Torch Bearer and beta3 thoughts

I feel his spell got weaker....

Its not only you too, his frost spells are worthless...

He seems like he does fine until the late game where UB, Rook, and Reg dominate.

If you use shatter you can get some nice dmg out of him really.

Rain of Frost at highest level even gives you two debuffs to shatter, so thats 1.2k dmg right there.

So a quite decent combo would be

Rain of frost = 500dmg

frost nova

Deep freeze = 1600 dmg

that equals up to 2100 dmg, which is quite good imo.

I think that shatter damage on his deep freez should actually come from fire I say.   Like, if you freeze them and then heat them up again quickly is when they'd shatter, not when you continue to make them cold.  

Make it so if he hits them with a fire-ball, and the above effects are on the enemy, then it does crazy extra damage.    Right now, to me, it still seems to be all ice or all fire (or just ice, because the above shatter combo I think trumps the fire side).   Though the fact that the tech tree merges at the top helps.

In general though, I feel that he's very powerful.   The rook is very much nerfed now that his hammer can't directly target people, so thats fine.   Reg can't really take on multiple people at once, except with his mines.   Reg doesn't have any stuns either, which makes me think that the torch bearer is the guy most likely to take out reg.   If he can get close enough to throw down a frost nova, our winged sniper is screwed. (the rook doesn't care, he's got too much HP, but thats how it should work, right?)

Rook's hammer slam alone can cause 2100 damage....

...and that's AOE as well .

this time you have to aim it though so its balanced
Im guessing you didnt play beta 2D where you would target enemy to use it and it would always hit if you were next to him when he started the animation..

Indeed the Rook's hammer is far more balanced. It requires a slight edge of skill to enable you to do any serious damage.

For the TB i actually quite like frost. I spec so that i'm full frost, without permafrost, go full in fireball to, and then get the end bonus + if you dont take any attributes from your bottom line you can get his fire nova thing to full as well. Which leads to complicated, but nice Demigod kills.

Rain of frost - Frost Nova - Deep freeze = with my spec thats doing around 2600 damage (cant remember the exact number of RoF) + your getting a 3 second stun, they've slowed by 30% and their attack speed is down by a similar number.

You can subsequently switch into fire, giving yourself +50% mana regen and enabling you to fireball them for 1350 dmg and then fire nova'ing for around 800.

Adds up to about 5k damage basically (number are a bit off i know)

It requires a lot of work, and you need some awesome mana regen to make him effective but i like it. That spec also means i have no auras, but i dont think they're that great unless there are large teams on the field.

My only complaint is that at lower levels he gets annihilated by any melee Demigod because of his minute health, its about half of Rook's.

EDIT: On the idea of heat doing extra damage for shatter = i don't really think its viable. It would mean that your constantly switching between your two forms and i dont think the frost nova stun would still be on them by the time you've managed to throw  fireball.

I thought it should be viable to actually switch forms and use each effectively, especially because all the synergy went into the ice tree, whereas the fire tree is just a bunch of damage spells which in fact pale in comparison to all of the ice spells combined. To offset this lack of synergy, his animation for form change should take less time, have fireball buff subsequent casts for 10 secs etc. Also, currently you can switch both forms and gain both effects for a short time if you were awaiting an enemy. If the form change were to be reduced in cast time, this would have to be removed.