Is Herald of Ice any good?

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sidtherat wrote:

or one can use 'free shatter' from Glacial Hammer

but for GH it is better to do Ash

Unless you can already perma-freeze end-game bosses, it's always going to be in your best interest to have as much base cold damage as humanly possible.

Between GH, Frostbite, and Passives, you're looking at a static 65+% chance to freeze on hit, but only if you're doing enough cold damage

Just to sidetrack, if I drop Herald of Ice and keep Hatred/Herald of Ash, what other DPS auras can I run really? It has to be < or = 40% mana reservation, since 60% will bust it even with reduced mana. I would have gladly chosen Haste if not for the fact it is 60%.

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LostForm wrote:

it adds close to 1k tool tip dps to my gmp freezepulse, so it is good for that at least

Came here to say pretty much the same thing, my GMP freezepulser gains about 1,500 sheet dps from it. I'd say it's worth it if you have high attack/cast speed in addition to good crit scaling, but otherwise it's pretty worthless because the base damage it adds is quite low.

If you run traps, Herald of Ice will buff them while Hatred will not. Herald of Ash will buff Bear Trap, but will have no effect on traps that don't do physical damage.

Maybe they should just introduce more heralds e.g. of lightning or chaos (or even earthquake for physical), just to give us more options for the 25% range auras.

My cast on crit character (Spec throw + GMP + COC + Arc + Arctic Breath + Fireball) gets an IMMENSE boost from Herald of Ice. Because Herald of Ice is a flat damage addition, the faster you attack / cast, the more benefits it gives you.

That makes it a perfect skill for CoC builds. :)

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Hayrich wrote:

Maybe they should just introduce more heralds e.g. of lightning or chaos (or even earthquake for physical), just to give us more options for the 25% range auras.

Wasnt lightning datamined or something? I'd guess it will come with a future patch.

using a frost nova shadow build + harald of ice and it srsly rocks!
going in with:
ice nova + curse on hit + frost bite
then ill just spam:
frost nova + spell echo + added cold dmg + cold pen + (just got the 5th L) added chaos dmg

if you can freeze 1 enemie and u kill him u can see the chain reaction! epic
otherwise i got vaal coldsnap + 2 novas casting and u clear a whole pack :)

It adds extra cold damage to cold builds, further increased by nodes and gear.
It helps you wipe big groups with a cold crit build pretty fast.
It benefits mostly crit builds, because of the shatter explosion.

It's not bad for it's low 25% reservation, works pretty good with some builds.
Not OP, but ok-ish.

Using it with Wrath/Anger and Windripper. For 13% of mana I'm getting decent DPS boost, and sometimes mobs just explode with ice - some kind of chain reaction, since the explosion of one monster, kills another one, and that kills another one, and so on. I'll give a video of that happening, if I don't forget.

Also, it works on my flame totem too, which is neat (from 700 DPS, with GMP, to 1000 DPS).

I'm not using any phyiscal damage, so Herald of Ice >> Herald of Ash, since it doesn't add flat damage, and I'm hitting a lot (Tornado Shot), and not hard, so the burn thing is pretty bad for me.

Its the only thing I can run along with Wrath and Anger, giving me third source of FLAT elemental damage. I can't run Haste or anything else, since it would cost a little too much.

So I'd say its pretty good, on some setups, and pretty worthless on others. - exactly how well balanced skills should work :P.