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Should I try to get a flurry proc before casting glacial spike or should I not bother and treat it as a bonus?
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Should I use ice lance after a glacial spike during dungeons and raids or only in the open world?
Thank you for your time 
- Probably. 2. If you flurried yes, twice. If not, not on mobs that can’t be cc’d like bosses and some mini bosses.
Also you shouldn’t really be playing glacial these days in end game pve.
I like glacial spike, I will probably try thermal void later as well and see if I like that better.
Ye it was fun in bfa. Dungeon mobs getting one shot 
. O pet freeze on dungeon mobs works great too, instead of brain freeze. Use it towards of the glacial cast.
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You’ve kinda just hit the nail on the head with glacial spike: Not casting it and waiting for a flurry-crit versus casting it and getting more off.
That and frostbolt damage is in no-way linked to glacial spike.
- Yes, you should always be trying to throw GS at frozen target. Not critting big damage is a waste.
- Generally yes. It’s better to Ice Lance the second WC than frost bolt it.
I am curious what Conduits and Lego are you running with GS? I was trying to make some reasonably build for some time, but nothing felt right.
Sadly there are no Conduits nor Legendary items that would benefit a Glacial Spike build specificaly.
On the other hand Icy Propulsion works amazingly with Thermal Void to a point that there is absolutely no reason to take any other talent other than Thermal Void.
I love Glacial Spike build as i,m really fond of big numbers on my screen 
but every single Conduit and Legendary item in shadowlands forces frost mage to spam icelances. There is really no choices in a frost mage’s built atm, unless they add Legos and conduits that will actually buff Glacial Spike. But unless they add a Legendary item that makes GS an instant cast when BF is up (would be sooooooooo much fun in PvP , i dont see any reason not to pick TV as a talent.
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How does a ice lance build work? I only know to build icicles for glacial spike.
Its not exactly an ce lance build rather than a Thermal Void build which is based on Ice lance crits.
Thermal Void extends the duration of Icy Veins by 1 second everytime a spell crits. You combine Frozen Orb with icy veins which will give you FoF procs that will extend the duration of icy veins. Thats pretty much the basic info.
Icy Propulsion conduit makes your crits to also reduce the CD of Icy Veins by 0,75 - 1.8 seconds (depending on the conduits ilvl). So every time you crit while Icy Veins is up you extend the duration of icy veins + you reduce its CD.
Icy propulsion is one of the 2 BiS conduits we have. The other one is Ice Bite. Ice Bite increases the damage of Icelance by 4% - 9.6% (depending on the conduits ilvl).
Lets move on to our Legendary Powers from Legendary pieces.
There are 2 BiS Legendary powers for frost mage.
The first one is Glacial Fragments. By its name you would think that it has something to do with Glacial spike but you couldnt be more mistaken . Its yet another addition that makes you spam icelances even more hard.
This legendary power makes it so every time you hit a target with icelance there is 20% chance to explode into shards that will do 40% of Spell power damage to 5 enemies near your initial target. And get this… if the initial target is standing in a Blizzard, the chance of icelance exploding is guaranteed. That means in trash mob clearing you just cast Blizzard every 8 seconds and spam icelances like no tommorow.
The other Legendary power you want to have (cant use both at the same time sadly) is Slick Ice. This power does not require you to spam more icelances. While icy veins is active every time you cast a frostbolt it reduces the cast time of your next frostbolt by 2% and increases its damage by 2%. That means faster frostbolts, which means more BF and FoF procs —> more icelance spamming —> more icy veins duration via Thermal Void.
This is it pretty much. You fish for procs with frostbolts to use with icelance in order to extend the duration of icy veins (via Thermal Void) and lower its CD (by icy propulsion conduit)
And thats why Glacial Spike will never be as powerfull as Thermal Void atm. Simply because every BiS conduit and Legendary power works amazingly with Thermal Void.
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That sounds like fun, they should add a legendary that makes glacial spike into the bfa version
Sadly, they won’t. They made the bfa glacial so powerful it broke the rotation. Blizz overreacted as they do and we went from no ice lance to complete focus on ice lance.
The issue with glacial spike is that it was balanced around the fact that you could get the frostbolt damage buff and higher icicle damage back in BFA, from what i understand, we can not get these things and it was not buffed accordingly, thus it is a huge cast time investment that does barely more than if you had just used an ice lance anyway, rather defeating the point in it. In PvP especially, you can just cast frostbolt if a freeze is active and do more damage.
I really wish blizzard would look at the way the classes work in this manner to ensure that choices do not become invalidated so easily, that would likely however mean the end of legendaries that affect abilities at the very least.
BfA was golden times. Memelance was fun and GS was competitive.
Now, Memelance is sort of competitive, but certainly not fun and GS is neither.
I do hope that in patches blizzard will add at least few conduits/legendaries that will support Glacial Spike.
I don’t like how ice lance is rng based but it is fun to see the icicles fly to the target, it’s like a machinegun.
Actually no. Glacial Spike’s damage is based on icicles that stores damage depending on the amount of mastery you have. It has been that way since 2018.
You are probably reffering to frost mage’s mastery prior to 2018 where icicles damage was based on the amount of frostbolt’s damage.
In BFA Glacial Spike’s damage used to do so much damage because of azerite power “Flash Freeze” + Tons of mastery through corruption. Now that those 2 are gone, Glacial spike’s damage went back to its original damage which was… meh. On top of that in Shadowlands devs had this “great idea” to nerf Splitting Ice (for no particular reason) so now Splitting ice is hitting the second target for 65% of the damage dealt to the primary target (down from 80%).
These things made Glacial Spike the only talent/spell in history of WoW that if you choose it you will do less damage overall than not picking ANY talent in the last row.
What they were talking about there is Tunnel of Ice, which helped with Frostbolt dmg being kind of garbanzo.
And considering you’re casting a lot of frostbolts in GS build, it was kind of really important.
They were talking about the build, not just the spell.
But why would anyone use tunnel of ice? It didn’t actually increase Glacial Spike’s damage.
Even if you took lonely wolf talent you would do less damage overall than 3x flash freeze.
It doesnt really fit in a Glacial Spike build apart from making your frostbolts hit a bit more.
Because the good pieces had 2 outer rings.
Yes, you absolutely wanted 3x flash freeze. But that still left 3 more slots to fill.
It didn’t increase GS damage, but it made you to not do 0 damage while you were getting Icicles up or waiting for Brain Freeze.
Cant remember if there was a piece that had both flash freeze and tunnel of ice on it but i’m sure there were pieces with flash freeze and frigid grasp which i beleive was much better in a glacial spike build as it was actually increasing GS’s damage during your burst.
It didn’t increase GS damage
Not True. It increased the damage of each Icicle as it’s stored whether it gets used in a glacial spike or not.