Will I be able to single-target quest with this AoE Mage Build?

h ttps://i.imgur.com/6dgeAr1.png

So if at some point I can’t find AoE spots and I want to single-target quest, will I be able to perfom fine with that one? I don’t wanna to be limited to only AoE and Spellcleave dungeons.

You can single target quests with Frostbolt and Nova. Are you sure you’re not overthinking things?

1 Like

You will be fine, I have a similar one.

You’ll be fine, but dump the Ice Shards down to 2/5. Your crit while leveling is atrocious and you don’t have Shatter to bring it up. Maxing Improved Frostbolt will do much more for your single target and the loss of Ice Shards will rarely matter for AoE anyway; Blizzard can’t crit and CoC critting might make one mob die faster… one out of ten.

Addendum: This build was made by people who expect to NEVER EVER have to single target, which is why they take a talent that is worth on average like a +2-3% damage increase to Cone of Cold (with five points and assuming no Shatter), in a very unreliable way (bigger crits) that doesn’t always make a difference to how many spells you have to cast to deal with a pull.

5/5 Improved Frostbolt on the other hand is a constant 20% haste for Frostbolt. It’s not even a contest.

Faster frostbolt is fairly good utility to have when you still want to single target kite mobs alongside aoe grinding packs. Higher ranked frostbolt spells start to take forever to cast if you don’t put all 5 points in there. I’m personally very happy I respecced at 40 from my own atrocious build to full frost so I could get more tools like Ice barrier and faster frostbolt spell is one of the good ones for leveling imo. Ofc you want aoe tools asap, but don’t neglect frostbolt, it’s your bread and butter spell.

Gonna show you with some theorycraft just how little Ice Shards helps your AoE. To make the calculations simple, we’ll use the following numbers:

Pull size: 20
Cone of Cold damage: 100
Spell crit chance: 5%

Cone of Cold will, with no crits, deal a total of 2000 damage. Since we have 20 mobs and 5% is the same as 1 in 20, on average we’ll crit one of those mobs. With no Ice Shards, that crit will deal 150 damage instead of a 100 hit, so now our total is 2050. With 5/5 Ice Shards, the crit will be 200 instead, and the total is now 2100.

So for the cost of 5 talent points, CoC’s damage goes up by 2.4%. And this damage happens in the worst way possible; a bigger crit. A bigger crit just means that one mob’s health will be even more disconnected from the rest of the pack’s, it will die earlier but it won’t likely reduce the amount of spells you need to cast to finish the pull.

So not only did CoC’s damage increase by a really small amount and in a bad way, but CoC isn’t even your staple AoE spell, Blizzard is. Blizzard cannot crit, so Ice Shards does nothing for it. All in all, for five talent points, your AoE damage went up by maybe 1%.

Note that if instead of relying on Improved Blizzard, you play a Shatter + CoC kite build, the value of Ice Shards goes up dramatically. This however is harder to do, and might be the weaker option even if you can do it, although I find it far more fun.

And lastly, Ice Shards will not help Frostbolt anymore than it will help CoC, so again we’re talking a tiny damage increase for those 5 points unless you’re playing Shatter or benefiting from Winter’s Chill.

You could argue that Ice Shards makes for more mana-efficient single targeting, unlike Improved Frostbolt, but you’d be wrong. If you’re singling down an elite, Frostbolts are very mana efficient, and the faster you cast them, the more of them you can cast. With slow Frostbolts you just end up relying more on Fire Blast and Cone of Cold (obviously less efficient) because you can’t find the time to cast. Also, even if the target is tanked and you can just turret Frostbolts until OOM, the time you save through Improved Frostbolt will translate into wanding time, which will add more damage than bigger crits with a terrible crit chance will =)

As aoe mage, if you are leveling then you will only spend gold on learning blizzard, cone of cold, new water and food and optional arcane explosion.

You wont buy any other spells, waste of gold. I am currently level 39 and i still have rank 3 frostbolt

I’m level 39 and rocking this hybrid AoE/single target build:

h ttps://classicdb.ch/?talent#oZZVAMIcfz

Works great for single target and AoE packs.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.