Frost rotation

Near as I can tell Frost ST is going to be take Spellslinger, then cast Flurry, Icy Veins, and spam Ice Lance.

Is that right?

Thats an option, if you do that its about a 12% dps loss though. You’ll need to use some other spells during your downtime between splinterstorms, small as that may be.

Early days, but I’m seeing about ~5k DPS loss between glacial spike and not-spike. Experimenting with Ray of Frost / Cryopathy because it hurt me seeing all those wasted icicles running Glacial Spike but just not pressing the button during Icy Veins.

Granted, haven’t really had fights that last longer than the Icy Veins window yet.

To me it’s hard to believe that in single target during Icy Veins casting Glacial Spike to consume winters chill is a dps loss compared to consume it with Ice lance, just because Ice lance is faster. GS does so much more damage than a splinter.

With my gear Splinters do around 5k damage. From the tooltip what I get is that they stack up to 8 and then a splinterstorm is casted. In that case it would be 40k damage.

Same for Ray of Frost. On the guides it says we don’t take it anymore because it not consumes winters chill. However, with the haste during Icy Veins, we can shatter ray and then cast 2 IL before winters chill goes off. How casting (frostbolt>flurry>ILx2) x2 is dps gain over (RoF>flurry>FoF ILx2 + frostbolt>flurry>ILx2) plus the damage of the splinters?

I think the idea is that in the timespan of RoF or GS you get 4x (or more) Ice Lances, each of which generates two frost splinters during Icy Veins (Augury Abounds talent). So every 4x lances is another splinterstorm, which is more winter’s chill, which is more splinters, etc.

Minor mention to Spellfrost Teachings, where all these double splinters might be resetting your Frozen Orb.

So in a short timespan / limited ability reference frame RoF or GS may outweigh ice lances, but in the wider synergy ice lance just becomes the most efficient splinter generator, and chilled lances + splinters + splinterstorms outweighs the raw damage of GS or RoF. It also may be a bit easier / less punishing rotationally, and definitely is far more mobile.

All theory mind, I definitely don’t have the field time to take any of it as gospel. As I said, my early testing shows RoF + Cryopathy (no GS) as not too far behind. But gear scaling and practice will show the real gaps.

I don’t super like this if it is optimal. I think RoF and/or GS getting some interaction with splinters would shake it up, but you may need to increase the amount of splinters necessary for a storm to balance that out. Something like… ice lance generates 1 splinter, frostbolt does 2, GS does 3-4, RoF does 3-4 over its channel? It feels odd to ignore so many talents and buttons during icy veins.

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Ice lance, Ice lance, Ice lance, Ice lance,Ice lance, Ice lance, Ice lance, Ice lance, Ice lance, Ice lance,Ice lance, Ice lance. :+1:

Just Ice Lance and chill.

Maybe I’m just bad, but I’m at a point now where I’d rather have an easier build that I can play well than an optimal build I’m terrible at, even if it’s a dps loss. As long as the loss is less than what happens when I mess up splinterstorms I can live with it.