Spellblade has pretty much always been Shatter Strike or bust. They made some great changes to Flame Reave where now Flame Reave is the new king, good stuff there. Shatter Strike still almost as good, good there still.
However a lot of the changes were geared towards a “proc” style where you used melee abilities to proc spells. After exhausting every angle I could experiment with the conclusion is — it all sucks in comparison to Flame Reave and Shatter Strike. The only one that comes close is spark charge but that’s nothing new and Runemaster and Sorcerer do that like 3x better.
Stuff like the Glacier node in Shatter Strike kinda baffles me. First of all it only procs off of the Ice Spikes (why?). And Ice Spikes halve on Shatter Strike recasts (why?). This causes Ice Spikes to not hit your main target on the recasts, pretty silly. Also only 20% chance to proc Glacier is abysmally low proc chance for an expensive mana skill like Shatter Strike.
On top of that it’s only 1/3 of a Glacier cast lol. so 20% chance to do 1/3 of a Glacier. Don’t go too crazy guys!!
I guess my main complaint is the lack of build diversity still, was really hoping to do some cool “spell weaving” from melee attacks but they all fall short, like massively short compared to Flame Reave’s melee damage. Flame Reave easily 5x the damage of any proc build.
To finish I’d also like to say I really hate almost all of the limitations of “Can only proc 1 time every 2 seconds”. Most of the limitations like these feel so bad and awkward. Like the limits on Fireball or Lightning Blast on Flame Reave. Why are they there? Flame Reave already costs mana, I can’t go that crazy with it because of the Flame Reave mana cost, that’s kinda the whole balancing point of the game are the mana limitations baked into everything. We don’t need these arbitrary “every 2 seconds” limits at all, it just makes us not bother with it and find a different build that has no limits.