Greater Black Ice Set

stpensive

With my SW, the Greater Black Ice set seemed to be the one to own initially:

http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Greater_Belt_of_Black_Ice
http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Greater_Cloak_of_Black_Ice
http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Black_Ice_Beholder

However, as anyone who has also looked into it, it takes an incredible amount of black ice to purchase (the only way to obtain); 250k each for the belt and cloak (Black Ice Beholder can be had from Kessel's). Even when you have the raw, it takes even more time (and expensive assets - gauntlets) to refine.

That said, the set bonus is 'meh' at best:

'Your powers have a chance to deal additional unresistable damage equal to 10% of your weapon damage.'

#1 - what is the chance
#2- with everyone's armor pen so high now, is this really a decent buff for either PVE or PVP?

I really wanted to match the ability scores of the belt, CON and CHA, so that it was in line with the SW's primary and secondary. However, the Lostmauth set, even with every ability score different, STR and DEX, still seems to be the superior set.

I'd really like your thoughts on this and if there are any dev lurkers, why make it practically unobtainium to get with such an average set bonus?

Thanks; Ill hang up and listen.

kuero21

You can buy the black ice stuff from auction house, the cloak is sold for 15 Linus favor in the dragon campaign store, or farm greater heroic encounters in well of dragons/ Tiamat.
But the set bonus seems to be horrible. 10% weapon damage - really? Average weapon dmg is like 1.5k? So you have a chance to deal +150 unresistable dmg? It could be useful if it was + 100% weapon dmg.

Beside, a "chance"... Today I tried to upgrade a lvl 7 enchantment with a 25% chance to succeed. I failed 19 times in a row, that's not the first time, though, that this happened to me.
I also often fail 4-5 times in a row, trying to open up a skill node (75% success chance it is said).
If this game says anything about a chance, forget about it. Either the game is lying about the chances or the specific calculation programmer should take some lesson in math.

Is it the same myth with the boons. I have tried 2 boons of the last boon section of the dread ring campaign, augmented thayan bastion (chance to create a shield that absorbs 10k dmg of an incoming attack and reflects it to a nearby target) and burning guidance (chance to deal 2k light dmg whenever you use a healing spell). Both have an unknown chance to proc. Though, the thayan bastion procs far more often than burning guidance. Thayan bastion procs every few incoming hits, burning guidance takes like 20-30 healing spells until you get it to proc.

Unknown

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stpensive

I did forget about being able to get the greater cloak with Favors. In any case, its a shame they have a set so time consuming to obtain with such a fantastically under-powered set bonus.

rockstargfu

Ounce opon a time
On servers far far away
This was practical to atleast try
When the mod it came from was end game
And lostmauth set didnt exist yet
But sadly we drink from the fire hose
Everything at ounce leads to alot of obsolete, overly gated items

wdj40

kuero21 said:

You can buy the black ice stuff from auction house, the cloak is sold for 15 Linus favor in the dragon campaign store, or farm greater heroic encounters in well of dragons/ Tiamat.
But the set bonus seems to be horrible. 10% weapon damage - really? Average weapon dmg is like 1.5k? So you have a chance to deal +150 unresistable dmg? It could be useful if it was + 100% weapon dmg.

Beside, a "chance"... Today I tried to upgrade a lvl 7 enchantment with a 25% chance to succeed. I failed 19 times in a row, that's not the first time, though, that this happened to me.
I also often fail 4-5 times in a row, trying to open up a skill node (75% success chance it is said).
If this game says anything about a chance, forget about it. Either the game is lying about the chances or the specific calculation programmer should take some lesson in math.

Is it the same myth with the boons. I have tried 2 boons of the last boon section of the dread ring campaign, augmented thayan bastion (chance to create a shield that absorbs 10k dmg of an incoming attack and reflects it to a nearby target) and burning guidance (chance to deal 2k light dmg whenever you use a healing spell). Both have an unknown chance to proc. Though, the thayan bastion procs far more often than burning guidance. Thayan bastion procs every few incoming hits, burning guidance takes like 20-30 healing spells until you get it to proc.

I use Burning Guidance on my HR with Oak Skin, when in a group it procs constantly for extra damage. The chance to proc is only when you heal Allies and does not proc if you just heal yourself... running solo it very rarely procs (sometimes does due to chickens or some such near-by that act at allies). So if you spam healing on Allies it should proc a lot as the chance to proc is if you attempt to heal even if they do not need healing, also the enemy needs to be near the ally/allies that you just healed for it to have a chance to proc.

Edit... another note about BG is that if it procs with multiple enemies around it actually hits all of them and not just one enemy. I`ve seen BG spammed all of the screen quite often

kuero21

Hmm I might try this someday. I tested burning guidance, considered it as useless and reskilled to augmented thayan bastion. Not sure if I want to reskill again only to try this out.
As a healing cleric I would only need it for solo content, so I probably don't need burning guidance anyway.

nightshift56

The belt of black ice and cloak of black ice that sold for 15 Linu's favors are no longer available from the venders in protector's enclave or the well of dragons. These were also not the same as greater black ice belt and cloak the OP is asking about.

The greater black ice belt and cloak are only available from the black ice vendor at the foot of the stairs of the black ice forge in Icewind Dale for 250,000 black ice each. Yes, it is a large investment to get the gauntlets and takes good bit of time to build the army of cyromancers to get into full production of refining raw black ice, but most of these items can be handed off to other characters on your account or sold when you're done with them. If you can mine enough raw black ice to keep full production of raw black ice going constantly, then you can get the required 250,000 refined black ice in a week or two. The raw and refined black ice from quests and heroic encounters also help out a little bit.

I already have the greater black ice belt and cloak for my main character and currently am working on getting them for my second one. I didn't see enough benefit to the three piece set to start trying to get the black ice beholder artifact yet, and may not at all. I have to do more research on the artifacts to decide what I want for a final set before I decide what to do there.

stpensive

@nightshift56#8963

Thanks for your feedback...

I too have a legion of Cryomancers going non-stop refining, and I now have enough refined Ice for one piece, but I am hesitant to spend it now after doing some more research (research I should have done initially). Just feels like I have been saving to buy a 3 cylinder Porsche.

Did you do this strictly to match your ability stats or some other reason? Admittedly, for me, it just feels wrong to use an item that does match your primary and secondary ability stats but the LOL set cant be ignored for its notable set bonus.

nightshift56

I'm not even sure if the black ice gear is best in slot for my CW or not which is what I probably should be going for, but my main reason for getting the greater black ice belt and cloak is that I had already bought the first ones with Linu's favor when they were available in the well of dragons and they have been working out nicely. Then after the new mods were released, i discovered the greater versions and felt that the increased stats were worth trying to get.

I have been using the "Death is the Best form of Control" thread from the CW class topic here on the forums as a guide for my CW but not following it to the letter. The only problem is that it does not really come out and state a specific set of artifact equipment as being the best and suggests the best is what suits your style of playing. So I started inspecting other CW chracters that impressed me and I saw a good number of them using the black ice belt and cloak. That prompted me to try them for my CW, so I got them and they worked well, so I have just stuck with them. The greater black ice belt and cloak may or may not be the best in slot, but they get the job done and for now at least that's good enough for me.

randomdigits

A couple of notes: you can mine 250,000 BI relatively quickly with the epic BI pick - I think you can get as much as 10,000 per hour if you figure out a good route. Refining it would be a bit quite some work on all 9 slots of course.
I'm considering some BI mining myself for the infusion and maybe epic gear for coffer donations...
As far as the "chance" set bonus, IIRC from the PC forum many of the chance bonuses actually work as a 100% chance with an internal cool down of 20-30 seconds.

c1k4ml3kc3

Extra notes :
http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Greater_Cloak_of_Black_Ice
http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Greater_Belt_of_Black_Ice

Each sold for 100.000 Black Ice in IWD Caer-Konig.

The difference is that the Greater Belt of Black Ice has CON + CHA, whilst the Belt of Black Ice has the INT + CHA bonuses on the legendary status.

I think that the Greater set should add 20% of weapon damage bonus instead of just 10%.