Maybe I’ve missed some patch notes, but for some reason I’m no longer able to consume the winter’s chill effect with ice nova. Did it frequently on my frost mage spell slinger, using the talent that let’s cone of cold apply winter’s chill to all targets hit if you hit 3+ enemies, great for applying a couple splinters to a crowd. Recently swapped to frostfire now the spec has updated more and noticed ice nova was no longer consuming winter’s chill. Bug or have I missed a patch note? I’m aware empowered ice lances from fingers of frost are no longer supposed to consume winter’s chill, hadn’t seen anything about ice nova though and it was useful to making it crit on a whole group.
Oh and I should note I swapped back to spellslinger to test this, no other change in talents, and also not working, where I swear it was still working prior to my swap to frostfire.
There are spells that intentionally not consume Winter’s Chill while benefiting from it - Comet Storm, Ray of Frost etc.
Ice Nova was not among them, but after they added its proc via Excess Frost they could have changed that, so that its procced version would not eat 1 additional stack of WC (I suspect that but not 100% sure).
To test more reliably check whether Ice Nova is more likely to crit when Winter’s Chill is on target. If yes - then it still benefits from it but no longer consumes and change is most likely intentional.
Ya been testing it, applying winter’s chill with both flurry and cone of cold, doesn’t seem to affect Nova’s crit rate (currently have about 20%) that i can tell.
Though I think the bigger issue at least for Spellslinger is it removes a way to reliably apply splinters to a group, since splinters are only applied on consuming winter’s chill. Less of an issue for frostfire, but even then, was a nice combo to tap cone of cold and then guarantee a group crit with ice nova. Just seems like there’d be a patch note somewhere, which inclines me to think this is a bug?
I’m gonna test it to when I can play. But if it both does not consume Winter’s Chill and is not affected by Winter’s Chill it is most likely a bug.