Qbert

While I agree that some mages will go 11 deep into frost just for cold snap (assuming it stays as an 11 poiinter) ... I just want to clarify that in arenas, the real value of Ice Block isn't the ability to use spell and its characteristics, rather the value lies in preventing the other team from wasting their time attacking you in the first place. The same can be said about Ice Barrier now; the real value isn't so much the damage absorbtion as it is the signal you're telling the other team that you are Frost so 'don't bother targetting me'.

The underlying beauty of Ice Block in arena is the freedom to cast without being hounded and hassled due to the futility of other teams to kill you when you can use it, Due to this nature of the spell, I don't think arena mages will place as much value in cold snap.

 

Evalara

Some raids are different. We NEVER run less than 3 mages, and occasionally as many as 5. Our warlocks are terrible and only break the top 5 on AoE fights, whereas our mages are frequently right behind our best rogue. We don't use CoR because our healers are pansies, so we always get CoS/CoE. We never swap classes in and out in the middle of a raid. For us, the changes are going to be Totally Awesome.

 

zurmagus

It can definitely be resisted. I've got a screenshot somewhere of my mage at level 40 or dropping a Blizzard on a group of level 48-50 mobs in Maurudon... lots of resist messages.

 

Pintofbrew

While I don't advocate the "IB is useless" mentality, I don't think over-enthusiastic pointing to amazing powers of IB is smart; Yes, it's more than an "oh shit" button, and can help you get back on track faster eg, when murlocks are running in and you get a badly-timed watery grave, or even just before mag 30%.

But be serious... You didn't just suggest the priests SW:P since you saved them so much mana, did you?

 

Axira

I expect that they're gonna make Ice Block a required skill for some fights from reading that comment. Perhaps they want us to tank some add again in Sunwell or TFT with Ice Block being our only rescue against a certain "once in a pull"-ability of the mob we need to tank... at least that is just my spidersense tingling when I read that blue comment.

 

aznxk3vi17

This is not a resist, but a Miss. Blizzard has no resistable part, you either hit it, or you miss, dictated by your hit rating (or in your case, the level difference).

 

Iod

I couldn't help but laugh at this one.

Even on my 70 mage farming the Sunfury Researchers in Netherstorm I get 'resist' messages popping up in my Blizzards. Must have something to do with hit rating.

 

kadgar

Compared to the very common meaning that IB is completely useless, even very small amounts of IB power are amazing.
However I still think that IB is the most underrated mage spell actually.
I'd say it's about 2% increased dps averaged over T4 instances.

It's up to you if you want to use IB defensively for the "oh shit" moments (likely for learning / new bosses) or if you want to use is offensively (likely for boring farm content).

About SW:P, I don't know healers that good and if healers really have a lot of spare time you better replace one healer with 1 dps class. Anyway with 2.3 healers will have quite a lot of spell dmg and with IB you can prevent 5k dmg often, sometimes more than 10k, if a healer has the time and mana why not put a SW:P or a MF on the boss?

I agree that it's a big deal, but not that it makes us overpowered.
WoW Forums -> Hypothermia reduced to 30 seconds again!


It seems that we'll get these changes with 2.4.

 

arch

Yeah the phrasing certainly implies that this will be launched with either 2.3 , 2.4 or possibly a minor patch inbetween 2.3 and 2.4, but I think the reason why most people doubt that it'll go live before WotLK is the fact that they will be under huge pressure to develop a very good replacement for IB in the frost tree.
That, and the possibility for swapping around certain talents in the frost tree, will probably take quite some testing - testing which could be done together with the rest of the WotLK talents.

This is a very nice and needed change. I anticipate cold snap getting slightly buffed and moved to IB's current position.

 

Cardynal

My biggest concern with this change to Ice Block is unless they give a substantial buff to frostbolt with the 21 point talent in frost, frost is really going to be inferior to fire in PVE. I'm really not seeing anything to justify lower dps over a 5 minute fight with the possibility of your pet dying and interrupts...which crushes your dps in comparison to fire. Lets just hope that they dont' add another utility spell to frost in it's place.

However, I still see frost as being the top arena spec. You still have your frost armor. And with the 10% increase to Frostbolt, you're going to see 21% higher crits on a target without resil...although i know you won't see someone with 0 resil in an arena. Shatter mages are going to be pretty powerful. The water elemental is also a much more useful 41 point talent than dragon's breath.

 

kimu

Hi,

Regarding the topic (Mage in 2.3) I would like to hear your oppinion on a Spec/Equip I thought of....with respect to the IB-discussion this might be considered OT but whatever

We are currently working on Illidan and I am thinking a lot about the items I will take (as I am DKP leader this is quite important to me).

Imagine following:

*) frost spec (done in a sec)
*) hitcap (have it already)
*) about 500critrating meaning 40%cirt (including WC) (have it already)
*) spellhaste (wrists, staff, ring, skull) (could take)
*) Ashtongue trinket (have it already )

With this setup you should have the 145haste from the trinket up all the time statistically resulting in ~2,1sec frostbolt spam(without skull being up !!). It is important that you are frost specced in order to have the max number of casts during the trinket-proc-time to make it proc again and that you don't have to recast scortch as you lose dps in waiting for the GCD (and hastetime obviously). If I use it in raids right now it is up a lot but I would need more haste in order to keep it up constantly.

I hope that with this setup I will (at least) reach the dmg of fire and having all the benefits from frost (e.g. less agro)

Do you guys think I can compete with fire ?
This question is more or less influencing what items I take (especially which out of the 5 t-pieces I don't take)

thx - cya

ps: this idea more or less came up when I saw that the ashtongue trinket has no GCD and that it might not be so crappy after all (at least for frost because for fire it is really a waste of the trinket slot)

 

Guinuvere

I've read through most of the mage posts and haven't been able to find a solid answer on this. With the new Chaotic meta gem, am I better off wearing my T4 helm or Cowl of the Grand Engineer? I am 10/48/3 and plan to stay that way. Lets say that T5 helm is not an option for at least a month. What will maximize my damage?

 

Cardynal

Your best bet is to pick up vontre's dps spreadsheet and play around with gear there. You'll see what's best for your spec.

In fact everyone who has a gear question should do this. This board is for mage theories and discussion...not "how do i gear a mage"

 

Axira

With that gear I'd say: "Yes" at first glance... But your remark about having less aggro but the same damage as fire is rather weird. The real benefit of frost is having more survivability, being able to kite stuff while DPSing it and having none of your extra high critdamage go to waste and rather fast spellcasts, which results in also less DPS-loss in fights that require alot of movement.

 

Kir

Need to bring dragon's breath's mana cost and cooldown down, nerf it's damage to compensate a bit. But, it's not useful as a control ability really due to it's cooldown, and it's pretty expensive for the damage. It'll never happen though, since they'd have to put CoC on a separate cooldown or bring it's cooldown to match, both of which are unnecessary since CoC is already good.

Alternatively, buff dragon's breath's damage another 10-20% to make the burst fire mage style viable in pvp again. Fire used to be quite decent due to it's burst pre-TBC. Bring that back a bit, would make fire mages tricky to play, but viable in arenas. At least with IB trainable, anyway. IB and blazing speed would let a fire mage stay alive long enough to help burst down the first target to get low. They would likely be one of the first to die afterwards, but as long as they take out an opposing player, it's at least worth it. Anything else is a bonus.

But, this is a PVE thread, so let's talk PVE. I love this change, because it helps in a lot of non-raid situations as well as having some situationally powerful effects in raids. Can't tell you how many times I've died on an encounter, such as Bloodboil, where I had a healing coming but just dropped before they got it off on me. It's definitely not a required talent by any means, but I really like the change. It just gives one of the more fun reasons for speccing frost, to all mages. I won't be quite as bored and frustrated playing a fire spec now. Which, it looks like I'll be stuck doing for a few more bosses (still use some spellfire pieces so I can't switch to frost without wearing even more subpar gear) until Illidan (on RoS now).

 

kimu

I tried that but I could not get to the point to distinguish between different equip (and that is what my question is about)....I did a lot of theorycrafting myself (with excel sheets ) but at this point I simply don't know if this is really the way to go....from pure numbers this would be totally imba but I doubt that I am the first to think about this use of the trinket....that is why I ask here if anyone has experience with it (and high hasterating with fire/frost) in general

jes - you are right....I mean everyone is raiding fire with 2.3 I guess but everyone would like to have the goodies from frost....it would be totally awesome if this could work out for me....I think I will give it a shot and spend my points on the staff from illi instead of the sword from archi

 

Docjowles

I'm actually in this same spot, so I ran the numbers through Vontre's spreadsheet (it's a fabulous tool for answering exactly this sort of question, do yourself a favor and download it).

For my personal situation (deep fire, full T4/crafted gear):

Putting an MSD into an empty T4 helm adds about 30 DPS
Putting a CSD into an empty T4 helm adds about 23 DPS
Going from an empty T4 helm to a Cowl gemmed with 3x [Runed Living Ruby] adds about 40 DPS

When I say "empty", I mean no meta gam. I have an [Infused Amethyst] in the blue socket.

From this, I conclude that the Cowl is about a 10 DPS upgrade over T4 with an MSD. It also has the added benefit of letting me replace a couple [Great Dawnstone] with [Runed Living Ruby], which adds another 10 DPS or so.

So unless I screwed something up, it's definitely an upgrade from T4, but not a huge upgrade.

 

kadgar

That is you assuming that they descided to make IB trainable just yesterday.
Take into account that they announced the increase of hypothermia duration (and especially the sily reason they stated in the forum: WoW Forums -> Hypothermia pah!) much earlier.
Seeing the whole picture I think they wanted to give us IB trainable in 2.3 but just didn't finish the repalcement talent yet.
Maybe Cold Snap moved to 21 and added a remove hypothermia function to cold snap. So they only have to create a 11 talent.


Short answer: depends on your crit chance, spell dmg, haste and a couple of other stats.
Long answer: There is a thread for you and such questions: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16781-mage_help_me_please/

 

frosty

The usefulness of Ice Block certainly depends on what you are doing imo. When there is only Hyjal/BT farming going on, it's pretty much reduced to a minor dps-boost like kadgar pointed out.

But it's actually more a talent that shines on learning raids, and even then it seems to be rather subtle - of course some people state that "i never needed Ice Block" ... Right, you don't, it's actually the raid healers that benefit from it, when the amount of dmg they have to heal up is prevented/reduced preemtively; stuff like Agonizing Flames on Illidan or simply evading Gurtoggs Fel Rage with Ice Blocking right before. I also can't count the times i saved my life with IB on the good old Mother Sharazh just b/c people were running like headless chickens in our early tries, or at Archimonde, where some guys didn't really understand the "stay around a decurser"-concept at once, and i knew i can run up to wherever they ended up, as IB saves me from anything that could happen. That is not really an issue anymore these days as most people finally know what to do, but i am sure it helped in our learning days.

On a sidenote: i doubt the replacement talent will buff frosts raid-dmg. Getting it on par with fire would make frosts dmg in pvp and solo-pve, and probably even in 5s, a bit too hefty due to Frostbite and esp. Shatter.

 

Rouncer

I'm betting that Blizzard will take the easy way out.

Give Ice Block a 10 minute cooldown as trained and then make the 21 point Frost Talent reduce the cooldown to 5 minutes.

I bet thats all they'll do since, honestly, the whole giving all Mages Ice Block as trainable really seems like an off the cuff change to quiet all the bitching and moaning on the WoW forums.

If they really have been working on it for awhile then I could see them taking a page from the Rogue survival TBC book (cloak of shadows with that amazingly short cooldown) and keep the 5 minute cooldown as trained but then have the 21 point talent reduce the cooldown to 1 or 2 minutes. That way a Frost Mage would have Ice Block available for every fight and would be able to save cold snap for preferential use with the Elemental.

They could even, if they wanted to get fancy, make the 21 point talent allow Frost mages to cast and bandage and evocate while Ice Blocked. Although that one would quickly have people up in arms since a class that could do serious dps while invulnerable would have to be overpowered.....although with Ret Pallies getting dps buffs they already have a class that can do just that so maybe its not that far fetched.


I love the concept and think that it will help a lot. I'm just hoping that the mana regen changes are going to be changing Arcane Med and Mage Armor to give mana/5 based on our Intellect so that they can redo our Tiered gear and change all that useless (in 2.3) Spirit into additional Intellect.

 

◊ manly

If you think about it, it would be quite the ultimate irony if they replace IB with another vital PVP talent. The point of the change is helping non-frost in pvp (which, in my view, will probably not succeed, but hey that's just my opinion). With this said, I don't think they can buff frost damage either. This leaves as possibilities pretty much only a utility talent, which needs to be somewhat novel because all 21pt talents are that way.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Rouncer

More I think about it the more I would be willing to bet that the new 21 point talent in the frost tree will be

Improved Ice Block - allows the Mage to cast spells while Ice Blocked.



PvE - doesn't increase Frost Trees specific damage so it would be balanced. Only issue I can see would be that the mage could Ice Block after aggroing a bunch of mobs, Ice Block and then just AoE them all down before it fades. Although Faxmonkey has shown that a really good frost mage can already AoE down just about any size group that can be snared.

PvP - more balanced then you would think since all our heavy damage spells have casting times and Ice Block removes mobility. Would be nice to get people to move themselves out of range when Ice Blocked for fear of damage and then you would have a chance to hit them with a spell when they move back in after it fades.

Even in the Arena it wouldn't be overpowered due to all the line of sight. Think about it, how hard would it really be to move out of LoS or out of Range of an Ice Blocked mage within 4 seconds, which is the minimum amount of time before the mage would be able to do any real targeted damage from within the Ice Block, GCD + Frostbolt casting time.

 

arch

My point exactly.

They are in a hassle, as they have to come up with something that won't be essential (which you might argue IB is now), yet meaningful and good replacement for ice block - and it can't be extensive additional surviability or (judging by recent testing) any vast dps increases.

The best addition would in my eyes be a anti-casting interruption talent with some other meaningful effect, but this alone will surely not be percieved as a good enough replacement for IB.

Thus this calls for moving around talents in the tree, and/or change the current version of ice block, which in turn makes this seemingly easy change a not so small job. The sort of job you'd rather do alongside developing the rest of the tree for WotLK, and well, we have been living with this for quite some time now.

Oh well, enough with the speculations, Kalgan practically made a promise to get this out "in the near future", but I just dont see that happening.

 

Pintofbrew

Allow me to explain:

A healer's job is to man a gate: His job isn't to do "as much as possible" as is our job, it's to make sure nobody dies. A good healer will always have his fingers itching to click, always being able to assess damage incoming to who and how much, how he's going to deal with it who he can spare to lose and who not. Healers don't have luxuries like parking DOTs (whats MF by the way? Unless you're referring to Mind Flay, which is 11th in shadow tree.) or bothering with DPS because simply put, if while they're jerking around providing 0.001% boss dmg if shit hits the fan they're one GCD and 350 mana down on what they should be, not to mention possibly out-of-5sec-rule.

Of course this has no bearing at all on IB, but I do think we need to be accurate in our statements. IB will not provide a DPS increase by allowing healers to partake of the damage meter. And I should think that 2% is a little optimistic: For a 10m fight 2% is 12sec worth of dps time. That means that whatever the IB is preventing from reaching you, you'd have lost 6sec to deal with without it (given you'd IB twice). Doubtable but not beyond reason. It's highly fight-dependent.

Roll on good times. Now if only they made it a little damn sooner...


Kimu, Guinuvere:
You are asking questions in the wrong forum. This post is on theorycrafting, not on "what do I do?". You should be asking these questions in http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16781-mage_help_me_please/ . Please don't pollute this discussion with pointless, out-of-place posts.

Rounced:
All classes, all trees, all 11th, 21st, 31st and 41st talents are cornerstones and unique. They all add a unique mechanic/spell/ability/function to the game and this is one of the fundamentals of the W.o.W. system. I doubt the 21st (or 11th if they move cold snap to 21, though I don't see why they should; it's hardly that powerful) will be as mundane as "less CD on IB".

Personally I'm hoping for an ability that provides a minor PvE group/raid buff. It has to be quite minor, because we're only talking 21 talents here, so how about "your frostbolt critical hits cause the target's miss-rate to increase by 2% for 5sec" or perhaps "your frostbolt critical hits cause the target to receive 2% increased damage from spell critical hits for 5sec" sounds delicious and not overpoweringly capable in either PvE or PvP. It will also provide us with some lovely utility for raids that we're so lacking in Frost.

 

ebbv

Whatever the replacement talent ends up being this is a much needed change. It won't make Fire as good as Frost in PvP, but it will help a lot. Obviously anyone who's serious about arena will still go Frost but it will be good for people who don't care enough to respec and just want to get the weapon.