Ice Spear

Like ALL cold spells they have way too high mana costs making there damage per mana costs prohibitive the only way ive found to make a cold witch viable is too forget about damage and focus totally on freezing and shatter.

Right now this skill is pretty great. Decent pack clear speed and extremely fast killing of rares / rogue exiles and bosses. Plus, I can keep most of them close to permanently frozen. A major improvement over previous leagues. And it works rather well with a wide variety of gems (Faster Casting, Added Chaos / Lightning Damage, Spell Echo, etc). The only essential gem is Increased Crit Damage.

In Domination and Ambush, I also played Ice Spear Witches and always felt like it was an extremely weak build in late game, but now I actually feel like it's semi-viable and that's enough for me. Thanks, GGG!

Would you guys recommend Empower as 6th gem? I am currently using Ice Spear - GMP - ICD - Spell Echo - Pierce. Should I use Coldpen/PCoC/Faster Casting instead in 6th socket? I've never played an elemental caster before, I'm really unsure about this.

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Cybermax wrote:

Would you guys recommend Empower as 6th gem? I am currently using Ice Spear - GMP - ICD - Spell Echo - Pierce. Should I use Coldpen/PCoC/Faster Casting instead in 6th socket? I've never played an elemental caster before, I'm really unsure about this.

I'd drop pierce for cold pen in the 5L.

For 6L i'd experiment between faster casting and increased crit chance. (or pcoc if you have invested in power charge nodes)

In my experience, this skill doesn't need pierce to kill groups. Especially when used in combination with herald of ice.

If you want to do Atziri, then the last link has to be life leech.

Could we buff the skill's cast time to 0.75 or 0.70 or something close to that? In fact, do the same for Fireball.

I think it would be the final buff this skill would require. Fireball would still need some love most likely.

after finally making this skill viable in 1.2 it now got totally crushed by 1.3 patch again.
Most important support nerfed by 50%, castspeed/crit dmg passive nerfs...

most annoying thing for me atm is the projectile speed. It's so slow, but perhaps all magical projectiles are equally sucky. Only have experience with arc.

A slight increase in cast speed could also help.

I'm doing a cold to fire + crit dmg + prolif + increased burning damage. Damage is ok. Nothing breathtaking

since i made the same experience as azraelb, i have to put my two cents: the most important supp was nerfed and that basically kills ice spear again.

after creating 3 toons and leveling it in the late 80s i really pushed it hard to make this skill good.
but it just cant compete in between the arc-incinerate-flameblast-meta. Other skills offer a lot more with less less effort.

even tho i think herald of thunder buffed icespear a lot since it applies shock in second form very reliably if not a 100% all the time. you feel the missing base damage in the endgame.

i played several toons, a yolo version of this skill with dual wands and overkill cast speed and a tabula i barely achieved 9k dps on gmp. it was a complete waste of skillpoints in cast speed and i had to sacrifice my shield for this amount of dps. theres no reason to use ice spear over arc in this setup.

right now im playing a fairly tanky version of this spec with a shield and cloak of defiance in bloodlines and i keep asking myself why im not just using arc, flameblast or incinerate.
i really like the skill and i wish it would rock, but i just dont feel it.

5link is: echo - fastercasting - ice spear - cold pen - gmp/lmp.

theres not much more room for improvement, my 6th link would be crit multi. i tested and faster casting is better than multi after the nerf.

my tooltip dps is 5.2k with gmp, and 7.1k with lmp even tho this is not terrible, i think this skill needs a buff along with a lot of other skills on the list. just a slight buff would be helpful.
a quicker cast animation, or a slight buff in base damage would help a ton.