Flurry triggers the GCD, and then the follow-up ice lance, triggers the GCD.
As a result, I keep finding frostbolt/GS into flurry followed by ice lance feels so clunky that it just destroys the flow. It makes it less fun to play.
Is it really like this or am I just doing something wrong?
It’s not inherently bad class design to chain two GCD skills together, it’s just something you’re not used to. Many other classes and specs(melee being huge) have more frequent and more rapid/unpredictable GCD skill chains. I quite like periods of rapid GCD spam, especially during FOrb+Blizzard with Freezing Rain. You just have to get used to it and possibly get a GCD tracking weakaura to make it a bit easier.
Just done use ice lance. Only use it for movement. Or if there are 2 or more targets. That’s what I do.
I’m used to it from FF14, but it was a bit of surprise with Frost mage because it was its quickness that I always loved about the spec.
I’m not necessarily arguing it’s bad class design, I’m discussing more if I find it enjoyable. I find it feels a bit out of place in the rotation cause you have a lot of instants surrounding it. In FF14, pretty much everything triggers the GCD, so the flow feels pretty constant. On the afflication lock, placing three dots in a row also doesn’t feel so bad. But ice lance after flurry feels clunky to me.
Perhaps it’s also experience, in that I preferred the class when it felt like you pressing lots of instant spells in a row due to the incoming procs.
Ice Lance and FoF feel fine, it’s a non-FoF ice lance after flurry that makes me wanna go play something else. Not that it really matters for the content I do with this mage, just wondered if anyone else found it clunky.
I think it felt much better at the 30%+ haste we had during the latter part of Legion. Only after getting above 20% haste in BfA has it stopped feeling clunky to me, but it has not yet reached the point where it feels smooth outside of Icy Veins/Time Warp.
Thanks, at least there is hope that it will end up feeling better.
As I gear up, it hardly seems worth using ice lance procs any more lol. I’m sort of lost on when to use them. Dump after glacial spike I guess? Unless it’s a cleave or something or I got a haste buff up, 25k isn’t really worth the gcd.
On the other hand, you can do quite a bit of movement with those GCDs. I use it to reposition quite often.
If you want to keep it simple just use this macro in place of Flurry on your action bar
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=3 Flurry, Ice Lance, Frostbolt
Just start tapping the button when you want to cast Flurry and it auto casts Ice Lance right after the flurry. And if you overdo it, you get the spell you should have cast next anyways: frostbolt.
EDIT: Added the reset=3 to the castsequence
Thank you for this.
I’m running a no ice lance build which has actually increased my dps.
Just use the rotation frost bolt till you get 5 icicles and a flurry proc. Glacial spike flurry then rinse and repeat . Ice lancing after flurry actually is a dps loss since it takes about a second to cast. I’ve found it way more benfitial to just skip the icelance and go right back in frostbolts … I’m out dpsing my mythic+ group most the times with this build on single target boss fights . Because imagine using 6 glacial spikes and every time you icelance. That’s about 6-7 seconds where u could’ve generated another glacial spike . Hope this helps
I had heard about a non ice-lance build, and yes, what you are saying makes a lot of sense to me.
It is a sad day when non ice lance builds are being talked about. Rip ice lance.
But I must add that build is only the most effective while running 2-3 flash freeze azerite traits. And lots of mastery . Since mastery increases icicle damage . And also talent splitting ice so each icicle has a 5% dmg increase which in total adds to 25% with 5 icicles . I currently have about 22% mastery and only 13% crit with 21% haste
There’s also a packed ice build that forgoes GS and is pretty competitive with NoIL build, if you really hate GS.
I’ve had IL hit over 100k, and i’m not that geared.
You can find it on the Altered-Time forums (I can’t post a link, apparently)
Fingers of frost should make ice lance go off the gcd. That would make for a very fun spec.
The no-ice lance builds requires 3x Flash Freeze traits.