njvack wrote:Huh. Having learned glaciate and used it, I never realized its damage depended on range, I just thought it was kind of a crappy spell.
This was my experience as well. My gut reaction was to want the simple solution of making damage the same at any range... but I think that mostly came from the easy comparison to Firestorm.
Making Glaciate basically just Firestorm #2 doesn't intrigue me. The current "shotgun blast" concept has strong fantasy, so I'd rather lean into it. I propose reducing Glaciate's range, perhaps by 2, increasing damage and making it uniform throughout.
The reduced range doesn't solve weird targeting concerns completely but it might help, and at least the output is unique so I hesitate to take it away when in practice even the current version has been only slightly more fiddly and troublesome than Fireball.
As far as Ozo's Ref. goes, there's a glut of cold spells at level 6 (Ozo's, Bolt of Cold, Freezing Cloud) and it's usually the least compelling of those, so I welcome a change, probably to level 7.
I'm not too keen on simply increasing Ozo's damage though, since I think that just creates another version of Ignition/Shatter. My pitch for Ozo's Ref. is to add an rC- debuff to the effect (maybe rC--) to evoke the "freeze-and-shatter" combo fantasy while encouraging gameplay that isn't just spamming a screen-wide AoE over and over.