Glacial Spike/Multi Hit Tricks

Classes Mage
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I’m trying to research what I’m doing wrong (which is probably a lot of things). I was looking at top frost mage M+ builds and have a really confusing concept that seems like I’m just massively misunderstanding.

I think what I’m trying to figure out is if the dps guilds just have glacial spike totally in the wrong place in terms of priority. Or is there some other subtlety about how to get multi-hits that I’m missing. The guides clearly say things like build icicles, but don’t overcap to get Glacial Spike. I’m wondering if (from a priority point of view) “always cast glacial spike if it is up” makes more sense.

Yufan is in the top Atal Dazar run: www warcraftlogs com/reports/y2TLxbajBvAn4V9z#fight=1&type=damage-done&source=3

Somehow Yufan cast Glacial Spike 134 times and got 485 hits. That’s about 3.6x the number of casts.

I had been looking at www youtube com/watch?v=6Zcep2cmiBE which shows a 390k +24 everbloom from the frost mage perspective. I discovered (to my absolute shock - since it is not mentioned in www method gg/guides/frost-mage/playstyle-and-rotation) that ice nova is an important part … but I don’t know exactly what it’s doing - because it freezes a lot of trash mobs, which increases damage. It can also (I believe) be used (as well as frost nova) to shatter a glacial spike.

I ran a +13 Atal Dazar this week and got 71 hits off of 50 glacial spikes: www warcraftlogs com/reports/a1zKnb3gDmGTd96N#fight=last&type=damage-done&source=5. I also did a bunch of testing on target dummies and I clearly see the fragments there. My guess is that I have (based on the old build prior to the class changes that eliminated rune of power) over-emphasized ice-lance when I have fingers of frost compared to glacial spike.

I appreciate any insight folks might have. Especially, I’m wondering (A) if you should always use Glacial Spike when it is charged, and (B) if using frost and ice nova for anything other than shattering glacial spike does anything? Does freezing things (briefly) increase the damage they take, or cause more secondary effects off of crits?

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I think that might be including 4set’s effect of shattering a glacial spike, and using your novas/pet freeze allows the 2nd glacial to shatter and explode as well [as opposed to just prio target with flurry]

1 Like
3

Logs is including 4 set as said above. You can double shatter your glacials with ice nove/pet nova and frost nova.

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Yes, but you cast blizzard, orb, and cms/coc over it since they dont generate icicles.

It shatters them for the duration, just like winters chill. Which means higher crit rate. Atm we only use those on glacial spike. And you’ll notice not everything in dungeons is freezable, in which case you’d want to adjust your rotation based on that.