Talk:Frozen Mallet/@comment-8468980-20140607034546

"We've done a lot of Mallet experimentation - but the result keeps coming back to - Why is this item in the game - whenever it's not fringe, the game sucks.

We're more inclined to delete the item entirely at this point." - Xyph

"The basic question is - Is Frozen Mallet essential to the game functioning well?

And it seems to be no, at this point.

Frozen Mallet doesn't really seem to help any combat cases we're happy with - nor does it seem to invite interesting gameplay when it works.

The main problem with Frozen Mallet is basically the concept of an on-hit slow and the idea that it's somehow supposed to help fighters or ranged characters.

At its core, there's a lot of interesting design space we could put on fighters or ranged characters - but Frozen Mallet doesn't help any of those patterns when it's good. It simply flattens all the patterns down to 'land one basic attack.'

It's not the permaslow - or the stats really. There's a richness in how ranged vs. melee fight each other and how they position against each other but Frozen Mallet, whenever it's been good basically tells people that a single basic attack should be what defines that pattern.

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't numbers or mechanics that you could do to make the current Frozen Mallet work. It's just, the gains really wouldn't be worth the costs in the end - You'd have a cool item at the expense of a lot of other things. This isn't a question of viability or whether or not we can make it attractive. All that is really simple to do. It's whether or not it's worth it and I'm not really sure at this point. " - Xyph

I agree with him wholeheardtedly. I think there are several items that should be removed from the game simply because they fill space and encourage false choices aka noob traps.