Cold Damage Hurts.... Bad. Does Cold Damage work differently than phys or other elemental damages? I know that there's some cold dmg that lingers for a couple secs. It always seems like cold dmg hurts worse than other dmg, or maybe it's just the consistent avg dmg is provides. Is there any strange issues in the mechanics of cold dmg and the way it works that make it do more than it displays?
cold damage that lingers for a couple seconds? That's just the slow effect. And no, there's nothing about cold that makes it special other then the slowing effect. Maybe you're just not able to leech/run away as well when chilled.
How are your cold resists? Cold damage has a lingering slowing effect, but does no damage beyond the initial hit. Items with the "Cannot be frozen" modifier eliminate that lingering effect. Some monsters (Duriel) have the paladin's Holy Freeze aura. This does small damage but the slowing effect cannot be effected by "Cannot be frozen" auras.
I've noticed that cannot be frozen tends to lessen some of the cold damage. Maybe its psychological but it seems to help.
If you're thinking of Frozen Orb remember that it hits many times for relatively small damage (compared to other elements).
Well, the most obvious reason when fighting a Cold Sorc would be the Cold Mastery, it's way more vicious than any other mastery. EG: lvl40 fireball with lvl40 firemastery = 2234-2424 damage lvl40 frozenorb with lvl40 coldmastery = 557-581 damage (-215% cold res) They both have exactly 95% resistances to all in hell, now they fight in normal. Average fireball deals 2329 damage, after pvp penalty that is 388. The 95% resistance kicks in, the damage is reduced to 5%. The person receives 19 damage. Average frozenorb deals 569 damage, after pvp penalty that is 94. The 95% resistance is infact 195% stacked resistance, gets negated by cold mastery -215% to -20%, so the damage increases by 20%. (maximum increasable by 100%) The person receives 112 damage. Keep in mind fireball can be shot much faster, but also keep in mind that frozen orb doesn't consist out of just 1x that 112 damage, each spike deals that damage, and each frozen orb consists out of 40 spikes iirc. So even if you can fire 20 fireballs per 4 seconds, frozen orb will still double the amount of projectiles and have a lot more firepower. All due to cold mastery, that's the reason why cold can hurt more :thumbsup:
The seemingly bigger impact of cold attacks is because of cold mastery. For e.g. a fire attack from a sorc, the character screen displays the damage including fire mastery while for cold attacks, cold mastery is not considered in the CS. For example, if you have a character with 75% cold res and the opponent sorc hits you with a cold attack which inflicts e.g. 3000 damage according to the CS, a naive calculation goes like this: 3000 pvp penalty -> 500 75% res -> 125 However, you can be sure that the sorc has cold mastery. At e.g. level 32 (-175% enemy cold res), she would reduce your res from 75% to -100% which means she would deal 1000 damage instead of 125. Even if you overstack your cold res by 100%, she would still deal 500 damage.
And yet the strength of a cold sorc is also the weakness of a cold sorc. STack 220+ cold res, 2 ravens, and she cries like a little baby.(Just like i Cry vs most smiters)
PvP is rock scissors paper anyway. If you know in advance whom to fight, you can always come up with the perfect killer character. I'm a PvP noob, but perhaps you can fool the others to appear as somebody else, e.g. by wearing cold sorc gear (which forces the enemy to massively overstack cold res, hopefully at the expense of other res), but actually being a fire or lightning sorc :evil:
Do you have any idea what kind of gear it takes to stack that much resistances? Don't forget the cold sorc can also have a merc wielding infinity and use a lower resist wand (if you're talking about stacking for the cold fight only, the sorc can have side gear for further lowering your resistance) Iirc -cold res can go up to -400 orso, and to stack against that while wielding dual raven, you'd have to sacrifice a lot of gear (note you won't be able to hit 95% cold resist, to stack you'll only get to 75%, 85% tops)), so how are you gonna deal damage with what's left, poke her with a toothpick? While she (on top of her game) would still be able to hurt you (even if your resistance stayed maxed and while dual wielding ravens)
