Is purgeable so its not a good alternative to Ice Block for those who were curious.
Make your way over to feedback forum and add to post about it.
Trading Block for a 4 minute wall that is 1 click purged or spellstolen is awful.
Get vocal now or welcome the next dead capstone.
At the very least they could have tried with the WOD one which was way way better then ice cold but still niche. For those who weren’t around back then it was this.
That (I.e. a reskin of Evanescence) was what I assumed it would be when I read about it… 4+
Min cool-down and purgeable sounds like a total joke….
They should make it provide reduced CD for affected Ice Block (since for example Shaman’s 60% wall with 12s duration is 2 min CD) and both unpurgeable and un-mass dispellable (since walls of other classes are not affected by either). That would give this talent both usage as a counter-Priest measure in PVP and effective defensive with no dps loss measure in PVE and would be fitting for a capstone.
It really should be a choice node with [Ice Block], not a capstone. And for 4min cd even if it were undispellable it still wouldn’t be that great.
Imo it should be 2~3min cooldown, [Winter’s Protection] cdr changed to 12/25% cdr (30/60s) to account for the lower cooldown and [Cryo-freeze]'s healing adjusted accordingly for the same reason.
Agreed. Why Ice Block’s cooldown is still 4 mins when every other class’s major defensives are easily half that is mindblowing.
Does Ice cold still heals 80% of your hp with talent or talent to heal was removed?
In pve atleast you can’t be purged
Ice Cold: Purgeable, heals as Ice Block with 70% dmg reduction and you can keep doing dmg.
Vs
Ice Block that heals, can only be removed by Warriors and Priest but you can attack or be attacked.
As it is right now Ice Cold looks good for PvE.
In PvP you want Great Invis and Dragon’s Breath always. If you pick these two and Ice Cold you can’t take Time Anomaly without losing the cd reduction on blink (or pick one charge and don’t take Mass Barrier/Invis capstone)
I like the idea of just flat-out replacing it with Evanescence. The only thing I ever really use IB for anyway is clearing my cauterize DoT.
another question - does ice cold clean debuffs? If not then i’ll just stick with iceblock, cause it’s the primary thing i’m using it for
No its not an immune so it wouldn’t clear anything but you would gain benefit of cryo healing during it.
I hate it that they kept the 4min cooldown. I will die on the hill that it should be a choice node with [Ice Block] on a much lower cooldown and with no [Hypothermia].
The entire left capstone level feels really meh now. Seems like mostly Frost-oriented PvP stuff. Mass Barrier/Mass Invis isn’t that great either, but I feel like people are gonna spend their points in the right side anyways to get Dragon’s Breath and GInvis.
In a lot of ways, with the new class tree, it really showed how bad those two-pointers feel (Frigid Winds, Temporal Velocity and Flow of Time). If it weren’t for Temporal Warp, we could almost outright ignore any talents below the 20 point line and not much would change.
Yeah, I still don’t think they know what they want to do with the Mage class tree. It’s still a mess and I don’t see how it can be fixed without a complete rework. Just moving things around isn’t going to do anything. I also don’t understand their capstone changes. It seems their answer to the lack of choice when it came to capstones was to just make them all bad, so it wouldn’t matter what you pick, rather than fixing the underperforming ones.
I suppose that’s the point. It’s a bit better for the Mage tree to be a grab-bag of random jank that we switch around based on what happens to be the most useful in a particular niche than being hard-locked into a specific talent layout due to the trifecta of Temporal Warp, Rune of Power and Shifting Power. With RoP gone and Shifting Power extremely accessible we have more flexibility for whatever that is worth.
I feel like I’m getting shades of the Shaman class tree from ours. Except their tree is random jank because it’s trying to present options to a caster DPS, a melee DPS and a healer spec simultaneously. I think the only way our class tree can be like the Warlock, Hunter or Rogue trees (since they’re the other pure DPS classes) is with an expansion-level rework where they trim all of those useless green conduit talents that are either never picked or only picked to access something else because they’re so low impact (such as every talent south of Ring of Frost…).
That’s exactly what it feels like! 
It seems they want to make the left side of the tree frost-focused 
which it should not.
The tree would be better starting with Ice Block, Great Invis and DB, with each spec getting the corresponding spell school by default. Our barriers should not be on the general tree.
With Great Invis and DB on the right side, the left side offers almost nothing.
It’s actually better to have utility capstones in the class tree instead of DPS ones. The right side is on the right track (heh), they just need some adjustments.
Now the left side still needs some work as well as some undertuned talents.
I actually agree that utility capstones make more sense than throughput ones in a class tree, however, the Mage class tree in particular seems to be nothing BUT utility to the point where I think it will start being detrimental to overall DPS especially with RoP gone. It’s just so cluttered with SL conduits. About the only thing I think they got right from the beginning was the inclusion of Blast Wave and Dragon Breath, almost everything else makes me go “meh, I guess I am gonna put a point in this or whatever.” Idk, maybe I am not being fair but I just expected more from the class tree.
P.S. I am still miffed they’re taking away Meteor instead of fixing it.
There are some very good utility nodes in the tree. The problem is that there are also many bad or borderline useless ones but some of that could be resolved with proper tuning.
They could still bring it back in the Fire tree where it makes the most sense if they redesign and properly tune it.
100% agree here, and it’s part of why it always felt off to have a tiny few output spells like IF/ROP, SP and Meteor in that tree. To me, the general tree should be all about options and utility, defensives etc and work alongside base spells to provide support to Mages that can be changed up depending on the content you do.
For example, things like BW/DB are great for M+ but have very little utility for most raid encounters allowing us to take more damage reduction. I wouldn’t be opposed to see something along the lines of Incanter’s Ward (frequent small damage reduction) or something that removes the slows from Frost spells but provides a defensive boost somewhere else.
I do however feel that the general tree is too bloated. There are a lot of 2-talent nodes that provide very small benefits. With a redesign, it could quite easily be brought down to 15-20 talent points without affecting the outcomes.