Break from Glacial Spike

Classes Mage
1

Ive been a frost mage since MoP and have really enjoyed it. Ive always love the machine gun style build that was a staple of the spec. When Glacial spike was introduced in Legion, it was a cool idea. Thematically, it was fun and seeing a big number as a frost mage was cool. The first time it was truelly a contender for being meta was in BFA with in the Eternal Palace and with corruptions. I dont really remember where it was at in Shadowlands but not aure if it was all that great. It had its hayday in Dragonflight though and has been “meta” ever since. I know the mages are split on whether they like it or not and I fall into the dislike side of that argument. I tolerated it in DF and found ways to be viable with out it the other times (mage discord needs to grab a dictionary to learn what the definition of Viable is and means).

With having hero specs, I think this a good chance that both worlds can be satisfied. At the moment, frostfire is best for glacial spike build and I have found success with a spellslinger machine gun build. This could be a great opportunity to tune the two different builds in a way that doesnt cause much friction between the two and gives options to players. This post wouldn’t be worth anything if I just complained so my solution is two parts. Buff icicles for spellsligers and buf mastery for frostfie.

The buff to icicles is to target the passive damage that goes unnoticed but deals a reliable amount of damage. The quick pace of the machine gun build leaves little room to add more spells to improve your damage so it can play into the frozen turret where you position yourself well and unload on your target with a decent amount of freedom of movent since you have a lot of instant cast spells all of the extra frozen orbs you get help with keeping the procs flowing. I dont have corrisponding buff for arcane since it is spell related.

Glacial spike scales off of mastery and Int but its not a great idea to mess with Int. What made GS so powerful in previous expansion was its interaction with mastery with the mastery corruptions and necklace traits. With mastery being a decent part in fire mages as well it would benefit that spec too. Adding a mastery proc whenever Icy Veins is “casted” would give a satisfying power boost that not only would feel good seeing bigger numbers but would help excel GS mages at snap priority.

Just my thoughts, hope a dev might see this and let us re-enjoy our machine gun playstyle again. These would be a quick change that could make the spec better for everyone.

2 Likes
2

I never liked glacial spike,for me its to clunky and need to much concentration on it.

2 Likes
3

Same.

My mage is not specced into glacial and rof bec. i don t like those spells much.
So atm i play like DF season 1 and for my needs (hero curve, delves e.g.) it is enough.
It would be enough for half mythic raid too, but im not intrested into mythic raiding anymore.

Sadly the devs just not brought any +new+ and fine gameplay options…just stick to the boring past. I will not repeat myself here about a missing something, you can read that in my other threads ^^

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4

Not having GS was fine for mythic. We went 6/8M this tier, I held my own against other members of the team. It wasn’t purple parces but a handful of blues and probably could have had blues across the board if I had more time in the tier. And for heroic, averaged 91.5. So even being sub optimal it was fine. Most late raid bosses come down to execution of mechanics more than anything.

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5

I really like the spell effect of GS, but I don’t like the mechanics of it and the type of 1-shot gameplay it incentivizes. On the other hand, I loved the Ebonbolt mechanic of it giving us guaranteed proc, but I hated the ugly spell effect.

If GS could be changed to have the Ebon Bolt effect, I’d be happy. Then we could talk about fixing Frost mastery.

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6

I’m not a big fan of it either. I use it because it deals good damage, but I’d prefer to spec otherwise. I’ve been doing a bit of heroic raiding, and it helps my damage to be pretty good.

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7

I’ve always like Frost and although Glacial Spike has only been a staple basically in Dragonflight, I feel like the spec would be too bare-bones without it anymore. If it were up to me, it would be baseline, but I understand that there are people that dislike the playstyle, so I wouldn’t be against there being a non-GS option. That being said, it’s borderline criminal that we haven’t gotten the DF s3/s4 tier set as a talent option yet.

Just wanted to point out that it was meta in Battle for Dazar’alor with the meme build where we completely ignored Fingers of Frost and Ice Lance in favor of generating more Icicles (there was no Hailstones until 10.0) and it was a straight up DPS loss in Shadowlands over no talent at all in that row, like you’d literally do more damage if you didn’t pick a talent for that row over speccing into Glacial Spike.

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