While skimming through the Classes i noticed every non Ultimate skill has at least 1 Aspect synergy in their kit.
The only exception is Ice Blades. It has Zero.
I think it deserves at least 1 aspect to make it at least somewhat attractive to use.
Is this a massive oversight by Blizzard, or is there some aspects still not showing the clbeta testers have insight on?
Ice Blades was severely over-nerfed and is pretty much a dead skill now. I doubt that even an Ice Blades aspect would make it usable.
Seriously though, read the tooltip and you’ll see that Ice Blades brings absolutely nothing to the table. Long cooldown, short duration, almost zero damage, and it only applies vulnerability to a single target.
I am honestly glad Blizzard is actively nerfing all the passive damage sources and turn them into support skills. This isn’t nor it should be idle game. Ice Blades are now utility skill that apply vurnability and decreases cooldown of your other skills (if specced as such). Other spec variant suggests we will be able to summon multiple ice blades at the same time (attack speed scaling with amount of active ice blades, which is positive feedback loop with their own CD reduction from attacks).
That being said it should definitely have aspect that cements it as support skill. However if I am not mistaken not all aspects nor uniques were available in previous client, hence couldn’t been datamined. I would stay optimistic.
i do not think this is the goal. otherwise those conjuration nodes and glyphs makes no sense to me if it is meant as pure utility w/o providing meaningful dps.
Ice Blade gets -0.5sec colldown on vulnerable, and you can speec over regular passive of sorc, that a froozen enemy gets vulnerable, and you can also specc over sorc class mechanic, that every hit of iceblade gives 15% chill per hit, which tranlsalte into freeze → vulnerable.
Synergy enough?
that same paragon board hints clearly to the fact they want you to get more than one conj skill if you are going for a conj build. hence they consider of course conj skills must be individually weaker than other skills (core or mastery). since they are supposed to work together, they naturally can’t do each same dmg as they were core or mastery skills. else in a conj build w 3 of those, you’d have immediately gone imba.
excpect you can do these synergy analyse for all skills, and still they get a uniqe aspect on top of it.
Then what passive are you talking about? there is none like that. And besides ice blades on their own do not chill. Sacrificing an enchant slot for a chill effect on such a weak skill that only does st and has pathing issues, makes absolutely no sense.
And why do i want vulnerable synergy for ice blades anyway, when they already provide vulnerability?
You have no clue about sorc, and try to sound smart. Please inform yourself first, before you talk big.
by that logic everything with synergy needs to be individual weaker. Given the fact that everything besides ice blades has aspect synergy, meaning ice blades would have need to be stronger not weaker. Since its missing synergy.
Coming back to the point that everything has aspect synergy expect ice blades.
I think the idea is that ice blade can be used as a utility skill. First, it is among the highest lucky hit skills for sorc. It procs vulnerable. The only other skill that does that for sorc is talented frost nova, which has a long Cooldown. I think for frost builds to compete against fire and lightning at the very end game is its ability to maintain vulnerability against bosses. Ice blades is a way to do that.
The build I’m currently planning uses Ice Blades in an Ice Shards build. It’s there solely to improve boss dps, which frost will struggle with unless it keeps up vulnerability. The build also has good synergy with lucky hit and ice blades will provide a good source for that on bosses. For anything that can be chilled or frozen (most trash) frost will already clear with ease. Ice blades is there to shore up single target weakness.
The frostbolt enchant I think is a sleeper right now. The ability for ice shards to chill enemies is great for trash because you freeze stuff faster and great for bosses to stagger faster. Adding chill to ice blades will also be very nice against bosses to stagger faster. Chill is the weakest stagger buildup mechanic but if every attack chills, could be strong.
So icy blades won’t be great for trash clearing except to activate more lucky hit procs, but is there solely to increase boss dps by keeping it vulnerable outside of frost nova cd.
I don’t think zoo sorc will be very strong, but it might work in world t3 pretty well. Maybe in future seasons there will be more to support it. A lot of classes have underperforming skills that will hopefully get more love over time.
As I was looking at builds, I couldn’t see a way to have the same gear/enchants for trash as bosses. I think for sorc, weapon swap and enchantment slot may be required when you get to bosses unless you way outgear the content you’re farming.
So is this in the ballpark of what you’re looking at?
https://d4builds.gg/builds/fa308638-3299-4a45-a16e-859ac5ee922d/
Ice Shards should do a handy number on trash while you have a barrier active as it will be ricothetting all over the place. As goes bosses, Icy Touch, Hoarfrost, Permafrost, and Avalanche should be nice damage boosts.
You have an extra point in Frost Bolt.
Whoops, that is because Frost Bolt is meant to be in the Enchantment slot. Fixed.
The best spell for lucky hit is ice shards. Since it clearly states per hit.
But for ice blades(per cast) you need to take those 70% and divide it by 6 since ice blade does 6 attacks inside their attack window. it is nowhere near 70% for each individual attack. And has issues with moving targets, which drasticly reduces its usefulness.
for all your lucky hit questions.
Funny that you think conj builds will be bad, Kripp for example thinks its one of the 3 best builds for sorc @endgame, the problem is, it struggles in the early to midgame a lot. Who knows if hes right, but he theorycrafts sorc a lot and isnt the dumbest i would say.
You probably wanted the crit upgrade not the crackling one for spark, otherwise this makes no sense in this build.
Crit is a really taxing stat in the early game, i wouldnt rely on it too much for leveling. even lategame sorc struggles with crit, and needs to do a lot more then other classes to achieve enough crit rate.
But what im still asking is more skill identity, ice blades needs an aspect for that and some incentive to take it beside some weak vuln uptimes. Right now its only halfway decent in conj builds. or in a super glass cannon lightning builds with a lot of cdr.
You bring up a fair point about lucky hit and moving targets. I was thinking more of lucky hit chance per cast, which ice blades is 71% and ice shards is ~58% without any lucky hit modifiers. End game, ice blades would have over 100% chance meaning average more than one lucky hit per cast. But in practice, I agree that Ice Shards is the best lucky hit skill. Ice blades just is icing and also provides vulnerable. Lucky hit is key to the build if you’re using Avalanche which I think is the only option for a build that wants to kill bosses since shatter does nothing against bosses.
I’m hoping ice blades will be easier to use against bosses and my build is using ice blades to improve boss dps. If I out gear what I’m farming, then it’s unnecessary. I’m imagining a very end game scenario where you need as many damage multipliers as possible and vulnerable is one of the most important. Maybe CDR will be more effective at reducing frost nova CD to maintain vulnerability.
For crit, I’m looking at Elementalist’s Aspect, which gives 20-40% critical strike chance above 100 mana. However, I’m not sure if that adds to your chance or multiplies your current chance. e.g. if you have based 10% crit chance, does it become 50% or 14%? If the former, this is the best aspect for any sorcerer build that can solve the mana issue and spam their main ability. Greatly increasing your chance to dip into crit damage multiplier more often is huge.
This build has one too many skills. Deep Freeze isn’t even on your skill bar. 
Was rushing this morning so I could get to chores out of the house. Let me address these issues. 
Thanks for the site
Apparently Ice shards is listed twice (unless that’s the Enchant), but interested in that passive about the Shards (Says while you have a barrier active it will treat all enemies as frozen), what does that mean ?, the shards would bounce off of all ? 
What is the purpose of spark? You ideally want to remove generators off your skill bar, but they will be necessary while leveling. My plan is to use frost bolt or maybe fire bolt if I have the enchant to get mana. When mana is almost becoming self-sustaining and I can almost entirely spam ice shards, I will drop the generator for ice blades (or maybe some other skill if ice blades sucks).
This is my current thought: h ttps://tinyurl.com/5n8xuy2z (forum wouldn’t let me link so remove the space after h)
This build depends on high amounts of lucky hit to restore mana and make ice shards free as much as possible. The aspect that gives two casts on avalanche proc is critical to maximize mana efficiency. Combine that with mana regen (which should increase a bit as you level and forced to take some willpower on paragon board).
I put a point in firebolt so I have the option to use the enchant for a good size increase to single target damage and can be good if I encounter highly frost resistant mobs. The second point of frost bolt does nothing anyway if it’s not on my bar.
i already posted the calcs for lh, its less. that guy in sheet did the math correctly.
EDIT: there is another sheet that shows every stats max values on items. Krip mentioned it, but wouldnt gave the adress away. But i guess it will be public knowledge in a few days.
Hmm. Ice Shards is 16% per hit, so that the probability of not getting lucky hit on a single cast is (1-.16)^5, which is 41.8% or the chance of getting lucky hit on a single cast with all shards hitting target is 58.2%.
Am I not understanding lucky hit correctly, then? I’m only calculating the chance of activating lucky hit, not the chance for the effect you want to occur since that is variable depending on what effect you’re talking about.
Ice blades is weird to calculate because I’m guessing the chance is affected by attack speed. I assume 10% faster attack speed would increase lucky hit chance by 10% since you get 10% more attacks (theoretically), but who knows.
the maximum you can achieve is 38% per hit when you slot every possible lh you can. that includes paragon, items, Aspects, and skills and lucky hit elixirs. So its quite high if you invest that much. but i would argue thats very unlikely to happen in most builds.
10% as translates to 10% more lh and modified by the skills lh modifier in theory but if the 10% doesnt translate to another attack it does nothing, so its not 1:1