◊ Vontre

Pintofbrew now that's interesting. I was thinking of trying frost raiding sometime soon, looks like it'll be sooner rather than later.

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koetjeka

I'll test it with a frost mage friend of mine, will post results tomorrow

 

Kutai

I've noticed during Void Reaver that my Water Elemental did not take damage at all.

 

Malevalon

I haven't done VR as Frost since 2.3, but I can tell you there is no specific immunity to Arcane, and I don't believe any generic resistance to AOE, for the Water Elemental. Here are a couple combat log lines from Kael'thas/SSC/Mag after the patch (copy/pasted from WWS):

Crimson Hand Centurion's Arcane Flurry hits Water Elemental for 1747 Arcane damage
...
Kael'thas Sunstrider's Arcane Disruption hits Water Elemental for 2098 Arcane damage
Kael'thas Sunstrider's Arcane Disruption hits Water Elemental for 2152 Arcane damage
[this happened many more times, with no partial resists on any entries]
...
Flame Strike's Melee hits Water Elemental for 32767 Fire damage
Flame Strike's Flame Strike dots Water Elemental for 3000 Fire damage
...
Coilfang Hate-Screamer's Sonic Scream hits Water Elemental for 4925 Arcane damage
...
Hellfire Channeler's Shadow Bolt Volley hits Water Elemental for 653 Shadow damage (1957 resisted)
[the only partial resist in the entire log]

At any rate, I'm back to a Fire spec. I was having a heck of a time keeping my Elly alive :-/

 

Xei

My WE got raped in ZA by the Hexlords shadow bolt spam.

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Pamine

The water ele never took dmg from VR's orbs. I always used him and let him stand there.

 

Vulkaire

It is just certain aoe's that don't hit pets that don't effect WE. For instance, Illidan's phase 2 fireballs and the storm from the Eagle boss in ZA. Most non frost based aoe's can and will kill it though.

 

Frenzi

This is false, the WE used to take damage from the orbs but at some point during 2.2 (may have even been towards the end of 2.1) he became immune to them. It is only on this fight and the WE is certainly not immune to arcane.

 

Pintofbrew

I can testify to what Frenzi states: Before 2.2 the elemental would get le one-shot in VR and Gruul's. Can't say about 2.2; I was arcane at the time (RIP).

Does anyone have any data of the list of aoe-immunities? Is there any correlation to Hunters? Is there any Blue data?

Vontre: Not wanting to sound overly optimistic and I am aware our mages aren't nut-case min-maxers, but I posted 6.9% on Hydros (rotating 3xAB & scorch on water phase) while they made 7.4%. A much smaller margin than I expected. On Lurker, provided I left the pet on the platform (it couldn't shoot from the islands or the water) I came under the rogues and above the firemages. On Leotheras I did a rather embarrassing 10.4% of total dmg done, plus 0.8% for the pet (next best: Rogue@8.6% although firemages have to stop 6sec early for phase change due to travel/ignite tics). Most surprising of all though, was said VR on 8.8% with pet, second to a rogue at 9.1%. And I had plenty of moving to do; I was under the impression that with 0 motion/transitions melee could have a party on VR... Warrior shout haste pots and enh sham (no elixirs) vs my spriest only buff, CoE and brilliant mage oil. Go figure...

Once again, I'm not saying this to be cocky or showoff, I'm simply gob-smacked that frost is not only competitive but -so fiercely- competitive. I was expecting 50-50 to have to respec back to fire after an abysmal hydros performance, not to leave the firemages in the dirt.

For completeness, just in case, I'll state again that not all our fires are up to standard. However, I like to think the difference between "good" and "great" to be less than 10%. Hence my bewilderment at surpassing them for over 12-15%. PS: our locks are hopeless. The only good one is SL spec so he can tank Leo's demon.

 

Frenzi

Well I remember a blue post about making encounters more pet friendly and the the changes to both Gruul and VR were implemented at about the same time as this. I can't remember exactly when though.

I am having trouble judging the performance of the different specs and classes at the moment as my old guild folded and a new guild was born with members from two separate guilds with the other guild being more progressed and gear levels between the members are quite disparate at the moment.

However from what I have seen Fire is beating frost marginally by 50-100 dps and locks are miles above any class on average, even the rogues. All of our mages are now fire, although I am interested to see what the new 21 pt talent in frost will be and whether it will have any PvE advantage.

 

Pintofbrew

I was quite smitten with Lhivera's suggestion of 21 talent on WOW US. It was a brilliantly well-rounded idea. In short (s)he suggested a mechanic that would cause a proc @~30% per frostbolt crit, that would last 5sec and cause the next fireblast, blast wave or ice lance to treat the target as though it was frozen. (S)he covered with data proving in PvE it's a 2.2% buff (thus very reasonable for 21), and in PvP it's a marginal increase as well. It makes a useful synergy for elemental spec and is good for leveling. Even down to "how am I going to use it when it procs after i've started to cast the next bolt?" had an answer: It lasts 5sec, so you'd cast the bolt after the proc normally and then lance.

I got all teary-eyed at such a well-rounded talent suggestion, I just hope the 10 or so pages on the forum got forwarded to the devs. Anything to get away from the dreaded Fbolt spam can't be bad afterall.

But I wouldn't hold my breath to be honest. I'm thoroughly prepaired for some idiotic invention.

 

Frenzi

I think what manly said will be correct though and it will be an activated talent like the other two 21 pointers and I am not holding my breath for something that will increase DPS.

 

Iod

21 points is too few points in the tree, but I was thinking of something like a Trueshot Aura for Elemental Casters (Increases Frost, Fire, and Nature damage by xx for members within 30 yards of Mage). Might be overpowered, but at least it would provide *some* sort of synergy for groups. Lhivera's suggestion does sound mighty tempting, though.

I'll throw in my support to the observation that Water Elementals are immune to the Arcane Orbs. I still haven't found any other encounter that they exhibit this behavior, though.

 

Aldric

I'm not seeing how such a change could be considered a PvE dps boost. The blastwave portion we can discard right off the bat, as well as fireblast seeing you would have to move in from 36 yards to 20 yards (max in both cases) to even use it. This leaves you with the option of ice lancing. However, icelance has an aweful coefficient of 14%. So at high levels of gear it becomes a huge dps loss unless you invest 7 points to get full shatter, which really isn't a PvE talent. A T6 mage should have around 2100 base FB and 1150 lances hits against a frozen target.

Start off at a respectable 27% spell crit, WC and shatter for a crit rate of 87% on your lances.

1150*.13+1150*2*.87 = 2150 average (1433 dps)

While at the same time casting a frostbolt instead at (27+5+10) 42% crit

2100*.58+2100*2*.42 = 2982 average (1193 dps)

So at a 12.6% chance per frostbolt to increase your dps by 240, you're talking about a 30 dps gain when you'd hopefully be averaging 1400 dps in raid, about a 2% increase by these numbers and what Lhivera quoted. 2% for a 8 talent point investment is pretty shitty. And that's 2% now, just imagine how much worse that will be when you take eventual scaling into account.

Maybe if it applied to frostbolts as well, otherwise it just doesn't hold up.

 

Rustyshrapnel

For a love of the experimental process and in the name of holy EJ wonkitude, my water elemental bravely gave his life (repeatedly) for science. I told my guild leaders to ignore my damage meters and went to town.

Evian Death Wish Series (me exercising extremely poor water elemental control and seeing what the little bugger will stand) in TK/SSC:

Al'ar: takes all AE damage.
Solarian: takes all AE damage (the moonfire! WOOSH splat).
VR: no orb damage.
Kael: doesn't seem fussed by Thaladred except for the silence (no knockback), feared by Sanguinar, couldn't get him close enough to Capernian's arcane explosion without getting Conflagg'd, dies to Telonicus's bomb, takes dmg from Axe's whirlwind but seems unfazed by anything else the other weapons dish out, dies in Kael's flame strike like a little scrub, seems pretty unaffected by the netherbeams during Kael's gravity lapse.

Hydross: couldn't kill him; it's almost impossible to kill a WE on Hydross even when you actively try.
Lurker: if I parked him too close he died to Whirl (melee attack), otherwise he was indestructible.
Moro: One-shotted by Earthquake, otherwise takes no damage.
Leo: Hahahaha, rended! (splat) Also takes Chaos Blast dmg during demon phase.
FLK: Dies to Sharkkis's multishot, never caught a spitfire, immune to all Caribdis's effects (duh), affected by the wandering tornado (doesn't get tossed up but will stop casting).
Vashj: dies to multishot, dies to Static Charge, dies to Forked Lightning, immune to the green goo the spore bats poop out in phase 3 (poison).


All in all, aside from the really obvious "this will kill your elemental" stuff, Evian was fairly hardy. On an average night in TK or SSC I lose him once or twice on a boss (Morogrim for example) but proper timing usually takes care of that. Aside from VR's orbs there weren't any real surprises on what he could and couldn't survive. Also if anyone can kill their WE on Hydross I will salute you; that takes some serious frost mage sucking skills.

I have no Evian Death Wish info for BT/Hyjal yet because our guild just got keyed and I suspect my GL's wouldn't cotton to me trouncing my dps in those zones yet.

 

macbeet

seems like this is going to be "Mage TC Wishlist after 2.4" (:
I thought about some more PvP oriented talent which resembles a tauren stomp or frost trap

Frost Ball
instant or 0.5 cast time
didn't think of mana cost
1 minute cooldown (or similar)
Engulfs target in a ball of ice, rendering him unable to act for 1 second.

The idea of this talent is to have an additional interrupt in PvP or an Oh shit! button for instances, when the mob charges towards the healer. Granted it does not benefit in raids, unless it gains an additional dmg benefit, which would most likely overpower the talent in PvP.

However what I would like to see most is an ability which benefits other classes as well, to give some raid support...but that does not fit into the 21-point-single-spell-paradigm

 

Rouncer

I completely agree with you over that suggestion, it really was just about the most well-rounded and viable suggestions I had ever seen for the new Frost tree 21 pointer, although it has one fatal flaw that is easily corrected.

I responded a bunch of times in that thread with this point. The talent does nothing if the mage is not specced for Shatter and/or is under level 66. My suggestion was to take his and then add an extra 20% crit rate to the instant attack that consumes the buff. I also thought that it's inter-tree versatility was a bit light. I thought it would ideal if they gave it some use for the main cast spell of each tree.

My version of Lhivera's talent would be:

Cold-Hearted
30% chance on the critical strike of any Arcane Blast, Fireball or Frostbolt to gain Cold-Hearted. While under the effect of Cold-Hearted the next Instant cast spell will gain a 20% increased chance for a critical strike and the target of that spell will be treated as if they were frozen in regards to spells and effects. Duration is 6 seconds.

 

Kir

The talent needs to be more pve oriented, or it completely negates the point of making IB trainable in the first place (too many mages are frost for pvp).

The only thing I think they ever needed to do to balance frost for pve was work in the frozen mechanic to raid mobs. Clearly, you can't have frost mages proccing roots on boss mobs, that's overpowered. You also can't have all the frost mages able to 'freeze' the mob for shatter purposes, or they'd kill everyone in damage. But, they work up all this synergy in the frost talents for that mechanic, and then it's all void on boss mobs.

I like lhivera's idea for this reason, but it's a little bit off. If there was a talent that let us apply the freeze debuff, but not root it, so we could take some advantage to having shatter in pve, it would be all the boost frost ever needed.
Make it wear off as soon as a crit occurs and it would end up being a ~7% crit increase (15% frostbite proc chance) on single targets to all the frost mages in the raid. That would have made up most of the difference between fire and frost without WE survivability buffs and such. It might be overpowered now, but I just think it's ridiculous that half of the frost talents and mechanics are worthless in pve.

If I had my way, I do something like reduce arctic winds to 3 pts, at 1/2/3% for the miss and dmg components, and move it to piercing ice's spot. Move piercing ice down two tiers to frozen core's spot. Then, buff frozen core to also give a 5/10/15% chance to apply a 'frozen core' debuff to a mob that acts like freeze for shatter purposes for your spells, but does not slow/root and move it to arctic winds old spot.

Would only be a few % dmg increase, but would offer more synergy with our talents and allow you to ice lance situationally.

 

Aldric

It's an improvement, especially for leveling, but without shatter and instead building it in, it's now almost exactly the same dps as frost bolting would be instead. Great for PvP, great for leveling, still really bad for PvE. My personal choice would be Nature's Grace (.5 less cast time after spell crit for all spells) but that would probably be heavily overpowered.

Let's face it though, there are about 3 passive 21 point talents across all the tree's for all the classes. It's going to be a spell.

 

spiderella

I don't know one way or the other for Kaz'Rogal as I've never been frost in Hyjal, but I do remember my water elemental blowing up a raid on Kazzak (whoops . . . XD).

 

Kir

don't see how. It's the same mechanics as the idea posted before, with a 20% crit increase even. So, at the minimum, it's the 2% increase you quoted before.

I disagree with your assessment of it's viability based on point investment. Yes, it's 5 pts for shatter and everything. Yea, it's only 2% increase on boss mobs (which is a decent amount) But, it's a much larger increase then 2% on all trash mobs/waves/adds too. It'd make taking shatter another situationally powerful ability in pve, unlike the crapfest it is now. Huge on trash/adds that are freezeable, and not completely worthless on boss mobs.

I mean, deep frost is already taking a bunch of the situational talents anyway. A 2% increase for talents you would have likely taken anyway is fine with me.

 

Methdrone

I was quite impressed by my small amount of raiding last night as fire. I was only able to make one pull on illidan last night, but dps look good for fire. Pre 2.3 I was pulling around 800-900 dps with the same spec no meta, now i have CSD.

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Aldric

No, the 2% from above, is 2% with shatter. Rounced's version without shatter breaks even. As soon as a T6 mage picks up a single piece of gear from Sunwell it becomes worse.

Because scaling of icelance is negligible when compared to frostbolt they would need to add another rank of lance every time a new tier of content becomes available to maintain that play style. The talent would be broken right at the time it's inserted into the game.

As to frost being loaded with "situational talents" it isn't. This build gets you to to 41 points where only 2 of them are situational (3 if you could IB), arcane is worse, fire is only slightly better at 1 point (with pyroblast).

The way to make a talent like this work would be make shatter a pre-req for it. Then you would need to make the effect trigger off not only the primary nukes but off ANY spell. That would make shatter effective and triggered off AE spam. Then for it's mild boss uses (negating scaling) and generic AoE use it would be well worth investing the points to take in a raiding build.

 

Rouncer

Lhivera did some TC math with my version and showed it to be a 3.2% increase in dps if the mage had 5 points in shatter. If the mage had 4T6 the bonus would be less but even without any points in shatter you will still have a dps boost by using the Ice Lance when you get a proc.

With 5/5 shatter the math looks like this

Frostbolt with 4T6 would rise to 1241.51dps which is still quite a bit less then the 1819.39dps that Ice Lance with 5/5 Shatter would do. Sure the overall dps increase is less when 4T6 gets brought into the mix but it is definitely present.


How about a mage specced Cold-Hearted but without Shatter?

If you were to add 4T6 into the mix then the Frostbolt dps would rise to 1241.51 which is still less then Ice Lances 1364.93 and that is without any points spent in shatter. Which seems to imply that while the overall dps increase may not scale perfectly as gear increases (which is a common theme in wow anyway, just ask Murphid) it would still be a long time before it would no longer be viable to cast the Ice Lance on a proc. It would also depend on the set bonuses of the Tiers after 6 since 5% to Frostbolt certainly hurts the scaling of the talent concept a lot more then say the 4T5 bonus.

 

Kir

You are inferring the wrong thing from my posts. I said 'I mean, deep frost is already taking a bunch of the situational talents anyway.' Yes, you can get all the damage talents without taking situational talents. I didn't say you were required to pick up situational talents to get the good ones, I said 'deep frost', meaning a frost spec, takes a lot of situational talents already. That is, take your 0/0/42 spec and use the rest of your points. What are you using them on? You can't get any good damage talents anymore, you've got a bunch of leftover points for situational talents. The classic 10/0/51 spec ends up having like 9 points to pick up whatever you deem useful in frost. An '8 pt investment' for another small dps increase, compared to using them for ZERO dps increase, means the opportunity cost is null.