During the creation of the spell effect i made a fireball.  the fireball spawned an actor that was a explosion effect.  the explosion had a sphere collider on it that i was using to see who was in range of the collision.  This worked fine for the fireball but when i created the iceball it broke the entire thing.  i spent about 10 hours trying to figure out why the ice ball wasn't working.

what i ended up figuring out was that for some reason the collider was putting the ice explosion into an infinite loop.  to fix the issue i disabled the collider and use a sphere trace to find out what was in range of the spell.