Glacial Spike or Thermal Void

[blackempire 0]

Wazzup this is my first forum post and stuff and im wondering what you think it the best talent to go for!

[Hxx 0]

It feels that in theory Thermal Void has a higher DPS ceiling, but after a ton of sim'd results and my own testing in game I consistently parse better using Glacial. It also feels like it smooths out the rotation more as you can go a long time (5-10 casts) with just Frostbolt spam trying for procs and it tanks your DPS. Plus, you get the random chance of being able to shatter GS w/ BF and that's nice! 

[Archimage 98]

Glacial should be better when you proc Brain Freeze often enough for the frostbolt and glacial shatters.
Buffed by Clarity of Thought relic and Nighthold set bonus.
Recommended when using Splitting Ice, since glacial will hit a second target.

Thermal Void should be better when you proc Fingers of Frost a lot.
Recommended with Frozen Touch talent and/or you are using anything that allows your Frozen Orb to come up faster.

[Atrelis 0]

Generaly, thermal void parses better and sims better in ToS and not because it has a higher dps ceiling. Also, TV is just more versatile in ToS and its very rare to see mages playing otherwise.

[Tri 138]

I prefer thermal void by miles but if you check parses there is a lot of preference for glacial spike. One of the big questions is do you have  Lady Vashj's Grasp. If so then thermal void becomes much much stronger. So there are cases to be made for both talents, but, thermal void is just easier to use and has a smoother rotation feel. GS is just so clunky to me and I hate the hard rotation stop time to cast it. 

[Tehril 12]

At the moment they are close enough that unless you are in a top raiding guild, you can play both without being a drain on the raid, however Thermal Void is just stronger as long as you are itemized for it.  In some scenarios you can find yourself doing more damage with Glacial, however that takes a lot of vers/mastery in place of haste. 

But if you have gear sets itemized for both, Thermal Void will beat out Glacial. Even with ordinary procs, Thermal Void beats out Glacial, and during the god procs it starts to dominate Glacial. sadly, in the latest change to our class, Blizzard detected some fun with us abusing % damage increases to do stupid huge Glacials, so the niche that the talent once had is now gone(RIP 100mil Glacials on last boss of BRH).

[Paigey 0]

Getting a better idea on what maybe better is to sim your character.   For me personally GS used to sim higher until after a few gear upgrades then TV simmed higher by about 200k

[Alpacapacino 0]

Always sim yourself, especially as a mage. Never use AMR use the addon pawn instead, honestly altered-time would probably be better to learn more about mage then icy-veins would. Icy-veins is good to learn to basics but honestly most of the frost forum section of altered-time offers everything including the basics. I provided two links at the bottom that you'll want to go to. Highly recommend watching the simc+pawn video guide.

Especially important to know that reaching the "shatter cap" is pretty much a fruitless endeavor. The information on the guide for frost mage is outdated in that respects on this site. You should aim for a 1:1 ratio between haste and crit. Once you reach 30 percent haste, it's value starts to slightly diminish. More haste= versatility getting "buffed".

Honestly depending on your gear the information i gave you kind of loses relevance. Sim yourself, enable scaling, check the boxes for int, crit, vers, mastery and haste. Go into global settings bring your iterations to 25k, never use less with an rng spec like frost. Or you will see huge variance.

Remember That GS was nerfed as well through mastery. In most cases if not 100 percent of the cases TV is just flat out better. Usually when someone says that GS pulls ahead of TV is if A they don't have the gear so it will pull ahead until they get better gear or B they simply do not have their character stats properly balanced, this is including improper gems and enchants.

 

Links:

http://altered-time.com

Quin69's pawn+ simc guide. He's playing ret but all the simcraft + pawn explanations are spot on regardless of class/spec. Probably the best youtube video on pawn and simc