I just found a new Glacial Aspect on an item level 793 staff (spikes deal 2899 damage). Unfortunately, the rolls on the staff itself are less than ideal so I’ll be transferring the aspect to another item. Looking for advice between putting it on an amulet or another staff that I have. Currently running a hybrid blizzard and ice shards build. I have a Glacial Aspect on my wand right now which was a mistake. Either change will be a boost in power.
If I go 2H, I would gain a big jump in power from the aspect plus the damage to CC inherent to the staff. On the downside, I’d lose an offensive aspect, cooldown reduction and lucky hit chance.
Amulet.
Very nice roll by the way.
I suggest amulet too.
Can’t recommend anyone using a staff with ice shards until they fix the hitting of small creatures and blood blisters.
I previously thought Glacial should go on the Amulet and put Control on the Staff. However, after the Aspect of Control nerf, I’m coming around to going two-handed and put Glacial on the Staff.
Prior the nerf, the Aspect of Control was just killer on a staff. I compared to going 1H/focus and I am pretty sure at this point the extra damage outweighs anything you can get from the extra Aspect. I think it would be different if Focus could accept a defensive aspect, but as it is, there is no good choice for the additional aspect.
So put the Glacial on a good staff and be very thankful you got such a good roll on it.
If you want to make Blizzard/Ice Spike your main source of damage - it’s hands down the best to put Glacial on staff.
Until they make staves more powerful, I would suggest going wand/focus for the extra aspect, implicit and affixes.
I was a staff player before S1 on my 100 sorc, ended switching back to wand/focus and my damage was quite a bit higher.
Amulet. Cant afford to loose mana, double cooldown and more on focus. My glacial sits at aspect power 805. Pretty much max. But i think is fun to combine Blizzard with shards. So piercing cold on Wand, glacial on amulet och deep freeze spike aspect on focus.
What aspects are you using? I’ve got Glacial, Frozen Tundra, Control, Prodigy, Piercing Cold and Biting Cold right now on my wand and focus setup. If I switched to a staff, I’d probably drop Biting Cold.
I’d get a pretty big boost in power from the increased crowd control damage and stronger Glacial Aspect. I need to think if losing the vulnerable, lucky hit and resource cost reduction would be offset by the increased damage. Loss of cooldown reduction would be annoying but not a deal breaker as this build isn’t as reliant on frost nova as others.
You don’t run Umbral? How can you stand being OOM so much?
I don’t run Biting or Piercing. Neither is useful for my build.
I am currently having the same dilemma, we do have 5 or 6 offensive aspect slots: Glacial and Frozen Tundra are mandatory, Control and Conceited have good damage multipliers and I wouldn’t drop them.
There are other interesting aspects: Piercing Cold, Biting Cold, Storm Swell as offensive choices or utility ones like Prodigy, Umbral or even Frozen Wake, so it’s up to you and your setup, if you use the Frozen Orb enchantment Biting Cold has more value etc. Both options seem fine, one will have more damage (staff) the other one shorter cooldwons, mana reductions etc and one more aspect to make up to the lower base damage
Raiment + Static surge maybe, anyway I think the build playable without any sort of mana recovery
Very interesting. I dont use RoI (I’ve dropped two, but just cant stand the defense loss so it gathers dust in my stash), so I find Aspect of Audacity to be very useful. And I find Umbral to be absolutely essential for damage - nothing beats more blizzards for damage output.
I dont use Orb, and I only use Ice Shard for the enchantment, so piercing and biting aspects are worthless to me. I still want to fit in the armor aspect but so far it just doesnt line up for me.
I don’t understand your comments on Piercing and Biting. Piercing allows the enchanted shards to pierce and hit more enemies. Are you only running shards with a single point to apply burning? Why not Biting Cold? It gives a 40% chance to apply vulnerable when blizzard freezes an enemy.
It sounds like our builds are a bit different. I mostly use blizzard to apply mass crowd control and kill weaker targets. I focus fire elites with shards. I tried pure blizzard and found it too slow for killing elites.
One must distinguish between Ice SHARDS and Ice SPIKES. Different damage spells, mods on one do not affect the other.
My main damage comes from Glacial aspect. DPS on my weapon is meaningless. I do sometimes spray shards at a target, but only to apply burning. I run the shard enchantment for that same reason, although I flirt with swapping it out for Teleport about once a week.
Ironically, even though dps on my weapon is meaningless, I happened to get a really good 2800 DPS staff. Sigh. Fortunately, the other rolls on it were killer as well.
Only solution is to have both blizz and shards create ice spikes!
I run prodigy and generally thats it. I have gotten to a good place with MCR , Max mana, and resource generation I dont need umbral and replaced it with glacial on my ring, I put Elementalist on my amulet to crit constantly.
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I wonder if Aspect of the Elementalist might even be more powerful than Aspect of Control, post-nerf. I should test that. I wonder if I have an extra well-rolled Control to go back to if I dont like Elementalist. Does it work for the Spikes from Glacial or does that not count as a Mastery skill?
Have you experimented with points in blizzard and the Adept glyph at all? I tested it a bit in the open world with a good staff without Glacial Aspect equipped. It seemed to do decent damage with Adept, crowd control on staff, elemental dominance, etc. I haven’t tried it in high-level NMD yet. Not sure if the additional damage is worth the 4 skill points.