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The vuln uptime for shredding blades is a really good part of the aspect. Kudos. However in a game with 20+ enemies on the screen, even with Enchantment Master Ice blade enchant, it’s just not that good. Maybe for single target. A good fix would be to allow this aspect to let Ice Blades deal AoE cold damage that makes enemies vulnerable. Because right now, it’s just outclassed by Lightning Spear in every way shape or form. No meta builds are running shredding blades because its a bad choice for damage, and for mass vuln application. Even with 5 blades out, only 5 out of 25 targets on the screen will be vuln from it.
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The damage part of the aspect is another textbook case of Sorc getting bad multipliers. A simple fix would be to have you do 1.25x damage to vulnerable enemies. As it stands, it is a 1.25x multi to your vulnerable additive. So if you have 200% vuln additive, it would take it to 250%, which is about a 5% increase in damage at endgame. 200% is hard to get, especially in a meta that often at most will run 1 legendary ring and wand/dagger focus. Not to mention for whatever reason exploit is still at 7.9% per 5 dex, when Destruction got buffed to 19.8 after the crit/vuln bucket changes.
Edit: apparently the 1.25x damage does work, but its only to the target that the ice blade made vulnerable. my test used ice shard to apply vuln. would confirm the theory and testing others have done in regard to it working
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I stepped away from this aspect as well for similar reasons:
(1) single target
(2) very slow
(3) chance to make vulnerable is still low at 40%. It is much less than that considering the snails pace speed of IB
(4) by the time it reaches target, target is already dead and has to chase a new target… and by that time the 6 (or 8?) second IB uptime is up
So there are too many conditions that need to hold true for this aspect to be effective: IF IB catches the opponent, if opponent is not already dead by the time it hits, if it applies vulnerable and if you can hit it again with a new spell.
This aspect is useful if you have frozen orb in one of your two enchantment slots because in that case, most enemies are always vulnerable (assuming your damage source relies on spamming a skill like mine does). When this occurs, youre applying 25% multiplicative damage to a good chunk of enemies at once. I have tested the 25% multiplier on a test dummy and provided test results in a previous post, and i can confirm you get 25% multiplicative damage. My test results are not aligned with yours so if you havent already, test on a test dummy.
Lightning Spear causes the splash effect but it too is pretty lame. Test it on the test dummy and see if and how long it takes it to hit the test dummy. Now consider your real enemy wont be standing still and is really fast.
Lastly, i dont think exploit glyph and chasing after the Frigid Fate Lengendary node is helpful unless you (1) have frozen orb as an enchantment AND (2) you spam your skills so that frozen orb shoots out often
Yeah I agree. I love that they buffed Lightning Spear but now Ice Blades is basically obsolete and frankly I don’t like having it take up a slot on my skill bar just to proc the 3rd stack of the Tal’rasha ring. We should be able to change the element types of our spells anyway.
And then there is the broader point that skills should not need so many specific aspects to shine, especially when offensive aspect slots are incredibly limited due to how good most uniques are. They’re trying to thread the needle between uniques feeling powerful and constantly introducing new aspects for every season but most of the time it’s not a meaningful choice at all and just leaves the player frustrated that there aren’t enough slots to use all the tools you have at your disposal.
Take something like Chain Lightning for example. You need two aspects just to make it work and one only goes in a ring slot which most of the really good uniques compete for and that aspect doesn’t even give you any DPS benefit, just lets you spam CL with the mana return it provides. I’d love to also be able to use Accelerating but there is just no room, especially when Conceited and Storm Swell are basically all but mandatory.
Sorcerers in general are just plagued by having to rely on stacking damage multipliers that come from aspects. Aspects that just give a flat damage increase are just not fun. That’s what the paragon boards are for. Aspects should do something cool like adding meteorites to your Meteor or icicles to your Blizzard, etc.
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I want my ice blades to fly around my frozen orb as an additional outer ring. Is that so much to ask for? Then it would be ‘shredding’. Maybe like 10 of them spinning. Each can proc individually.
BTW, the 25x multiplier only works on the target that Ice Blades made vulnerable. It should apply to any target that is vulnerable. It’d make it a lot more appealing. Especially since our construct could make things vulnerable in AOE situations.
Wait are you for real?
Too good, thanks for the laugh devs. El oh el.
Sincere question here… Are you speculating this or did you test this? How did you test this?
If i was testing this aspect, i would collect 3 numbers to evaluate: (a) base damage with vanilla firewall (b) apply vulnerability with lightning spear, cast firewall and collect damage number from FW (c) add on shredded blades aspect and repeat B.
The hypothesis here is that we will see a 25% increase between B and C.
I would test this myself, but this aspect does not work with my build. It should work well with any build that uses frozen orb as an enchantment for the reasons i stated earlier in this thread
I just dropped 145k g’s to test this for you.
Looks like Patronum is right. Only on the target affected by iceblades not all vuln enemies. Very easy to see when using FO to proc vuln for the other test dummies in the group.
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Ouch. Probably worth it to report as a bug. Either the aspect is working as expected and the description is wrong or the inverse is true.
If the former is the case, a description change is warranted because the way it is currently worded would lead a normal person to have incorrect expectations.
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Probably incorrectly worded, but who knows.
I also think it should read 50% and do 50%, but you know…bugs.
Thanks for the verification ninja
I will report it on the bug report in case it is supposed to work on all vuln targets and they don’t know the issue.
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this would confirm my testing as I used Ice shards to apply the vuln. and another person tested it with ice blades to apply the vuln and got 1.25x
yeah, it needs to at least aoe splash the vuln to make it worth it. otherwise, it pretty much only targets one target and the rest you’re not getting any benefit. such a fail.
WTH, that’s a complete joke. Makes it decent for bossing (assuming no adds), and maybe PvP.
Why can’t we ever have nice things?
Big brother barb took all the fun toys.
I swear they’re afraid we might actually have fun.
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Our class would actually be a lot more competitive if the Tactician glyph worked as intended. Currently it is additive, but it is written as multiplicative
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Running a CL sorc in the early endgame stage… Level 71. Been using frost bolt and orb enchant as my ice damage… And even though IB is a little subpar, would you switch bolt out for IB? I usually mix in a bolt just to boost damage,. Another option would be adding Blizzard, but Mana might run short
They need to also just undo the nerf for how much cooldown you need to use for the enchantment. Lightning spear superior with unstable currents by far.
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