I tried it out and its so, so stress free… here’s me hoping the answer is “it’s not bad at all! go for it!”
That’s probably the answer you’d get Bc people here mostly encourage anything works and as long as you’re good and it works for you, it works for you mentality
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While I’m a fan of “do whatever works for you”, I don’t like building around an ability that has a 15 second cooldown, costs 90 mana and fires in multiple parts.
Frostbolt build shoots out as fast as every 1.3 seconds with Icy Veins, and the damage is empowered even further once the target is frostbitten/it can pierce multiple enemy heroes.
Though Icy Veins is not 100% necessary either, the shields you can get from Ice Barrier are pretty massive and make her safe to play.
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Way better and reliable than it used to be. Blizzard Build is now a proper sustain build and with the Icefury Wand reworked you can now just keep pressuring the lane. Blizard isn’t reliable in teamfights but you can use it smartly to zone people out or otherwise help your team. The more stinging part is sacrificing Icy Veins although since this build is about sustain damage you likely won’t feel it.
I am not sure about full Blizzard Build but parts of it can always work and worked before. Even full Blizzard is good if you know what you sacrifice and what you gain through it.
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I had to check just to make sure, she doesn’t really even have a ‘Blizzard build’, it’s just two talents on 13 and 16 (Storm Front and Snowstorm). Although I guess it can qualify as a build or partial build.
But she has nothing else that directly buffs W.
Jaina has 2 mana Talents (on not competing tiers).
And a talent that gives her 1.25 cdr from AAs (on everything), giving it a cd of around 5 sec.
So it’s not that bad.
Tho I’d still not really recommend it, because it lacks any kind of defense, and Blizzard can be walked out.
It’s fun in QM tho, especially if you for some reason can double soak as her.
(And she has 3 Blizzard talents, and I’d argue that RoF and Deep Chill at lvl 20 are “Blizzard” talents.)
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Icefury Wand is a massive CDR on Blizzard which turns her 15s ability to almost 4s ability. Similarly her mana troubles are non-existent thanks to Arcane Intellect. So you got a level 4, level 7, leve 13 and level 16 talent building up to her… yeah, it’s a full build. No way around it.
Main reason why I don’t pick it imo
Ppl literally walk out of it unless hard cced.
Yeah that was the build I had in mind.
Finger of Frost + Arcane Intellect for the +spell power rather than mana regen, but I might grab lingering chill because it makes your life a lot easier.
Icy Wand for the CDR reduc because landing AAs is easy.
Storm Front is amazing
Not a fan of Snow Storm, the damage increase is pathetic. If only 1 wave hits, no bonus. 2 waves, 25% damage bonus, 3 waves, 75% bonus, but when will you ever hit 3 waves?
With Icy Veins build…
- Every second you spend aiming that frost bolt is lost DPS.
- Icy Veins is not burst, its sustain. So looking for that perfect opportunity where you can be left alone to DPS for 5 seconds and not get CCed or popped is super stressful.
And both of these is just too ****ing stressful. Just too ****ing stressful. And I play Jaina for Water Elemental and nothing else LOL.
But the blizzard build, 5sec cd frost bolt has no stress of “OMG IM LOSING DPS!!! FIRE FIRE FIRE!!!” followed by “OMG I MISSED! ITS THE END OF THE WORLD!!! MOST OF ICY VEINS IS WASTED NOW!!!”, you pop cone of cold when you go to aa something and not part of a combo or anything.
Its just so much more stress free.
Wand would count as W talent (though you can’t always safely AA chilled targets), but Arcane Intellect kind of affects all her builds.
It might even be used in Q builds, though then you give up the ability to pierce multiple heroes in teamfights which is not optimal.
The one “full” build I never really played is E, I just don’t like the lv7 talent even with cd reduction as it’s a fairly expensive and requires nearly melee range (but the real issue isn’t mana or cd, it’s that it requires you to be very close to enemies)
The safest to play out of the 3 is probably Blizzard build.
It requires aggressive usage of Icefury Wand (which just got buffed). Personally, it’s my preferred build. If you build for Frostbolt and Ice Lance, you rely on constantly landing that on the same target to be effective, whereas Blizzard works as an overwhelming zoning tool. With the range upgrade you can trap teams or make them choose between splitting and eating a lot of damage and a slow.
I run it with Lingering Chill, and then Deep Chill at 20 to setup engages off of the slows.
Edit: Also, the Snowstorm talent at 16 is kinda of a trap talent as standalone piece to her build. If you’ve got someone else with hard CC setup, like Uther, ETC, or Diablo, it’s absolutely insane–especially for pushing. However, it’s very rare/unlikely you’ll be able to use it yourself, since it shares the same tier with Numbing Blast.
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It’s not so bad when she has better CC/burst damage.
Im a fan of git gud
Dont pick W build. You dont have the aim to hit all 3 reliable
Get icyveins even if you miss , the cdr makes up for it
You forgot her lvl 7: Icecfury wand. Lowers Cd of blizzard when AA an chilled target. Without it, blizzard build doesn’t work as well.
It’s very stress free. go for it
It was a top build for the Mage Brawl. Since damage sets were doubled, and Jaina already had a unique damage boost, the not-moving parts of structures made sieging down towers ridiculously easy for a blizzard jaina (despite her probably being the least chosen mage <.< >,>)
I’ve generally regarded it as more a siege/specialist build as is, so the coming cdr from Icefury hits working on pve targets bolsters that aspect of the build imo. Cast long range blizzards, but chill something close for cdr, rinse repeat.
Rotate lanes, take mercs, siege towers from outside their attack range, and just be a caster-version of Hammer cheese.
Another note about Blizzard Build. The level 16 talent and damage bonuses for Jaina in general.
Her trait provides a baseline 50% bonus damage, which is combined with Icy Veins why she’s the Ice Queen of Damage. Yet this feature also makes other bonus damage factors interact differently with her.
Let’s start with Fingers of Frost which increases her bonus damage to chilled targets from 50% to 60%. While this looks good in effect it only gives you 6.66% bonus damage. It isn’t bad but keep in mind that even completing the quest it isn’t a significant power spike, you basically deal damage as if you are a level higher than normal.
Arcane Intellect is unique among Jaina’s damage-boosting talents because it gives her spell power. It isn’t a damage bonus so it isn’t additive with Chilled’s effects. Instead it provides a flat 10% bonus damage. This is really nice and has no quest component so if you want single target damage or just don’t care about Q-build this is a must.
Snowstorm is providing 50 and 100% bonus damage on the second and third waves respectively. This stacks additively with Chilled so unless somebody freshly steps into these you increase the normal damage bonus to 100-110 and 150-160% respectively. So depending on whether you picked Finger of Frost prior this means 31-33% and 62.5-66.6% bonus damage respectively. As you see additive stacking reduces the power of this talent significantly. It’s still good at siege but the strength of Blizzard was never its full damage but the fact you can just place it somewhere and it keeps dealing damage.
Northern Exposure is your sole armor reduction talent. People tend to stop at that but when we talk about damage it should be mentioned alongside your other damage boosting capabilities. Every point of negative armor gives bonus damage which, like spell power, is multiplicative with your other types of bonus damage. Things only get complicated when the enemy has armor but usually to your benefit. You see when a target has positive armor then armor reduction’s value increase exponentially. A target with 20 armor is reduced to 0, this is comparable to having 25% bonus damage. Meanwhile if Deathwing’s 40 armor is reduced to 20 that nets 33.3% bonus damage. Hogger’s 60 armor reduced to 40? 50% bonus damage! Again, the higher the opponent’s armor value is the more you get out of reducing it. This is something people miss. Yes, you don’t do full damage but you will do a significantly larger fraction of reduced damage if you reduce their armor.
Anyways, lastly I talk about Wintermule which is an odd exception but also shows trend with clones and mirrored abilities. Wintermule recasts your abilities with 50% damage, this is an absolute multiplier. So if you got 100% bonus damage with Wintermule it deals normal damage. There isn’t much to say about this aside from the fact that you cannot get smartass with it. Wintermule does exactly as it’s said on the tin, deal half damage of your spells via recasting it by the Water Elemental.
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Last I checked wintermute doesn’t double cast blizzard, it casts after yours ends.
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It still effectively mimics your spell, just differently from Q and E. Not really sure what value you thought is in your input there.
I think this is a misconception in regards to the power of this spell, and other heroes with multiple additive damage boosters.
If the talent was multiplicative, it would simply have different numbers… that probably get the same end result.
It’s the final output that matters and is balanced around.