RWBYFanon v5
RPG Social => RPG Discussion => Topic started by: ReaperJoe on February 23, 2019, 03:00:13 AM
-
So, this is another post where I rant about something that’s probably fine but has potential abuse cases that can be cleared up by mod rulings. This time it’s about ice dust and how, in my opinion, it’s the single best type of dust to use in pretty much every circumstance in any given fight. Now, before I continue, this is going to primarily concern pvp bouts, not threads run by a thread mod who throws swarms of Grimm or a giant boss monster at a team of characters.
Now, ice dust is generally used for one thing: it freezes things. In combat, most of the time it’s used to freeze an opponent in place. I’m going to refer to being frozen in place in this manner as “snared”. When someone is “snared”, they can’t move, but are most likely still capable of reacting and fighting.
But how would a character escape from this “snare”? Well, they would have to break or melt the ice, it’s pretty much the only way. Otherwise, the character is just stuck, at least until the ice melts on its own, I guess. Now, let’s compare that to the commonly listed effects of other types of dust. Fire generally just increases the damage of an attack. Sometimes it’s used to ignite flammable objects, but most of the time the effect is an instantaneous blast. Wind dust is most often used to create a knockback effect, increase the speed of a shot, or just a flat increase in damage. Pretty much any effect created with this dust is instantaneous unless the character spends a continuous amount of dust to create a continuous wind effect. Kinetic dust (possibly also known as repulsion dust) is similar in this regard, as is gravity dust. The effect is either a push or a pull that lasts for a brief moment, and doesn’t create a long-lasting effect except in rare circumstances.
The only types of dust that consistently generate longer-lasting effects like ice dust are lightning and earth dust. Earth dust generally creates, well, earth. Depending on how it’s used it can harden an attack to make it hit harder or be used to create a defensive barrier which can last however long it needs to in some circumstances. Lightning dust, on the other hand, seems to generate a variety of effects, depending on what’s convenient to the user. In some cases, lightning causes a hampering slow, in other cases, it causes the jitters. In my character Lucas’s case, it causes characters to potentially drop whatever they’re holding. And while those effects can lead to heavy advantages in the right scenarios, none of those seem to be as blatantly strong as a straight-up snare.
The ice snare is the only case where the affected individual has to pay attention to the cause. Even in the case of lightning dust, there’s nothing the character can do about it once they’ve been struck, so they can just carry on fighting with the knowledge that the “debuff” put on them is temporary. However, if a character doesn’t have a way to deal with ice, they’re just stuck until the ice-user arbitrarily decides they can go free. And that’s why I say ice dust crowds out every other dust option on the market, at least at the moment.
Now, I’m not calling for a nerf or any kind of balance change, I just wanted to bring up a talking point. Due to the nature of the site and the variety of characters that can be created, any kind of blanket restriction would have to come with an asterisk. With that said, though, does anyone else feel this way?
-
I mean, sure, it's THE Dust for crowd control, but it doesn't do any damage. Depending on the delivery method, it can be easy or hard to dodge completely. I feel like it's relatively balanced that way. Earth Dust can be used to pretty much entomb people when used right, which imo is far worse as you 1) can't melt earth/stone/whatever as easily 2) it's relatively harder to punch through 3) its use isn't direct like Ice, which means you don't need to nail the target, just its surroundings.
-
I'd argue that ice dust not doing damage is dependent on the character and the person writing, and dodging anything period is context dependent. And while earth dust can potentially entomb people, sure, I'd imagine that it's much harder to do so, especially in a universe like RWBY's where characters can jump around like kangaroos on cocaine. The problem with ice is that if you hit them once and freeze them, you essentially can guarantee the next hit, and the hit after that, and the hit after that, and so on.
Not to mention, I'd argue you can entomb people with ice as well if you use enough of it, and if you can restrict the target's limbs, they'd have just as hard of a time breaking out.
-
Diana cowers in a corner clutching her ice rounds
I think balance, in general, will always be a bit random on a site like this. Its why the character I use most isn't a good fighter, Diana can heal and try to control the battlefield with Dust, but is a pretty weak fighter on her own. Which means her "story" in the fight should hopefully not clash with others. Mechanically ice dust is probably quite strong, hence why we see Weiss use it constantly. I personally just think the its up to the people in the thread to keep it interesting.
Then again my angle here is for PvE because I'm certainly not dealing with PvP.
-
With the way this site works it's usually sorted out pretty quickly by just having the other guy break the ice almost immediately. Best case scenario I've seen is you get a turn where they don't hit you. worst case scenario it actually achieves sweet fuck-all in slowing them down.