question: triple frost vs frost w/ immolate

[echomirage]

For elemental beamers: what's the benefit of Frost Nova/Immolate/FrostBeam over Frost Nova/Blizzard/Frost Beam with the Incinerate enchant on weapon?

Just about every Frost Beam mage I look at on the leaderboards is using the former, with ALL sorts of different enchants, from Slayer to lightning.

In my (very!) unscientific testing, there might be just the slightest damage edge for Nova/Immolate/Beam, but I just can't say for sure.

What I do know is that Thermal Shock is proccing just fine with the triple-frost/Incinerate approach; I figured the Blizzard mob slow effect would be more helpful than whatever minor damage Immolate does.

But if that's so great, why don't I see -anyone- else using it? The players in the top 100 obviously know what's useful, and I just can't figure it out.

Thoughts/advice welcome.

[Citizen055]

Ive been struggling with this also, immolate and the shatter effect is just so underwhelming. I’ve been experimenting with nova/timewarp/beam and seeing good results.

[mahara]

Shatter is about rounding up the mobs and immolate is about that one sentence really ... “affected targets take up to 45% more damage ...”

[Citizen055]

I did some more testing and damage-wise both timewarp and immolate give roughly the same damage but immolate can be used before every cast of frostbeam instead of every other, so immolate is probably better. But where you say it’s needed to draw aggro, I haven’t seen the same in my playing. I seem to get plenty of aggro just as fast without shatter, and with shatter I often attract attention of mobs I don’t plan on and in higher trials that sometimes kills me if I get unlucky. Obviously dying wastes tons of time- the 3 seconds is nothing it’s how all the mobs get bored and wander off. Don’t they know I’m about to get back up snd slaughter them?

[bojck]

Exactly as mahara said. Keeping aggro is key, otherwise time warp would be better than immo

[echomirage]

Aha. This makes sense.