Ice lance (Level 7 talent): now reduce its cooldown from 1.5 to 1.25 after hitting a chilled target.
You could argue they buffed Ice Foes in same talent tier, so it is not an overall nerf. I dont care about Jaina being worse or better hero. What matters here is Devs are encouranging players who cant aim properly Frostbolt (a skillshot) to pick a talent way easier to land.
What is the point on going Ice lance now when is obviously better to play a far easier build. It greatly reduce the skill required for new jaina players or people at lower leagues, which is fine, but for players who are veteran playing with her (Lv53, Diamond1) now are forced to play braindead talents, which also makes her more boring, since now will be even more “land combo and forget”.
Ehm quite simple: nerfed or not nerfed, Q build still has by far the highest single target dps. If you need to kill 1 target (well up to 2 with pierce, but that’s situational), you go Q build.
You’re not going to take ice floes if you’re expecting to be hitting 1 person with it…
Considering Q build jaina has been by far the strongest mage for ages now, it’s not surprising it finally got a nerf.
I’m interested to see how aa+storm build performs now though, since the buff is really massive (the high damage on 3rd wave was quite irrelevant as it rarely hits, but now that the 2nd hit has +60%…). My gut feeling tells it’s a bit too much (considering the aa build was already quite good before), but we’ll see.
As for shotgun jaina, I think it’s still quite meh. The old Ice floes that had no cap on cdr performed miracles sometimes. This one - not so much. The 5 sec cdr hard cap hinders it. Well I guess, it performs in longer clumped fights (but cmon, how realistic is that? ppl clumped up for 5+ seconds?). I still miss the EEEEE moments of the old ice floes…
Also cdr 3->3.5 sec changes absolutely nothing for it (well a small buff to 1x1 - a situation where you don’t want to have this build anyway), as hitting 2 ppl is still the same capped 5 sec cdr…
I rly wish they instead nerfed the cdr to 2 sec but increased the cap to 8 sec. Then you could completely annihilate the whole team if they clump up as 4 [up to 6 E’s during icy veins duration, 100% root uptime] (but be much weaker when they don’t) - that would give the build a really powerful niche.
3 Likes
I think you still go Q at 7 after these changes. The other 2 talents are just meh.
The talent already got a huge nerf. Back then was 2 sec cd reduce, which was truly OP (when Ktz and Jaina were the King and Queen of hots, in the mage meta). But now it is almost non existant reduce. I just tried it in Train mode. On single target (without using ulties or ice veins, is almost the same dmg as either blizzard or e build. on single target. On multiple, is far less. (5 sec of time to land skills).
Ice lance is +31 single target dps.
Ice floes is +18 dps/target with 3.5 sec cdr (1 target) or +33 dps with 5 sec cdr (2 targets).
So as you see ice lance still is the go to pick for 1 target. And that’s before you consider the most important part of the talent - it allows you to chain only Q’s without taking extended chill duration lvl1 or using other skills to chill. And it also alleviates jaina’s mana burden heavily. If you hit 2 targets with Q, it’s cost is virtually reduced 3 times by that talent (30 cost, 10 mana return per target).
3 Likes
Btw, the icefury want gives +60 dps from the aa dps increase component alone (not even counting storm cdr). So technically that’s the highest damage potential talent. But hitting aa’s continually and not getting destroyed for it is just quite hard on jaina… Not to mention that you’d want ice barrier here to have a chance staying alive while doing all those aa’s, but it competes with storm front on lvl13 - a core talent for W build.
The build definitely has potential in some games, but is generally hard to utilize in practice. And for sustain dps (which this build is made for), a greymane or orphea will do a better job, anyway.
I’m definitely going to play around with it though.
Well, I often play jaina extremely agressive, in teamfights or in duels/ganking. So Ice barrier is mandatory for me no matter which build i go (though I always go for Q). I might give a try to W or E now but I don’t think I’ll never used to it. Its like playing Ming Orb build, its great, but boring, and I dont want that for my cold waifu.
Icy veins is the cornerstone of aggressive burst-damage jaina. You don’t die if you kill your target before he can do anything.
If you’ve never experienced the famous minigun build (it’s only fast enough to be called a minigun if you have icy veins), you have to do it. You just have to, at least once before the cdr is nerfed to 0.5 sec XD.
You shouldn’t really need ice barrier if the enemy is all dead though. And you still have ice block.
Seriously, with good positioning you just don’t need ice barrier.
Huh I just realised icy veins is 300% cdr. Why the hell do I always calculate it as 2x cd reduction, when it’s 4x XD. I really need to sometimes read the descriptions again before assuming I remember them correctly from reading 3 years ago… That actually puts shotgun build into a totally new light: 2 targets = 1.25 sec per E = 5 E’s during icy veins duration.
P.S. If you attempt to play shotgun build, please please please, don’t try it without Icy veins - that most definitely WON’T work. The main idea is to dish out as many E’s as you can if you happen to run into clumped up opponents. They’re really not going to stay clumped up for your convenience…
Yes I know that. The thing is really you never saw me playing ajajjaa. I am a real pain, go sneak behind enemy lines, kill healer and mage with Elemental and Q+E only, and wait for their frontline to focus me, when they dive, i have alerdady my Q+E again+since i saved wizzard, with ice barrier my shields are huge and most of the times I survive the dive and kill 3 in the process with some help from my team. Its really risky but somehow it works since no other jaina play like that so far i’ve seen. The only problem is if they have a good carry.
65 winrate on my most played hero. But probably not because of that but good macro (jaina is also great at double soak and ganki (with elemental+barrier+q build, can solo even people like arthas even with bad positioning).
Ice veins is probably the best talent Jaina has, but my playsyle requires shield so hard. I wish i wouldnt have to chose between both.
Ehm, if you calculate how much shields you would generate in 5 seconds with icy veins… Jaina would be THE anti-burst TANK, if icy veins could be picked together with barrier XD.
I guess ice barrier would have to have a cap on shields like kerrigan. And if you put it on lvl16, it would still be hard to pick it over other talents. Still that would be a much smaller tradeoff than with icy veins.
Nah, I like that now it’s a serious tradeoff between burst damage and survivability. They already destroyed a lot of such choices on other heroes by making those generic talent tiers (defensive-only, offensive-only). I’d like more choices like this, not fewer. They’re hard to balance, but they’re worth working at as choices like this are what actually allow heroes to be heavily diversified with talents.