About Ice Breaker (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, July 30, 2015, 11:04 (3641 days ago) @ Funkmon

Thanks for listening!

I'll answer your Journey question in a separate post, with a spoiler tag in the title, so people don't stumble across spoilers by accident.

As far as Ice Breaker is concerned, I still use it/see it used very frequently. Aside from the regenerating ammo, Ice Breaker and Black Hammer do more pure damage per shot than any other snipers (not including final round shots). It's not a big difference, but it is significant in many situations. My benchmark is Crota Normal: Ice Breaker and Black Hammer can both 1-shot kill the Boomer Knights. No other snipers can do that, as far as I know.

Next time my group does a Crota hard mode, I'll try to remember to record a video of the bridge section. Cyber and I are usually the first 2 across the bridge; Cyber with his Ice Breaker, me with my Black Hammer. Once we're across together, we WRECK everything on the far side. We've ended up being the last 2 standing on several occasions, and rather than wiping we go ahead and complete the encounter ourselves. With so many Hive majors to deal with, it can be extremely helpful to do as much damage per shot as possible, and the constant flow of acolytes and thrall means you have very little time to reload.

My concern is that the Ice Breaker nerf will harm its usefulness in these kinds of situations. The ammo recharge might be too slow for the weapon to be viable in those kinds of intense, up-close battles. Whereas players who use it to hang back and camp (the behavior Bungie is trying to curb) will have no reason to stop what they're doing. It'll just take them a little longer to cheese their way through encounters.