Now that it does decent damage how do people feel about it? I’ve only tested on a dummy thus far but it definitely feels like it smooths out the rotation very well but is it worth tAking over stormflurry? Thoughts?
I feel like it might eventually have its place due to scaling well with mastery, but it just feels like a poor man’s frostbrand.
Stormstrike priority is also so high that it makes not choosing stormflurry suspect.
I don’t dislike it…just like I don’t dislike hot hands. They just underperform or are for more specific things. The shock reset is interesting, but really only helps Fire Nova (which also underperforms).
If you need to guarantee stick to someone in PvP and are unsure frost shock and earthbind will do the trick, ice strike is there for you.
We’ll see when the logs come out. I think it gives too many GCDs though. Once enh gets a decent amount of haste we’ll be GCD locked and ice strike will just be completely unnecessary.
It’s also unusable with the storm strike reset leggo cause when playing with that you already are GCD capped
I want to like ice strike. It’s nice to have another hard hitting melee ability to press that also provides a snare and more shock flexibility. When I saw they were buffing ice strike by 75%, I started playing around with it more and taking it more seriously. But I ultimately abandoned it and just went back to stormflurry for all content. At least as of the time of this posting.
One problem is that it just doesn’t synergize with the enhance legendaries whereas stormflurry synergizes to a greater or lesser degree with frost witch, doom winds, and wolf bones.
Stormflurry procs WF, stormbringer,MSW, and crash lightning.
Ice strike, last I tried it, didn’t seem to proc stormbringer or windfurry or crash lightning. Not sure about MSW. I think it may have procd MSW but I had a hard time telling for sure.
It could be useful for PvP or solo stuff if you are using the earth shield legendary since it gives you another up front hard hitter and more shocks. Like frost shock to snare, close, SS, flame shock, ice strike, flame shock 2nd target, then frost shock is back up to snare your primary target by the time ice strike debuff is off.
But it still seems questionable due to the lack of synergy with other talents like elemental assault and ascendance and the inability to proc stormbringer, WF, or crash lightning.
At the end of the day, it just doesn’t seem like it stacks up that well against stormflurry given the lack of synergies with anything outside of a little bit of flame shock spread for fire nova.
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I’d still like someone to explain to me how haste can make you GCD locked.
I thought haste reduced the GCD at the same rate that it reduces the CD on haste impacted abilities.
So, for example, if I have 100% haste, then SS CD goes from 7.5 sec CD to 3.75 sec CD. And I auto attack twice as often. And I get twice as many procs.
BUT, I also have twice as many globals to fill since the GCD is .75 sec instead of 1.5 sec…
So isn’t it a wash? And doesn’t haste potentially actually give you more free globals to the extent that there are any rotational abilities are not impacted by the haste?
Doesn’t everything just happen faster like hitting fast forward but gaps don’t go away, they just get shorter - so it FEELS like there aren’t gaps?
Ice strike? More like nice strike bc the enemy thinks its nice you’re using such a weak ability vs stormstrike
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Ice strike hits as hard as stormstrike after accounting for mastery and armor. Harder on plate.
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Harder on plate? MOre like try harder to BAIT me with ur icy lies.
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I still think it needs some work… Hot Hand is really nice when it procs as it does great damage however, its proc rate is really bad. Ice Strike not needing a proc and resetting your shocks is truly the bread & butter of the talent IMO. I feel like maybe they should increase the damage of your next Ice Strike within 8 seconds of using frost shock.
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The funny thing is pure single target sim currently has hot hand as the best performer on the row for me in prepatch. This is of course without borrowed power from shadowlands. Though in practical use it does feel like it never really procs when using out in the wild 
exactly it does GREAT damage but it rarely procs which is sad as it would be a powerful asset to have imo. If they up the proc rate alot more i think it’ll be the goto talent. However, still I want ice strike to increase frost shock dmg with reset and i think it would be perfect.
Since people already talked about the effectiveness of it, and I agree it’s kind of meh outside of just dealing damage, I’ll add something else. Its animation isn’t fun at all. Doesn’t feel satisfying to press from a visual or audio view in my opinion. I really wanted to like it but it just isn’t happening.
Agreed with everything you’ve said however, been qing bg’s/pve/dailies playing with various builds adding in ice strike helps with the flat points in the rotation. Its nice to be able to frost shock when you need and slow someone else while resetting shocks and using flame now whomever is kill target etc.
Changes I’d like for ice strike:
would be some sort of increased ranged so runners/kiters you can use it on them & slows them for 50% (currently already slows)
PVP Talent/addition only adding a rooting effect to your next frost shock after use to help us close the gap.
Ultimately adding more frost damage would be ideal however, that kind of defeats the purpose of hailstorm (wishful thinking i know just saying 
)
I think you’re mostly right, until you reach very high haste values. The GCD has a cap to how low it can go (.75 sec, I believe). Your cooldowns do not. So if you have over 100% haste, the GCD will restrict you from spending abilities as fast as they come off of cooldown.
I’m not familiar enough with the new diminishing returns system and the expected haste from gear to know how feasible that scenario is.
I thought that it would effectively get rid of any downtime by letting us ice strike and immediately shock it up but my buttons are full up as it is.
This is what I found while testing in dungeons. I rarely use ice strike because I’m generally GCD locked as it is. This is partially due to using ele blast though. Side note omg I love ele blast it hits like a truck. In one dungeon it was my top single target hitting ability it freakin chunks!
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Those would be some nice changes. It can be fun in some PvP where you can slap out an extra Frost. I don’t usually run Hailstorm in PvP but the few times I did it was fun. A root would be nice!
Wish it still felt better with its animation than an “Ice Tickle” or something. Maybe some kind of little flurry that quickly rushes over the target when hit. Some chilling winds. Something! It uses the pre-9.0 Obliterate animation which I thought was kind of funny.
Yes, one of my favorite to get on Enhancement. Loved it when I was playing Ele, too! It’s one of the reasons why I think there should be more similarities between talent trees/specs. I would personally like LMT talent on Enhancement as well.
Fair. I think that’s right. I was thinking about haste in normal ranges below the GCD cap.
I regularly see people talking about haste filling gaps in the rotation and I think that’s not correct (outside of crazy cases w/over 100% haste).
I really like what Ice Strike does for the rotation, but unfortunately it just isn’t competing with Stormflurry. I think it would be a lot more appealing if it were off GCD, though.
Off-topic but I also like having Elemental Blast on Enhancement.