A normal shambling zombie literally outran my Ice Blades. Out of the 6 secs duration for Ice Blades, 3 secs were spent chasing after a mob. I had an entire “no-mana build” planned for ice blades at end game, saw this happen at level 15, and promptly canned the idea and deleted the character.
The last I checked, there is no way for us to increase the duration of conjurations, only their damage. I believe a balance pass needs to be done quickly on these spells to either drastically increase their duration (e.g. by a factor of 3x or more) or impact: a whole class of spells are unused because they have been poorly tested/thought out!
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There is a glyph, which gives +20% duration.
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Thanks for that 
, missed out on glyphs.
But you are right, the closed alpha → server slam nerf on them, hit them hard, and killed possible builds.
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Ice blades were so much fun with the enchant effect of spawning them from kills. They really butchered the class it’s incredible.
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I quickly spec’d into IB as I found a +2 item. Wow, I couldn’t believe how bad it was and how bad it looked. It’d look bad in D1, let alone D4. Awful spell!
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This. I couldn’t believe that was IB when i cast it 
And then I realized it couldn’t kill a shambling zombie (grey mob) before it despawned. That was it for me.
I can’t believe that some of these spells even made it into the release version.
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they nerf conjuration spell to void because some douchescumbag thought lvl 25 beta was endgame…
Must’ve been the intern who came up with that one. The name sounds so cool, “Ice Blades”. I thought I’d be throwing forwards some cool ice spell. Truly horrendous animation and implementation on Blizz’s part.
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I have a build focused on Conjuration and Ice Blades at 60 right now. +118% conjuration damage, +82% cold damage, rank 7. Enchantments are Ice Blades and Frost Nova so that Ice Blades can proc Frost Nova and apply Vulnerability to groups.
Listed damage is 2047-2502. White damage vs. mob outside of Kyovashad per hit is around 900-1500.
It’s INCREDIBLY anemic, not least because there are no legos supporting it. The biggest use I get out of Ice Blades right now are as Frost Nova bots. It sucks big time.
oh i forgot to put my build (stats in notes section on my actual gear):
(https://d4builds.gg/builds/2598a53a-7324-4593-a0b2-0b68d7f6068e/)
i run very slow Tier 30 NM against the meta iceshard that i have too.
btw, need some help for adjustement of this build for T30+ NM. Thank you
Add hydra in your build, if you can free 1 “cooldown” from your skill bar, if stuff allows it, you can get up to 3 of them, and they count to 100% to your conjuration damage.
And they add Burn to your build, so you can add the burn passives like more crit dmg or self heal.
Lightning bolt has amazing potential for PVP, for those of us that enjoy that competitive aspect. The problem is you need to put bunch points into shock passives at the end of tree to make it give dmg reduction and extra stuns.
But yes as far as PVE, the conjugations are absolutely trash imo
I thought tbey would be teleporting around and doing damage.
Instead, they can’t even finish a skeleton and dont lower the cooldown of other abilities by much at all.
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Are you taking that evolution that reduces other cooldowns by 20% of the Ice Blade reduction?
That is a trap. 20% of 0.5s. A whole ZERO-POINT-ONE second cooldown reduction per VULNERABLE enemy hit. It’s incredibly awful. It maybe made sense in the first beta where Enchanted Ice Blades needed only 20s instead of 40s, and the Enhanced upgrade reduced cooldowns by 1s instead of 0.5s and it was relatively easy to have 5-6 blades out permanently, but post-nerf?
Complete trash. Do not buy that upgrade, it is a waste of a skill point.
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yes dont take that upgrade, im using iceblade with atk speed to apply vuln very fast with forst nova too
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Makes total sense but more frost nova and attack speed on ice blades is better for packs.
The other is (if nerfed and only slightly) better for single target bosses.
While three different sources of frost nova is fun, you dont really need that many for most packs. What is needed is a constant supply of vulnerability outside of boring ice shards build.
More Frost Nova more now is good for bosses because you can quickly stack up stun.
And Frost Nova with the upgrade applies Vulnerability.
There is pretty much no situation where taking the other upgrade is worth it. (Heck, I have doubts that even taking the attack speed is worth it because most of the time you will be unlikely to have more than 2-3 blades and their movement speed and getting in range of targets to swing is the more pressing issue).
Yeah, its only ever 20% because most builds arent using the ice blades enchantment to spawn more.
What I think is more important is ensuring you have enough lucky hit to gurantee one frost nova from one cast of ice blades. In that sense, you’ve guranteed one extra frost nova per mob pack. And of course guranteed stagger.
That said, that enchantment slot competes directly with ice shards enchantment and ice bolt spam. Is ice blades better than simply casting 4 ice bolts for its feeze stagger on bosses? And losing chill on ice shards if yoire running it? Im not so sure.
Someone hasn’t put much time into their research at all…