both of which are weak without frozen, hell arguably still are weak with frozen.2, and a third that wasn’t announced.