Monday, 18th November 2013, 03:55 by and into
This is GDD, not advice. I agree that dual school, lvl 9 spells are extremely expensive and often times not worth it for most characters, in most games, and I'm happy to point this out to people in relevant CIP and advice threads.
That being said, I am very glad that fire storm and the like are in the game, and I'm very glad that "cut everything that is not strictly necessary/optimal in order to win" has not become part of Crawl's design philosophy, as this would make it a significantly worse game. More generally, I'll just say that it is a bit depressing to see how often experienced players (and forum posters) use GDD threads as pretexts to comment on what they take to be superior play style. Even when what is being said is accurate, it is distracting and off topic.
Anyway, as for the design discussion so far:
I don't think anything about ice storm is broken, and nothing about it *needs* to change in order to "compete" with fire storm. Ice storm already does that by 1.) being ice/conj., and ice anti-trains with fire, and ice as a spell school has a lot going for it that fire lacks; and 2.) having a larger irresistible component to its damage. The former is the main differentiation, the latter is not such a huge deal but still something. Further differentiation probably isn't necessary, but if a really cool (no pun intended) spell proposal comes out of this that would not be a bad thing. However, I will say that there is something nice about the current set up: At an aesthetic level, I like that fire and ice get lvl. 9 dual school spells, while earth and air get single school lvl. 9 spells. And because their mechanics do still differ somewhat, I'm really okay with fire and ice both getting "storm" spells that operate similarly.
If any developers do agree with OP that further differentiation is warranted, a smaller tweak to how ice storm works might be better than a revamp. My suggestion if this is deemed necessary would be to give ice storm more of a "blizzard" feel: targeting and irresistible component of damage is same as now, but initial AOE blast is 9 squares total (like fireball), with freezing clouds lingering in blast radius (as now); however, next turn a slightly larger AOE blast encompasses the area, and the turn after that, an AOE blast radius equal to current spell, still centered on original target, with lingering freezing clouds. Damage for each of the three blasts could be about 40% to 45% of current damage, so you get more overall damage, but spread out over three turns. Casting multiple times would instigate multiple "blizzards," so the spell doesn't have any cooldown the way tornado does.
As far as the more drastic changes go, however, I do think that the way to approach that would be, "what niche could be filled?" njvack made a good point about the lack of a quiet, high level AOE spell. You could even build on this by making it a spell that has a chance not to wake up enemies that are already asleep—but does significantly less damage (though still a substantial amount overall). Anyway, those are some ideas, though again, I don't think a change is necessary.