I hate: Ice Wraiths

 And they hate me too.

Skyrim is one of most well travelled games of all time on account of being ported to every system under the sun. I know we joke about how many editions of the game exist but to be frank, it's a stellar game that thanks to the work of modders has a handle of genuine immortality without being necessarily built to facilitate that sort of game. There's no rougelite systems or decent cyclical play loops; but fans refuse to let the game die by modding in any and everything they can think of. Just recently Skyrim got itself a multiplayer mod and a Nemesis-style system straight from Shadow of Mordor. (Better watch out for a cease and desist on that one right there. Who knows how petty Warner Bros are willing to get.) What I'm trying to say is that this a game that has had everything in it torn apart and put back together so well that most players know it's landscape better than Bethesda's developers do. We should considering the amount of times we played through the darn thing. By all rights we as consumers should be surprised by nothing in this game, it should be incapable of rustling any jimmies. And yet...

I have a deep and enduring hatred for the enemy known as Ice Wraiths that I've had since the game first launched in 2011, and retain to this day. I despise their stupid wisp-like design of being bright shining blue, which clashes with their usual spawning environment; ice sheets. I hate the noise they make like a rattling cobra, loud enough to alert you to imminent death but nowhere near clear enough to indicate where the danger is swiping from. I hate their sweeping attack pattern which is nigh on impossible to dodge with how far it travels. And I hate the ice-wall effect they create on the floor with every swoop they make, essentially turning every encounter into a hardly visible minefield thanks to the fact that they spawn in snowy environments and again, the snow floor clashes with Ice Wall. In essence; I think they're most annoying enemy in the game and I hate them.

To be clear, Ice Wraiths are not the most deadly, nor the most one-shot capable in the game. Without turning off kill animations those dubious honours would probably go towards Dragons who, thanks to a badly programmed kill move parameter, can literally cutscene kill you at full health on the highest difficulties. Or maybe towards the Dragon Priests who are pretty much the only other creature in the game to make use of the borked 'wall' spells, that apply constant damage at such a ludicrous rate they can melt your health bar in about five consecutive seconds unless you immediately move, whereas the same amount of time spent in concentrated fire would do a fraction of that damage. (I think it's because of overlapping damage sources that hit you simultaneously, if I were to guess.) Those enemies are both bearable for the sole reason that slaying them is worthwhile. That life-or-death struggle is the demand of a serious boss encounter at the end of a dungeon or a epic ambush from a flying dragon. Are they poorly balanced? Sure. But getting that kill on the otherhand feels like all the more of an accomplishment because you faced that unfair wall. But what of Ice Wraiths?

They're trash. Pitiful forgettable worthless trash mobs so useless they're not even really afforded any substantive lore snippets explaining what the hell they even are! I guess they're just 'elementals' as nebulous of a title that is, but they aren't tied to any quest that really puts any amount of attention on them or their function because they aren't supposed to have a function. Yet somehow they're one-shotting demons. Off the top of my head I can think of only two quests in the entirety of vanilla Skyrim that will pit you up against Ice Wraiths, on any of the major critical paths. You have the route up to High Hrothgar, where they serve as obstacles that can feasibly just be run past. The game doesn't explicitly force you to fight them. And then there's the introduction quest to the Stormcloaks, which pits you against three of them to 'prove your worth'. A funny hazing ritual given that it is single handily the most dangerous task you'll embark on in the entire Civil War quest line. Does every Stormcloak have to kill three Ice Wraiths in order to join? If they did the army would consist of no-one but the Dragonborn.

The problem here is a clash of aesthetic and design, one that I can assume is driven worse by any of the numerous ENB mods that players choose to install given their tendency to up bloom to JJ Abrahams levels in the pursuit of 'beautification'. Bethesda designed an enemy with a jabbing stab range melee attack that does vicious levels of damage on it's own; a split second timing thing if you want to try and side-step it; but they made it damn near invisible thanks to their translucent icy body that slips right inside the already gleaming white of the ice caves and/or sheets they spawn near. They also tend to spawn in packs, meaning you can suffer an heavy infestation of invisible death snakes flying through the air at you for any given time without knowing it before your death.

And this is coming from a guy who actually loves the winter world of Skyrim. In fact, I like all depictions of winter as long as it come from the distance of a plasma screen. Yet for the Ice Wraiths that very theming is it's death. Not to mention how the things are damned sturdy too! Skyrim in general has a pretty piss-poor elements system where elemental weakness or strengths are pretty inconsequential in combat, and nowhere is that more frustrating then when facing literal ice monster that hardly feel it when being blasted with fire spells. They're also resistant to straight physical damage, which makes them a small tank and a canon; guess god really did the min-max stats when coming up with these guys on their character sheets; huh.

I welcome any number of ice-tainted Skyrim beasts over the bloody ice wraiths. Ice Trolls; annoying for their regeneration abilities but at least they're slow enough to make sense for the power behind every swing. Ice wolves; sturdy but easy to ultimately overwhelm. Frost Giants; so overpowered they literally break the physics engine but still good for the odd laugh. Everything else has some saving grace to them but the ice wraiths. I don't even think they're visually all that interesting; you know, in the brief moments you can even actually see them. Their design of spikes upon spikes just sort of brings to mind memories of the Prometheans from Halo 4; messy overdesigned garbage that melts into the scenery. It's just a good thing that Ice Wraiths are only a single rarely used enemy instead of an entire third of the running time. (God, Halo 4 made me weep.)

Many people flock to mods for Skyrim looking for some sort of mod to disable the spiders from their game because they've allowed their phobias to grow so bad they literally can't function if a badly animated one is on screen. (To be frank, I also have a phobia with spiders. If you think Skyrim's are bad, you would suffer a heart attack playing 2001's Resident Evil.) What I need is a mod that erases all Ice Wraiths for the game entirely so they be neither an eye nor brain sore ruining my good questing time any longer. A great exorcism of every Frost Snake from the border of Hammerfell to the Sea of Ghosts. Maybe a Saint Juib-style figure who drives all them from the land in some heroic act of self sacrifice. I don't care about the excuse behind it; it just needs to be done. No more Wraiths!