How exactly does Glacial Hammer work?

Hey all I am really confused about this gem.I don't fully understand how its damage functions work and what would be better for me to take from the skill tree.Should I be focusing on elemental damage,cold damage,melee physical damage or mace damage?

I would really appreciate it if someone explained glacial hammer to me in depths :)

Thanks for your time!



PS: if anyone is wondering I am trying to go for Templar glacial hammer 1 handed mace + Ice spells (Kinda like a spell warrior type) I would love to hear your Opinions,tips and tricks on this as well.

There's generally two ways to go about GH.

First is to go phys/cold. Your damage starts as physical damage, then 50% of it is converted to cold. So your goal is to increase physical damage as much as possible. Your freezes will be a little weak, but you will be able to benefit from life leech from physical attacks and enemy resists will be less of a concern (nothing sucks like bosses with capped resists when dealing elemental damage).

The other option is to focus on cold damage. Increase your cold and elemental damage, wear the unique gloves Hrimsorrow (which converts an additional 25% to cold for a total of 75%), and utilize resist a reduction to further increase your damage. Your freezes will be really strong in this case, getting max duration on everything but bosses, and even occationally freezing bosses with the correct setup.

Either way you want to make sure you add in Elemental Proliferation and Melee Splash support gems to make crowd control easy as pie.

"

gilrad wrote:

There's generally two ways to go about GH.

First is to go phys/cold. Your damage starts as physical damage, then 50% of it is converted to cold. So your goal is to increase physical damage as much as possible. Your freezes will be a little weak, but you will be able to benefit from life leech from physical attacks and enemy resists will be less of a concern (nothing sucks like bosses with capped resists when dealing elemental damage).

The other option is to focus on cold damage. Increase your cold and elemental damage, wear the unique gloves Hrimsorrow (which converts an additional 25% to cold for a total of 75%), and utilize resist a reduction to further increase your damage. Your freezes will be really strong in this case, getting max duration on everything but bosses, and even occationally freezing bosses with the correct setup.

Either way you want to make sure you add in Elemental Proliferation and Melee Splash support gems to make crowd control easy as pie.

Both options still focus on maximizing physical damage as much as possible. So MPD is a must-have regardless.

Not necessarily; chances are if you're going the elemental damage route, comparing MPD to WED directly, the latter will yield more damage. Of course both are nice, but between proliferation and penetration gems, you might not have the space unless you have a 6-link

"

gilrad wrote:

Not necessarily; chances are if you're going the elemental damage route, comparing MPD to WED directly, the latter will yield more damage. Of course both are nice, but between proliferation and penetration gems, you might not have the space unless you have a 6-link

GH + MPD + WED + EP + LL + FA. Maximum freeze effect. Change out FA for MS if you want three hits instead of one. I don't see any reason not to have both.

Cold penetration is important if you want to kill bosses in any reasonable amount of time.

Also, melee splash is necessary if this is your trash-clearing link (though you're right if this is a boss-focused link, you can generally have an easier time stacking damage with single-target links).

"

gilrad wrote:

Cold penetration is important if you want to kill bosses in any reasonable amount of time.

Also, melee splash is necessary if this is your trash-clearing link (though you're right if this is a boss-focused link, you can generally have an easier time stacking damage with single-target links).

Then change out MS/FA for CP. The same can be done for LL being changed out for Melee Splash. You should have enough leech on gear to compensate for trash mob damage. That's one reason why it's best to maximize GH through physical damage.

Are we on the same page here? We're talking about AOE link that deals mostly cold damage, yes? Leech won't do a whole lot when your total physical damage is 10-15% of your attack (through hrimsorrow and hatred). MS/FA is important to get lots of chances to freeze.

Anyway the links I use when going GH proliferation is:

Glacial Hammer - Cold penetration - Proliferation - Multistrike - Splash - Weapon Elemental Damage (or Life Leech).

Weapon Elemental Damage puts a LOT more damage into that link than Melee Physical in this case, but even then I don't use it unless I get 2-3% elemental life leech through specific gear. To be honest you don't really need it either; cold penetration acts as a multiplier as well, just one that doesn't increase your tooltip damage. For an AOE link, two damage-multiplying links is plenty to clear trash mobs. For high-health mobs and bosses I have a separate single-target link.

"

gilrad wrote:

Are we on the same page here?

Apparently not, so allow me to be perfectly clear:

Glacial Hammer is a physical ability that converts some physical damage into cold. Frozen enemies hit by GH are culled at 33% or less life. Thus, physical should be the main focus of this skill.

50% increased physical damage will increase all of the skill's damage, while elemental and cold damage increases will only apply to the cold part.

Seeing how the skill has an inherent 50% conversion, all elemental/cold increases are only 50% effective. With any more phys-cold conversion it increases the effectiveness of those increases.

However, the smarter thing to do is to grab the already 100% effective physical damage increase. Not only is this present in strength, but gear has inherent physical leech. So focusing on physical damage helps increase inherent leech and potential damage without requiring the Life Leech support gem.

50% increased physical is better than 100% increased cold, just due to the leech.

"

gilrad wrote:

We're talking about AOE link that deals mostly cold damage, yes? Leech won't do a whole lot when your total physical damage is 10-15% of your attack (through hrimsorrow and hatred). MS/FA is important to get lots of chances to freeze.

Depending on how you did your damage, physical can still leech enough. Think about it:

If 75% of your attack deals cold and you only take 25% (75% resistance) of 18% reflect, it won't be a problem. But your physical will still leech to counteract most damage you take. But you shouldn't take much since GH is meant to freeze packs of enemies through EP.

All the more reason to focus on physical damage, since it can still leech enough and saves you that Life Leech support to instead use Faster Attacks, WED, or anything else.

"

gilrad wrote:

Anyway the links I use when going GH proliferation is:

Glacial Hammer - Cold penetration - Proliferation - Multistrike - Splash - Weapon Elemental Damage (or Life Leech).

MPD - increase damage more than anything else. This provides more elemental damage than WED or Cold Penetration. It also helps a lot with leech.

WED - raw increase is best against most enemies. Since most of the game is trash mobs, this is better than CP.

EP - to spread freezes.

CP - useful mostly against bosses. Though it's a straight damage boost either way.

MStrike - generally not good since it lowers your cold potential damage and thereby freeze duration. Bad choice.

MSplash - somewhat good choice, but not required. Again lowers freeze potential.

Those, with the exception of multistrike, are really the only good gems for it. FA can also be used.

The problem with GH is that it inherently isn't good at clearing quickly but is good for freezing large groups due to EP.

Hopefully we're on the same page now.

"

gilrad wrote:

Weapon Elemental Damage puts a LOT more damage into that link than Melee Physical in this case, but even then I don't use it unless I get 2-3% elemental life leech through specific gear.

Really? Let's see:

Assume 100 damage is dealt and you have ~50% increased physical damage due to strength.

MPD will bring it to 223. 50% to cold results in 111 physical and 111 cold. Total of 222.

From 150, there's 75 for WED to affect. So you'll end up with 75 physical and 119 cold damage. Total of 194.

Difference of 28 damage, and MPD has a lower multiplier than WED. Oh, and MPD still helps with leech a lot more.

So explain to me how and why you think WED adds more damage than MPD?

But let's look at a 75% conversion.

100 increased to 150. 25% is physical, 37. 75% is cold, 112. 112 is increased to 178. Total of 215. Still lower than MPD but it has less base physical to leech from.

You made me go back to Standard to pull up my old GH character:

Melee Physical damage tooltip DPS: 7500

Weapon Elemental Damage: 7900

Keep in mind the actual DPS numbers are much higher because the game is behaving as though I'm attacking with my off-hand (which I'm not because it's not a mace). resist reduction further multiplies the damage by at least 1.35. Also the gems I used were level 1 because I couldn't be bothered to find two equally leveled gems.