Ice lance was changed at some point to only cleave to enemies you’re in combat with, I assume to prevent pulling random groups in dungeons. I think depending on what content the player does, this might’ve been a terrible change.
Someone check my math on this. Ice lance used to be one of the best “spam taggers” in the game, and combined with portals and a few other unique tools we had, it made mage one of the best classes to do legacy content with. After this cleave change, a GCD is added to every mob kill when killing in groups. For an extreme example, insane in the membrane requires at least 33,030 kills. This cleave change adds about 13 hours to this feat of strength if done on a mage. That’s a pretty nontrivial amount of time and I feel bad for anyone who wants reputation achievements or anything similar and mains a mage now.