Salt is far more of an issue than ice spires, trust me on this. I have an ice spire claimed and so far I've gotten exactly 1 ice shard from it.
My attributes are currently sitting around the 70s, I've been staying in the 200% region with my hunger bar, not really putting a lot of effort into it to be fair.
I know of a handful of people who have like 150+ in attributes because they are consistently using salt, these are the people most influencing PvP so far this world (felix vs ad, frost vs polska, bob dole vs ainran).
Ice spire makes barely any difference at all compared to salt, it spawns at a way higher rate and agility is far more important than MC or anything else in combat.