Shatter

Shatter is a Mage talent that increases the mage's spell critical strike against frozen targets.

Functionality

Shatter is a talent in the Mage frost tree that passively increases the mage's critical strike chance against frozen targets by 10% per rank, up to 50% at rank 5. A frozen target is a target immobilized by a frost-based spell, such as [Frost Nova], Freeze, [Frostbite], [Freezing Trap] or the freeze effect from the  [Freezing Band]. The critical strike chance applies to all of the mage's schools.

Requirements

• Requires 15 points in Frost Talents
• Requires 2 points in [Improved Frost Nova]

Rank Table

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Tips

Shatter is an important talent in many frost and elementalist talent builds. Shatter is very effective when combined with talents such as [Ice Shards], Spell Power or Ignite which improve critial strike damage, or combined with [Frostbite], [Summon Water Elemental], [Cold Snap] or other talents which give more chances to freeze a target.

Because shatter is only useful against targets that are freezable, this talent has more utility in PvP and solo PvE situations. In raid situations, many mobs and most bosses are immune to freeze effects.

Prior to Patch 1.11, the critical strike bonus only applied to frost spells. After this patch, shatter now aplies to all of the mage's spell schools. This change made shatter a viable talent combined with fire and arcane schools, especially in elementalist builds.

in Patch 2.0.10 freeze effects were changed to break early on critical strikes. Typically, a freeze such as [Frost Nova] will now break on the first critical strike. This reduces the utility of shatter, as the critical strike will occur much earlier with the talent.

It is still possible to get two ciriicals on the same freeze before it breaks. First, cast a long cast time spell that also has a projectile travel time, such as [Frostbolt] or [Fireball]. Immediately after the cast, use an instant spell such as [Ice Lance] or [Fire Blast], or use [Presence of Mind] with another spell, if you are fast enough and at good range. The check to see if the target is frozen, and thus the critical strike check, is done at the time the cast completes, while the freeze effect is not removed from the target until after the spell hits. Thus, both spells will have the benefit of shatter due to the time of flight for the first spell.

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