Glacial Cascade

Glacial Cascade can only hit max. 2 times the same mob, never more. The circles increase and decrease with AoE / Conc, but they only overlap once.

unless you are hitting something moving away from you or is fairly large

Surprisingly strong even at low levels.

Hello.
I like playing with different builds. I'm not kind of a person who sticks to just one or two characters and plays only them through the whole league. I am very curious about glacial cascade, but I'm worried about it, as there are only a few posts here... and none made post-2.0.0.
Can we have a proper discussion about this awesomely-looking, but heavily underused spell?


I see a few problems with Glacial Cascade:
1. Damage being split into phys/cold sounds cool and is not a problem by itself, but it means that cold penetration and anything with -cold resist is only about half as effective. This applies also to any +% cold damage +% physical modifiers from passives and gear, which is pretty huge as ONLY pure +% spell damage works fully on GC, and it's much harder to get.
2. Same as #1, but for crit - significantly lower chance to chill/freeze when compared to ice spear (long range) and freezing pulse (short range). Also currently there's no crit effect for physical damage, and the crit chance got recently nerfed from 6 to 5 percent. On top of that, not linking cold penetration means even less cold damage done to monsters. So I don't see any point in going crit with GC, except for the obvious "moar dmg!" only because you have super nice gear.
3. Comparing to many other attacks and spells, the aoe of GC is pitiful. It's basically a ball lightning to which you can't link half of the support gems normally available to BL... GS/reave/tendrils with increased aoe support or tornado/LS/fireball/AB linked to gmp can all hit half of the screen, while GC always hits in a cylinder-shape. There's no "good" way of augmenting that shape, because the more aoe you get, the lesser the chance of hitting monsters twice, and lowering aoe means also shortening range...
4. I did some raw calculations, comparing GC to many other spells, and it turns out that the base dmg is a stinking garbage. I don't know, it seems like you have to hit monsters three times to really benefit from this skill's mechanics.


What are the possible solutions to those problems?
Ad 1. Converting most/all of the physical damage into elemental damage, allowing you to use curses and penetration with much higher effectiveness. Note that currently you can't convert cold to phys.
a. Moonbender's Wing is a new item introduced in 2.0.0, and has 25% of Physical Damage Converted to Cold Damage AND 25% of Physical Damage Converted to Lightning Damage. It doesn't have too high str/dex requirements. Hrimsorrow (low level unq gloves) has 25% of Physical Damage Converted to Cold Damage. Pairing both items means that you will deal only 25% of GC's physical portion still as physical, but you're giving up a lot of defenses from the gloves slot so it's totally not worth it.
b. DW Moonbender's Wing -> 50% phys into cold, 50% phys into lightning. 0% as phys.
c. Moonbender's Wing + "physical to lightning" support -> 75% as lightning and 25% as cold. 0% as phys. This makes GC total damage +/- 50% as cold, 50% as lightning.
The real question though: is it really worth it? Is it worth to give up one weapon slot and one link, or both weapon slots, just to kinda "get rid" of the physical fraction, when you could just equip a nicely rolled wand/scepter with +% spell damage +% cast speed +% cold damage +0.2% cold leech AND an awesome implicit? I don't think so :/
Ad 2. There's no efficient solution. You either shouldn't go crit at all, or invest a lot into crit if you have powerful gear suited for it.
Ad 3. Probably not using GC as main attack. I'm serious. Rime Gaze + GC = cheap conc effect five-link, making it super strong against single targets, large bosses especially. As for killing everything else on a 5/6/7L, there are many possibilities, basically ANY cold or lightning spell (the latter if you're using Call of the Brotherhood).
Ad 4. Knockback [+ good cast speed].
a. You can get a lot from the support gem with 20%q.
b. There's also 6+12=18% from the passive tree (Fending), although located super deep between marauder and duelist.
c. "Of Fending" is a suffix spawning on jewels, giving 4-6% - probably a better choice than the aforementioned notable node.


Thoughts?
Is it viable as a main source of damage in 74+ maps?

I've been thinking about the faults of this skill for a while. The skill is good early game but quickly falls off later because of it's mechanics. The split damage seems good early because it diminishes the effect of resistant mobs but late resistances are mitigated better by pen and how physical damage is calculated makes it somewhat bad. the main fault of the skill is it has no good way to scale, you need to go with only spell damage/crit no ele/type damage and cant use pen. Not to mention the utility/aoe doesn't really scale well with it's mechanics.

Looking at the problems the simplest change I would suggest is to change the calculation/wording of the damage, rather than doing: 91–140 pys 169–255 cold level 20; make it: ~260-400 physical damage with 50% converted to cold. This way you can now scale it much like EK, also additionally you could use the never used gem phys-light and do 100% ele damage, etc.

This change would keep the thematic elements of the gem while expanding on it's uses and strategic options, making an overall more interesting skill.

You guys absolutely neutered this skill when you released 2.0.0. It was already under par, but then you took its crit down from 6% to 5% and pulled its damage scaling back from 80% to 60%, which was on top of the herald nerfs which were vital for getting decent damage out of the skill. From 1.3, I went from ~18k tooltip to ~11k in 2.0.0, with 20% less AoE because I had to swap daggers from divinarius to rares because my damage was otherwise so mediocre. On top of that, the nerfs to EB have left it unable to be sustained on mana without massive investment. Look at my character CopulationAuthority, I can only sustain constant casts for about 6 seconds before I start stuttering on him, and I have four pieces with mana regeneration and heavy passive investment. Everything about my character got butchered in 2.0.0 for no justifiable reason (GGG got mad at an item named Cloak of Defiance and took it out on all casters, regardless of whether or not they used it). I thought for sure that you would have noticed how dumpstered it is by now, but you guys seem to think its only problem is its AoE.

"

I've been thinking about the faults of this skill for a while. The skill is good early game but quickly falls off later because of it's mechanics. The split damage seems good early because it diminishes the effect of resistant mobs but late resistances are mitigated better by pen and how physical damage is calculated makes it somewhat bad. the main fault of the skill is it has no good way to scale, you need to go with only spell damage/crit no ele/type damage and cant use pen. Not to mention the utility/aoe doesn't really scale well with it's mechanics.

Looking at the problems the simplest change I would suggest is to change the calculation/wording of the damage, rather than doing: 91–140 pys 169–255 cold level 20; make it: ~260-400 physical damage with 50% converted to cold. This way you can now scale it much like EK, also additionally you could use the never used gem phys-light and do 100% ele damage, etc.

This change would keep the thematic elements of the gem while expanding on it's uses and strategic options, making an overall more interesting skill.

This is a really good suggestion that I would get behind, but even still, it's not enough. Even the 25% AoE increase from this patch isn't enough. The skill needs its 6% crit chance back at the minimum, as 5% just leaves your damage way too spiky for it to feel satisfying in any way. Additionally, it should get the 80% damage effectiveness back, because as I already pointed out, heralds were nerfed hard.

This was easily the most fun build I had ever played in this game, but you guys ruined it. Here's a vid of what I'm sorely missing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsHtoRcAnhk

So I have decided to give GC a try once again with the new buffs anh here are some first thoughts from leveling:
good
1)damage is really nice
2)with the new buff and passive tree AOE nodes its possible to use conc. effect without gimping AOE too much

bad:
1)skill mechanic still feel cranky as ever => more AOE does not solve this
2)so far I thought that firestorm is the skill to ruin your FPS, now there is a new king

overall:
decent skill for leveling and good single target probably even lategame. But I dont think many players will use this as their primary skill

I have a theoricrafting problem with this skill.

I'm using it with the ring Pyre.
Instead of having ice+physical dmge, i'm doing fire+physical dmge.

Glacial cascade hit the same target 2-3 times per cast.
Does it mean that i can proc the burning effect 2-3 times in a single cast on a single target ?
If yes, is Emberwake a good choice for a secondary ring ? I don't have any crit bonus on my current build.

There is no difference how many times skill hits enemy, ideally, if you have 100% chance to ignite you will do extra 16% dps from fire damage regardless of attack/cast speed (16% is default without fire/spell/burning damage increases). Heard that proliferation should also help increasing ignite stacks against packs of monsters.