Life Getting More Health than Ice? Snow Way!

[JacobDeathBringer]

Thaumaturges of the Spiral unite! Every piece of the Life Karamelle crafted gear in Test Realm has more health than the equivalent Ice gear, the Life gear has almost 400 more health in total than the Ice gear! Is KingsIsle really planning to take away from us the very identity of our beloved school of magic?
From the very beginning the Ice School has been the known as the ‘tank’, damage-protection school, with unique, iconic spells like Tower Shield and Ice Armor. Ice is known for its great ability to ward damage and protect themselves and their team with shields and absorbs, and to tank damage for the team using its highest health and resistance, and exclusive utility of taunt. I commend Kings Isle for their focus on each schools special, unique identity, and for making the new and improved version of this utility on the Ice Karamelle spell in Test Realm! I can’t wait to get it! I know I’ll be choosing the 3 round Taunt spellement path, as that is what Ice is all about, tanking for the team! The new Taunt forces enemies to target you if they decide to attack. The Life spell was given its equivalent and opposite utility, Pacify, which means enemies cannot target you if they decide to attack, designed, I presume, for the Theurgist to hit and then give them time to heal before getting killed, so... Why does the Life set of Karamelle gear have 394 more health, when the Life spell forces the enemies to not hit you, and the Ice spell forces enemies to hit you? It would make more sense to give Ice the higher health, like it’s always been.
Ice needs the highest health, resistance and block to tank the enemies’ damage for the team. That is their specialty. Ice and Life are similar in that they are both designed to protect their team, but in two very different ways. Ice focuses on protecting their team before they take damage by taunting the enemies, casting protective spells and tanking the damage. Life focuses on healing their team after they’ve taken damage. Taking away Ice’s health takes away their ability to protect their team, as they rely on their high health and resistance to tank damage, just like life relies on heals to protect their team. Taking away Ice’s health is like taking away Life’s heals!
Life doesn’t need the highest health, as Life has countless heals to heal back its health. The new Pacify effect further supports this point. Life is about healing, not tanking damage.
As a player with a level 130 Thaumaturge, a Diviner and Necromancer at level 124 and a Conjurer at level 73, I’ve played the game quite a lot and have gotten a good feel for each school’s unique specialty. Storm is all about dealing the most damage. Fire is about damage over time. Death is about draining the life out of its enemies to heal itself. Myth is known for summoning monstrous minions and its unique utilities. Life is all about healing. Ice is all about tanking and protecting, also known as, health and resistance! This is why taking away Ice’s health is taking away it’s very identity. It’s like giving Ice more damage than Storm! Or giving Storm life drains! This has happened in the past, with Myth.
Myth’s main characteristics are summoning minions and their unique utilities like Pierce and Shatter. But all the other schools can summon minions, you can just use treasure card versions of Shatter and Pierce, and Fire had just as much health, more damage and critical, and better spells. So, there wasn’t much point in playing Myth. Thankfully the school has been revived with the updated Orthrus and a solid heal, giving players a reason to choose it over Fire.
If Life has the highest health and is the best healer, why would anyone play Ice? You can’t give a school’s purpose and identity to another school without destroying it. It’s like putting your cars engine into another car, your old car won’t go. Comment bellow my fellow Thaumaturges, and vote to save the Ice School!

[Patrick FairyStalker]

I'm inclined to agree, but there is one caveat. If KI wants to make life the health school, they need to do it right.

That is, they truly need to solidify Ice as the true resist+block school. The most overpowered stat in the game when done in excess is resist. Let me illustrate:

An ice with 10,000 health and 75% resist effectively has 40,000 health (with 0% resist).
A life with 12,000 health and 50% resist effectively has 24,000 health (with 0% resist).
A wizard with full immunity effectively has infinite health, regardless of their actual base health. That's because every attack will do zero damage.

These are obviously unrealistic numbers, especially with pierce around, but my point is that high resist heavily outweighs high health when done right.

But we already know that resist is getting an overhaul, so it's very hard to tell where KI is going with this health/resist balance at the moment. For one, life is heavily incentivized to not have high block due to the incoming critical heal nerf. It's interesting to see KI shift life toward high critical, low block, but high health. More of like a glass cannon healer, which fits in line with the pacify effect. Again, we need to begin seeing a decline in life resist and an increase in ice resist for this to ring true.

[JaredSpellFrost]

Reposting what I said in Eric's thread because I don't think I can say it any better:

Life should never get more health than Ice for several reasons:

1. Ice is the "tank" school- they need the most health and resist to take hits! In exchange, they sacrifice damage, critical, pierce and power pip.

2. Life has heals, Ice doesn't. Life can survive with less HP as they can very easily heal back up with Satyr, Pigsie, Guardian Spirit, and more.

3. Life has the highest Outgoing/Incoming Healing and accuracy- traits which have been assigned to their school since the beginning. Just like how Ice is the tank school, Life is the healing school.

I worry that KingsIsle doesn't know what they are seeking for when they talk of (Cough giving Fire more damage than Storm cough cough) "school identity." Ice and Life have had their identities solidified for over a decade now, so why is their talk of decimating this?

@Sparck, please relay our concerns to the Devs! Ice needs the highest health- we have the lowest damage, Critical, and Pierce to fairly compensate for our large health pools and Resist. Taking away our health will be stripping Thaumaturge's of their core identities- something KingsIsle should strive to avoid at all costs.

[JacobDeathBringer]

Yes, the proposed 'fix' to turn resistance into a rating is worrying, and completely unnecessary, as we've seen that when players get too much resistance, KingsIsle just gives all the bosses 25%+ armor piercing. There's no reason they couldn't just keep doing that, if it ends up being that Diviners have 100% resistance and all the bosses have 80% piercing, so what? Just make the gear No-PvP. Turning resistance into a rating is just part of their master plan to turn every stat in the game into a rigged, hidden stat that no-one will be able to question because no-one will be able to understand how it works, just like they're doing with Critical, Block and Shadow pips. Once that's done they'll be able to manipulate the stats however they like without anyone knowing, just like they've been doing with the current rating stats. After this update, they'll be able to keep you farming for every single new gear upgrade, cause they'll be able to make the old gear stats so decayed that you'll have to farm (or pay thousands of crowns) for the new gear to get good stats. Your Shadow pip chance is now dependent on your enemies' Shadow pip chance. How does that make any sense? How does your skill with Shadow magic go down if you're fighting a boss with high Shadow rating? It allows KI to create bosses that won't let you get a Shadow pip until 20 rounds, all they have to do is make the boss's chance super high, or heck, they could just make it so that when you go through the sigils, you have X% less Shadow chance, cause it's a rating and you can't see what it is or measure it. As much as I've tried to stay away from these horrible rating stats, it seems inevitable that I'm going to get screwed by them whatever I do, I know I'm not gonna be motivated at all to upgrade my stats if they make resistance like Shadow pip or Critical/Block rating, and it's not like I'll need to anyway, PvE is so easy and I don't do PvP because they don't let crowns players play for free. If resistance turns into a rating, I'm gonna want us much health as I can get, since I'm pretty sure health will always have to be a set, reliable stat.

[Eric Stormbringer]

Yes, the proposed 'fix' to turn resistance into a rating is worrying, and completely unnecessary, as we've seen that when players get too much resistance, KingsIsle just gives all the bosses 25%+ armor piercing. There's no reason they couldn't just keep doing that, if it ends up being that Diviners have 100% resistance and all the bosses have 80% piercing, so what? Just make the gear No-PvP. Turning resistance into a rating is just part of their master plan to turn every stat in the game into a rigged, hidden stat that no-one will be able to question because no-one will be able to understand how it works, just like they're doing with Critical, Block and Shadow pips. Once that's done they'll be able to manipulate the stats however they like without anyone knowing, just like they've been doing with the current rating stats. After this update, they'll be able to keep you farming for every single new gear upgrade, cause they'll be able to make the old gear stats so decayed that you'll have to farm (or pay thousands of crowns) for the new gear to get good stats. Your Shadow pip chance is now dependent on your enemies' Shadow pip chance. How does that make any sense? How does your skill with Shadow magic go down if you're fighting a boss with high Shadow rating? It allows KI to create bosses that won't let you get a Shadow pip until 20 rounds, all they have to do is make the boss's chance super high, or heck, they could just make it so that when you go through the sigils, you have X% less Shadow chance, cause it's a rating and you can't see what it is or measure it. As much as I've tried to stay away from these horrible rating stats, it seems inevitable that I'm going to get screwed by them whatever I do, I know I'm not gonna be motivated at all to upgrade my stats if they make resistance like Shadow pip or Critical/Block rating, and it's not like I'll need to anyway, PvE is so easy and I don't do PvP because they don't let crowns players play for free. If resistance turns into a rating, I'm gonna want us much health as I can get, since I'm pretty sure health will always have to be a set, reliable stat.

We aren't sure how resistance is changing- The rating is only one method they were exploring. It is a bit too early to tell in what direction they are going with that. As for the effectively hidden stats- I agree with you- it would be a lot better if stats were viewable. I believe Ratbeard had stated on one of his streams that Wizard101s original tech wasn't designed with dynamic stats in mind so they are looking to add that capability moving forward. That would help the stats be less of a mystery to players.

Your Shadow pip chance is now dependent on your enemies' Shadow pip chance. How does that make any sense? How does your skill with Shadow magic go down if you're fighting a boss with high Shadow rating?

Well if you are a master of the sword and you fight an untrained novice you'll have a pretty easy time of it. However, fight another swordmaster and you'll have a tougher time. Same concept here.

[Torpzun26]

I can kinda see the point of Life having more health. Life and Ice would both be defensive schools, but Life has larger health drops that they have to refill while Ice has to maintain defenses to make sure health loss remains minimal. Life gets big numbers to undo, Ice makes normally big numbers small. However...

Health or no health, no matter how the new Taunt is implemented, Ice as a tank school will almost always be inferior to a high-resist Death with Bad Juju. Not only is this spell more effective at stopping attacks at a whopping 90% reduction vs. 50% or 30% from Tower and Legion shields respectively, but as a negative charm Juju works better against a wider range of spells such as DoTs and AoEs. Juju does cost more pips than both of those spells, but a Death Juju spammer typically won't need pips for anything else except maybe a Reshuffle. Since Ice's defensive spells are cheaper, they get more pips, which they can spend on a heal or something, but it would take a lot of healing to make up for the damage that you could've otherwise prevented with a better damage debuff.

Against multiple enemies, that's a different story as Bad Juju only affects one enemy. However, in most cases, these enemies tend to be so easy to kill that you can reduce the enemy's side to only one boss very quickly. Another win for Juju spam.

In the very rare case of multiple hard-to-kill enemies, then Death Wizards would just instead use Virulent Plague. This is a spell Ice can actually compete with, but they still end up losing. The spell is 3 pips, and only 10% more effective than a Legion Shield that's costed at 1 pip. But once again, negative charms are much better than positive wards. If you're up against 4 bosses, the first one can take out your entire Legion Shield with an AoE, but if you used Virulent Plague, then this can't happen. A Legion Shield can affect up to four attacks, while Virulent Plague always affects four attacks.

Now, for the good news. The Taunt change signals that this is not how Ice will be required to tank. Ice's method of tanking will be to use a Taunt (or for a more longer-lasting option, actually gain a little bit of Threat at the very start of the duel!), become the target of the enemy's single-target hits, and have enough Resist to shrug it off. This is something that you can already do, and have been able to do since the beginning of the game. And while Ice has the best Resist in game out of each school, you should remember that tanks don't wear that much school-specific gear. Anyone of any school can do this, it's just Ice will be only slightly better than everyone else at doing their role, until Life overtakes them. Then Ice will not even be the best at what it's supposed to do.

The newly changed Taunt will only be useful if there's a healer in the group, or if the hitter can't annihilate everyone in one attack (that means they're bad and you should yell at them!!! rawr!!! Ok, I'm kidding here, there are some bosses that actually require multiple hits to defeat) For Ice to really excel at being a tank, they would need at least some of the following:

• A way to have the most resist, more than the likes of Jade Gear and other high-Resist universal gear. This sounds very dangerous and I don't actually support this at all, at least until Resist is changed like they said it will be.
• Better shields that help them compete with Juju spammers. They can kind of do this with the 80% single-school shields, but only against the Elemental/Spirit schools. There is no such option for Balance, Astral schools, or for the Shadow school. And again, Life can do this too, and they will soon have better health than Ice, making them better at this.
• A non-Shadow form of Intercept to help them better defend the team against AoEs.
• Support for Absorbs. Right now, Absorbs are weaker than Dryads even when you remove healing boosts from the equation entirely (and I'm just comparing it with Dryad because they're both X-pip spells, Life has better heals than Dryad). They are also hard-countered much more efficiently than Dryad, though Aegis does help with this a lot.
• Have Taunt lower, or eliminate entirely, the chance of enemies casting AoEs. I don't expect Taunt to mess up cheat AoEs like the Triton's ginormous trident swing cheat, but instead to interfere with spells such as his Tempest for example.

[WarWeaver]

Naturally it should be Ice! They are the defensive school and every stat involving defense should be higher then every other school, just as it has been since the very beginning. Wait, isn't this just like what they did with Storm and Fire at the start of the third arc where they gave the formers gear damage to the latter?

[Oxnhorse]

This seems a bit weird to me.

With the ability of putting +26 square universal defense jewels in gear, and most pets have the Proof/Defy of +15 tacked onto defense stats, it seems like this argument falls flat.

Yes, Ice has always been the Tank of the game; but any school can be utilized as a tank with the right stats and equipment.

As for Life, the school is primarily stuck in a heal only mode, until getting the Swan card after defeating Shane von Shane, before entering Darkmoor Graveyard.

As for having the most health, my Balance guy, Jared WildSword has the highest of all my wizards (8295) and he was the 4th to reach Empyrea and the Notochord.

Oxnhorse