Game Design Corrupted Ice Barrows Gripes

This applies to Ice Barrows as well.

Corrupted Ice Barrows suffers from two things: Party bottlenecks (parkour sections) and forced elemental advantages. Let me explain why these two things kill the enjoyment of IB/CIB for me:

• In (corrupted) Sand Swept Tomb, the elemental advantages aren't as forced (or, for that matter, forced in any other dungeon), and it is highly repeatable due to randomized runs every time you play CSST. It's not a bottleneck, since you're supposed to be capable of doing the challenges solo, then meet up at the colosseum-like area where you survive until the door opens.
  In (corrupted) Ice Barrows, whatever balance the game has had is completely thrown out of the window. Frozen Guards have an absurd weakness to Earth, and are required to be slain in order to get tokens in Stage 1. But the greatest offender has to be Theorick's Shade, with its disgustingly large HP pool and laughable weakness to Fire and Earth to the point any weapon that does these damages will shred through his HP pool. This is Elemental Exercise levels of forcing an elemental advantage down someone's throats, and is basically not the ideal way to teach a player about elements.
• The second "parkour" segment, which is basically an invisible tightrope that slows you down to a snail's pace. Remove it entirely?
• The "Run!" segment. Oh god, the "Run!" segment. It's a huge party bottleneck. You're either fast, or you're waiting 20-25-30 seconds and getting butchered, minced and disemboweled while waiting for the ice to melt, letting you through. That segment needs to be replaced. Entirely. It bottlenecks parties, bottlenecks the players who like to go fast, it's just awful. For first few playthroughs, it's an adrenaline rush, but any run beyond the first few is just "if you're a glass, run to the end, or GET SHAFTED LUL"

In general, I feel like Corrupted Ice Barrows could be executed better, especially with the Elemex levels of forced elemental advantages going away for good and being replaced with somewhat reasonable weakness/HP pools that make sense. Because these two things take away enjoyment and force specific builds/archetypes to be played on CIB, including quads with Earth/Fire, rainbow and neutral (relying on elemental conversion).

 

Fair point, I've seen people use horses but I haven't seen how do they affect the parkour.

Well, it'll still be a party bottleneck, which is bad in large parties, but it'll be more forgiving in solo and small parties.
Worth noting that I do have a 35/35 chestnut on my prof slave that I simply didn't bother moving to my other classes, so that would've helped over a black horse, but still.

 

I was actually going to mention spell conversion - weapons that do Neutral damage can do Fire and Earth damage thanks to elemental conversion in spells. If you don't have anything better to bring or just want to keep your OP ASF build for Ice Barrows, just bring a weapon that does Neutral damage, including at-level Crafteds and Basic weapons. Good point.