Ice Spear Sucks
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Ice spear is my favourite cold spell, because it is unique. It's not "hold right click to win". It's primary downsides are it's the only by-nature single target skill gem in the game and it requires distance.
This is all fine and works well for party play and totems. Except that it's not BIS single target, even if you explicitly exploit the strength of the skill by focusing on crit multi. The clear speed solo is worst-in-game, and in a party while it has some cool utility, it's getting outperformed in Cold Crit Witch builds by Glacial Cascade and Freezing Pulse. Speccing into what Ice Spear is by nature "good at" creates a build significantly worse than the others. The existence of Southbound creates the interesting possibility of dual pyre ice spear proliferation - pyre no longer destroys corpses and allows the proliferation to continue. However, there is no longer any effective method to spread single target spell damage to mobs. Like single target melee skills (although less now than previously) - the AOE skills always win. I don't think that restoring proliferation to it's original radius and damage is a good idea but I think that Ice Spear is worlds behind other spells. LMP, GMP or Pierce all help it but not to the degree you can help the others above. I find it interesting that Bino's beartrap poison prolif has been allowed to continue for the duration of the league so far, when burn prolif was not as bad (insofar as it didn't grant you over 20k regen a second). I think it would be nice to see an ice spear threshold jewel. Something to spread the good single target damage, like fireball received that isn't "lmao lmp pierce spell echo cold pen crit damage" This thread has been automatically archived. Replies are disabled.
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" Single-ranget skills suck because their damage is way too low, that's all. It's ridiculous to watch archers using Blast Rain (AoE skill) instead of single-target skills (Burning Arrow, Frenzy) just because it's superior DPS-wise. IGN: MortalKombat
Molten Strike build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1346504 There is no knowledge That is not power |
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I agree, ice spear is in a terrible place right now. The level 20 gem does 321-482 (401.5 avg) base cold damage at 0.85s cast time (472.4 base dps).
Ice Nova lv20 does 369-577 (473 avg) base cold damage at 0.9s cast time (525.6 base dps). Freezing pulse lv20 does 689-1034 (861.5) base cold damage at 0.65s cast time (1325.4 base dps). Arctic Breath lv20 does 451-677 (564) base cold damage at 0.8s cast time (705 base dps). See the problem here? Even if you cap your crit and raise your critical multiplier to 200% you're still doing less damage than a no-investment freezing pulse. Hell, with capped crit but only the base 150% crit multiplier you're still doing less damage per second than arctic breath, and that's an aoe spell that can be conc'd or shotgunned, pick your poison (708.6 dps with perfect(100%) crit ice spear). If you're not critting you're literally better off running Ice Nova - it has higher dps and a much wider effect. It's disgusting and a clear example of GGG forcing a meta by intentionally leaving skills underpowered. |
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My first character was ice spear witch (lol the worst one and for a noob).
ice spear is worse in most cases. It can be almost competitive with around 40-50 ex investment. And yet after that kind of investment it wont be better than other builds. Do note that tooltip dps is for first form, in second form its roughly x1.5 higher. In this patch 2.1 its possible to get somewhere 68k or more tooltip dps, but at the cost of any kind of survive-ability. Currently its just not possible to have good dps and good survive-ability, while other builds can offer both and with no meaningful investment. Last edited by Andrius319#4787 on Jan 14, 2016, 11:17:32 AM
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" Well that is overexaggerating and a lot of it. They simply didn't put much investment into Ice Spear and it is pretty clear that simple damage increases are an issue with it, not to mention that it serves a pretty similar role than Arctic Breath does. And it isn't even the only skill that is in a odd shape. Glacial Cascade while being popular in 2.0 has fallen out of favor and with the Frost Nova buffs it was to be expected that it crowds out other ice spells. Freezing pulse still does quite well but it is rather short range and doesn't clear that much. |
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" Actually, I found Ice Spear (with Fireball) being useful for CoC build, that utilizes Elemental Equilibrium. The main reason - Ice Spear (without quality) and Fireball have the SAME projectile speed, which leads to hit sequence (and EE bonus) even at large range. I used wand Barrage as trigger skill. I played that build in Darkshrine and it was pretty viable and gear-independant. The main its advantage before non-EE CoC builds is higher DPS against bosses (cause even if you curse them, they have a major curse resist - not so with EE). But self-cast Ice Spear is just pathetic... IGN: MortalKombat
Molten Strike build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1346504 There is no knowledge That is not power |
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It's pretty shitty yeah.
Dys an sohm
Rohs an kyn Sahl djahs afah Mah morn narr |
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" They don't really nerf builds mid league, they reduced like flameblast damage by 20% but that honestly had negligible effects. Part of playing in the leagues is once they start its "locked in" and GGG only does bugfixes and such. https://youtu.be/T9kygXtkh10?t=285
FeelsBadMan Remove MF from POE, make juiced map the new MF. |
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It's semi viable if you don't build in any defense and go deaths harp + drillneck + pierce. I used it for my 20/20 in the v last flashback league. I was freezing everything(even bosses) up to tier 8 maps. Not a great build but it's far from the worst I've played.
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Im a little afraid about ascendancy expansion. When it will be released, there is assassins class with which will be trivial to get 95% crit chance and with that- ice spear will no longer be uniq, im concerned if there will be some other great sources to improve it accordingly.
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