Me and my buddy (who HATES fighting the gauntlet and wants it erased from his memory) came up with a simple but extremely effective way to fix how the ice gauntlet works.
You keep the 5 second cooldown on Heavy Freeze, which will eliminate the ability to stun lock someone for 4 seconds while doing crazy heavy attack burst damage.
BUT, in exchange, the ice gauntlet keeps its damage and instead of increasing Ice Showers cooldown from 20 up to 30, you actually LOWER it to 15-17 seconds.
This is a win win for everybody and makes so much sense. By keeping the 5 second Heavy Freeze cooldown, you eliminate the ability to stun lock someone for 4 seconds, which I admit is frustrating and is OP when combined with the BURST heavy attack damage.
However, by letting the weapon keep its damage, and letting people use ice wall slightly more often, you still get relatively the same amount of CC and damage out of the weapon, except now it will be spread out over a longer period of time and it will take more skill to land this combo 4 times instead of all at once. It makes fighting against it not as frustrating because you will only be stunned for 1-2 seconds and gauntlet user will only get 1 “free” heavy attack on you per rotation vs 4 heavys like it is right now. It gives the defender a chance to get out of the stunlock, and they wont be at 10-20% health when they get out. They will have a chance to fight back, run and hide, heal, use an ability etc etc.
Also, this change would work for OPR, War, open world pvp, all while allowing the weapon to keep its damage which will keep it viable in PVE as well. SUPER simple and easy change…in the end this isnt a buff or a nerf, its just simple mechanic change that fixes all the issues while not making the weapon useless or trash tier.
Thoughts?