The History of Ice Lance (Vanilla WoW to Mists)

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Published on January 22, 2014 4:00:04 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4NSyWQP0Kg

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World of WarCraft (2004)

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The History of Ice Lance

Ice lance is the spell that a Frost mages dps revolves around.

Ice lance was first introduced in The burning crusade. It did a little bit of damage, but was instant cast and cost very little mana. If used on a Frozen target, it did 3 times its normal damage. Coupled together with Shatter, a mage spell that has change many times over the course of wow but has always increased your chance to crit on a frozen target . Made it possible for Ice lance to hit for 6 times its normal damage when used on frozen targets.

And because of the way frost nova use to work, alowed mages to spam icelance on frozen targets as long as their Ice lance didn't hit the damage threshold. Frost nova would still beak on damage back then, but only if you hit over the damage threshold. As long as your ice lance hit just under that damage cap you could spamm it.

But Blizzard changed that quickly to give frost nova a higher chance to break when hit with a critical srike.

But even with this fix, mages still found a way to use shatter to their advantage.

There was this thing called the shatter combo.

What mages typically did in pvp was cast a frost bolt. Right before the frostbolt finished casting, you'd use your pets freeze to make your target frozen and gain the shatter effect. You wanted to wait right before you finished casting so that your opponet didn't have enough time to dispel the feeze. Then, once frost bolt left your hand, you would use Icelance immediatly after. Frost bolt has a slower travel time then Icelance and the shatter is applied to your spell when it leaves your hand, not when it hits the target.

So while your shatter buffed frostbolt is in the air, your ice lance will also have the shatter buff since the target is still considered frozen even though the frost bolt is almost garenteeded to break the freeze. Both frost bolt and icelance hit roughly at the same time, and no matter which one hit first, both gain the shatter effect and dealt a lot of damage in 1 Gcd.

In wrath, Fingers of frost was given to mages. Fingers of frost allowed your spells to act as if the target was frozen while under the effect. Allowing Ice lance to be used more often outside of just shatter combos.

In wrath, Ice lance was changed to only do double damage against frozen targets while gaining a little buff to its base damage to not be compltely terrbile outside of shatter. Also fingers of frost was given the added effect of buffing Ice lances damage by 25% when used.

In Mist, Ice lance was changed to do 4 times its damage on frozen targets in addition to haveing the 25% boost through fingers of frost and almost always critting with the new shatter. Theres also a glyph that allows your Icelance and mastery ice lances to cleave as well as another glyph that will split your icelance into 3 smaller icalnces during Icey Viens to increase its damage.

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