Here is the thing, frost has much more survivability built in, ie, its got more tools, but what if you can survive as fire, just simply by learning to play better?
I know its the case, because I know fire mages who simply don't die, and since thats true, having tricks is only good in so far as covering up for your weaknesses. Remove the weaknesses, and you might as well gain the 26% damage.
This is true in pvp to a lesser extent, but other classes are having their trees reworked so there isnt a pvp and pve tree, why should we want anything different? If I want to raid with frost, whats it give me? I can replicate ice block with a pot for gold instead of a talent point, and I can replicate ice barrier with priest shields, but I still cant freeze or snare anything, so I give up 26% dmg, and 3% efficiency for the priviledge of casting blue bolts? If shatter and frostbite etc mattered in pve, there would be an argument, but as it stands, I dont die in raids as fire, why would I need to be frost?
The problem is that that cannot be overcome. You cannot design an encounter such that if you don't have 31 in a certain tree you die right away and become useless. Well you could but can you imagine the whining? And what about classes that do not have ice block?
DPS is useful no matter what. Survivability will always only be situationally useful at best (in raids that is). I think that is the heart of the current frost issues. The tree is designed around something that intrinsically has very limited raid value.
Originally Posted by Seeten
Here is the thing, frost has much more survivability built in, ie, its got more tools, but what if you can survive as fire, just simply by learning to play better?
I know its the case, because I know fire mages who simply don't die, and since thats true, having tricks is only good in so far as covering up for your weaknesses. Remove the weaknesses, and you might as well gain the 26% damage.
This is true in pvp to a lesser extent, but other classes are having their trees reworked so there isnt a pvp and pve tree, why should we want anything different? If I want to raid with frost, whats it give me? I can replicate ice block with a pot for gold instead of a talent point, and I can replicate ice barrier with priest shields, but I still cant freeze or snare anything, so I give up 26% dmg, and 3% efficiency for the priviledge of casting blue bolts? If shatter and frostbite etc mattered in pve, there would be an argument, but as it stands, I dont die in raids as fire, why would I need to be frost?
If those things don't interest you, then my goodness, people, don't be a frost mage
I reject your premise. So many of the changes being made to every class are designed to make every tree successful in every aspect of the game. Why should mages be limited to certain specs for certain aspects of the game?
Untrue, and you know it.
SL lock with Felguard = Stay away in PvP. In raiding? Ehhh, lower damage production. Reverse for Incinerate locks.
Demonology tree is currently the PvP tree. So it got raid buffs: more damage, and a raid-viable pet.
Affliction was the leveling tree. It too got raid buffs: more debuff slots (aimed at the class as a whole, but most beneficial to affliction), improved CoE and CoS, more damage.
Destruction was the raiding tree. It got pvp buffs.
Beastmastery and Survival were both PvP trees. They got raid buffs. Survival's aren't very good, granted, but that's clearly what they're intended for. Marksmanship, the raid tree? What do you know -- PvP buffs.
Shadow tree -- raid buffs.
It goes on. Of course some trees remain more optimal for certain content than others. They don't need to be equal. But they all need to be viable. One shouldn't be so much better than the others that you'd have to be crazy to use your preferred spec in your preferred content.
One of the primary goals of the 25-man raid limit and the new talent trees and, I expect, raid encounter design in TBC is to utterly demolish the crusty old min-max paradigm. I hope that goal is achieved.
At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.
The problem is that that cannot be overcome. You cannot design an encounter such that if you don't have 31 in a certain tree you die right away and become useless. Well you could but can you imagine the whining? And what about classes that do not have ice block?
DPS is useful no matter what. Survivability will always only be situationally useful at best (in raids that is). I think that is the heart of the current frost issues. The tree is designed around something that intrinsically has very limited raid value.
I agree with you, and this is why Frost needs a raid buff. My suggestion is more winter's chill type effects. Stuff that cant matter in pvp, because you hit people twice(or however many it takes in the xpack) and they die, but matters a lot when stacked in a raid, such that it makes up the %26 and the %3.
For instance, what about a winter's chill effect that stacked up to 15 times(for whatever value makes frost roughly equal fire dps)? Obviously doesnt change pvp balance, you'll never hit anyone 15 times with frostbolt in pvp, but makes a huge difference in raids.
We have only scratched the surface with whats possible, but think about what frost brings to the table in a raid, and then buff with an eye to making raiding better, and pvp stay the same, I think your onto something.
Fire got Dragon's Breath, which buffed pvp survival, allowing it to pull off crazy survival combos in the middle of a flag fight in AB or flag room in WSG, which used to be the sole territory of frost, so they obviously get it. They just need to get the right stuff into frost to make it viable.
Lhiv, I dont put much stock in adding waterbolt to the frostbolt calcs. Too many things can kill the elemental in 1 hit, particularly in a raid situation, and he dies in 5 mans to bosses in the beta right now, so I think adding him to the numbers does frost a disservice.
Lhiv, I dont put much stock in adding waterbolt to the frostbolt calcs. Too many things can kill the elemental in 1 hit, particularly in a raid situation, and he dies in 5 mans to bosses in the beta right now, so I think adding him to the numbers does frost a disservice.
Agreed. It's a best case scenario. I included it mainly so people can't say, "but you should have counted the water elemental's DPS!"
ETA: Also, I must have been high on that DPM comment.
At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.
I agree with you, and this is why Frost needs a raid buff. My suggestion is more winter's chill type effects. Stuff that cant matter in pvp, because you hit people twice(or however many it takes in the xpack) and they die, but matters a lot when stacked in a raid, such that it makes up the %26 and the %3.
For instance, what about a winter's chill effect that stacked up to 15 times(for whatever value makes frost roughly equal fire dps)? Obviously doesnt change pvp balance, you'll never hit anyone 15 times with frostbolt in pvp, but makes a huge difference in raids.
Frost could be fixed for raiding, I think, with a one-point talent:
Improved Winter's Chill 0/1
Requires 5 points in Winter's Chill
Your frost damage against the target is increased by 1% for each application of Winter's Chill.
At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.
Personally, i feel frost shouldnt have better damage than fire, whether that increased damage is through dps or dpm.
It's counter-intuitive to me, and frankly looking at the benefits of a frost build aside from damage, it doesnt add up.
I find the whole argument a bit pointless, since we don't know what raids will be like. If however, the signs are correct, that blizzard is making raids more 'dynamic', ie: more movement, move surviving, more incoming damage etc, then frost will have an advantage before damage is even considered.
Raiding frost in naxx (chosen because its the newest raid instance) isn't a waste even now, the amount of healing you save (this is practically all fights) , the ability to kite on gluth, the everpresent 'oh shi-' (it happens, dont pretend it doesnt) buttons, the extra aoe power and use of shatter (gluth/maexxna/gothik/anub), these are things you can't measure with a damage meter, and they're being completely neglected in most of these arguments. Who says no to a frost mage even NOW when they're higher dps than a hunter [in my experience], with more utility, and more self-sustaining?
Im slightly bemused by the mage who's never used ignite, yet is arguing about intra-class spec balance? Some experience in the subject helps a lot with perspective. I've personally dabbled with fire/frost specs more times than i want to admit..
I'm not exactly despairing though, i get the feeling from beta forums (the lack of solid info suggests mechanics are being changed a lot) that mage damage is being tweaked constantly, and as tseric's recent post suggested, it's certainly a matter of interest to the devs. We'll see what happens, I reserve judgement till we stand on solid ground so to speak.
I just find it amusing that the reason for going with 41 Frost (Water Elemental) interacts so poorly with the primary reason for going Frost (increased survivability in random target or AE encounters).
In general, I think Frost needs a raid or party buff unrelated to DPS. I find it annoying that mages exist in a vacuum compared to other classes. We leech off the other class' buffs and don't do anything special to make them notice we're in the group (although I guess now Warlocks have Fire Vulnerability for Incinerate/Conflag cycles). Slow somewhat works too, but I'm worried it just won't be that big a deal in 5-mans or raid encounters, acting like an awful Curse of Tongues.
Survivablity has little to do with a raid if you are all playing correctly.
Blizzard has to give Frost mages some kind of extra damage bost to be more in line with the other trees. The elemental seems to fit the bill to a degree.
PVP survivablity is another matter and I will argue that the frost Elemental is great for PVP. (Although better then another tiered talent compared to it is a whole diffrent argument)
Insta Cast Ranged AOE from the elemental really awsome against melle, and AWSOME for shatter. Interrupts spellcasters casting. A very nice PVP tool.
Well, don't kid yourself too much. People like us for water/food, portals, AE, AB, the occasional CC and 'locks will simply love the fire vulnerability in the expansion. I am quite comfortable theorycrafting that we aren't *really* bringing that much utility through those things but other classes do indeed like to have us around for them. In fact, we could be way down on the damage and people would still want us around, although min-maxers would of course replace us in many situations.
I may think that many of them are fools but hey, we are not going to actually be hurting for group slots for at least a while yet.
Im slightly bemused by the mage who's never used ignite, yet is arguing about intra-class spec balance? Some experience in the subject helps a lot with perspective. I've personally dabbled with fire/frost specs more times than i want to admit..
So you're amused that I can add, subtract, multiply and divide with sufficient skill to know that 25% more damage with (now, thankfully) a slightly worse DPM sounds a bit out of whack? I understand how ignite works. I've seen it in action. Knowing that you like a certain spec and pointing out that that spec may be hurting compared to others isn't rocket science. Dismiss me if you'd like, but the numbers (before today and to some extent after) speak for themselves.
I could care less about the extra damage, but the fun of being a fire mage just got the life sucked out of it. I *enjoyed* the cooperative play more than anything else. We only usually have 1-3 fire mages, so we couldn't set the ignite chain on auto-mode and had to time our combustions/scorches... It was a lot of fun, especially on boring raids.
I could care less about the extra damage, but the fun of being a fire mage just got the life sucked out of it.
I keep seeing people say this. So if you had to coordinate with other fire mages to carefully roll ignites in order to squeeze out a maximum of 40% of your original crit damage, you'd all be OK with that? Because it was really about the cooperative play, not about the damage?
At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.
Yes Lhivera. I would be happy with that. I said before the mage review that I wouldn't mind if they nerfed our damage, and then put in mechanics whereby we could increase it to our former levels by careful timing and usage of skills.
Rolling ignites is the *one* reactive thing mages have when dealing DPS. We have less options and less choice than any other class whilst raiding, and button pushing and options is supposed to be an important part of gameplay according to Blizzard. That's why I want frostbite to work on raid bosses - not so that it makes Frosts DPS UBAH, but just so that I have to watch the bosses debuffs, and slam him with an Ice Lance when he does get frozen. It's another level of interactivity. It's sad to say that I'm contemplating an Arcane build, despite the fact it's inferior in almost every situation, *purely* because it appears to have more options and more buttons to press than any other build right now, and that's what makes the class fun for me.
We don't even use rolling ignite teams in raids like other guilds do, as we're only up to C'Thun so far, but we do have a lot of fun trying to keep them going haphazardly, and that makes fights a lot more interesting for me and the other mages on my team.
I find it annoying that mages exist in a vacuum compared to other classes. We leech off the other class' buffs and don't do anything special to make them notice we're in the group (although I guess now Warlocks have Fire Vulnerability for Incinerate/Conflag cycles).
I keep reading opinions like this posted, and I'm wondering what world you guys live in?
Food, Water, Arcane Brilliance, Polymorph, Counterspell ... every one of these is noticed, trust me. It's pretty clear what class is leeching the most, and it's not mages.
Maledict is on the right thread. Some amount of variability and reaction is being taken away from mages, while in other cases it's being added (Rogues with Mutilate and Combat Potency).
Before you start to drift, and your soul begins to scream.
I just wanted to tell you, that you're listening to a dream.
I find it annoying that mages exist in a vacuum compared to other classes. We leech off the other class' buffs and don't do anything special to make them notice we're in the group (although I guess now Warlocks have Fire Vulnerability for Incinerate/Conflag cycles).
I keep reading opinions like this posted, and I'm wondering what world you guys live in?
Food, Water, Arcane Brilliance, Polymorph, Counterspell ... every one of these is noticed, trust me. It's pretty clear what class is leeching the most, and it's not mages.
Maledict is on the right thread. Some amount of variability and reaction is being taken away from mages, while in other cases it's being added (Rogues with Mutilate and Combat Potency).
Food/water can be vendor bought, or given pre-raid, AI is some mana and around half a spell crit, poly is used in 2 naxx encounters, counterspell is used in one? Versus rogues out dpsing every mage other than the ignite holder. What you should be argueing is AoE capabilities of the mage class which are supposedly our strong point. There needs to be more AoE fights in the game.
Food, Water (vendor/1 mage)
Arcane Brilliance (1 mage)
Polymorph (I think we are past domo, and MC'd people can be affected by the miriad of other CC in the game)
Counterspell (situatial and earthshock tends to work better most of the time)
It's pretty clear what class is leeching the most, and it's not mages.
That's because fire mages have great dps compared to other classes currently. That's the only real reason we aren't seen as leechers. That and some strange ingrained belief that mages > other classes. This works out to the mage's advantage being able to get in raids/groups easier than alot of other dps classes.
Abilities like CoS/CoE/imp aura/Totems/Power Infusion (cast on others) all are great group enhancing abilities. Besides imp scorch what do mages do to improve the group's ability to function. Why bring more than 1 if our dps is sub par? That's what some of the mages are worried about in this thread. They see our dps being erroded with nothing compelling to replace it. Perhaps all this worrying is baseless and we'll still have decent relative dps. We don't really know now especially with everything in flux.
What you should be argueing is AoE capabilities of the mage class which are supposedly our strong point. There needs to be more AoE fights in the game.
Please, no more suppresion rooms, no more tunnels before fankriss. AoE encounters need to be meaningful or not done at all. Not something thrown in that confirms our gimmick need for a couple of aoe classes.
Trouble with AoE encounters is that you tend to outgear them like the nefarion adds at the beginning. Started as needing a bit of aoe but now that we are geared it's quite a bit quicker to just single target and blast them down. AoE scales horribly which is why most of the "should we aoe" or "should we single target" decisions are made for you by the developers which imo is dumb. Hey look a large group of mobs with low health. I wonder if we should aoe? Hopefully new ranks of our aoe spells will help for awhile but after that it will be the same prediciment as we have right now.
Regarding AE - is it only our guild that has our best warlocks easily equal with the mages on AE fights, and in supression room encounters outperforming mages due to their far superior mana regen over the long term? During fights like Nefarian our mages are generally better than the warlocks, but on the long AE crawls that Blizzard insist on putting in each instance, my damage drops significanlty simply because I don't have their massive on tap mana regen. As long as the healers keep an eye on them, a warlock effectively has a vastly larger mana pool compared to me in those sort of circumstances since the lifetap changes.
Not moaning or complaining, as I've always considered the label of "AE master" to be a ludicrous one at best, just wondering if other peoples best warlocks were able to hit these levels? I'm fairly sure our mages aren't slacking on these fights, and I know I'm not...
What you should be argueing is AoE capabilities of the mage class which are supposedly our strong point. There needs to be more AoE fights in the game.
Please, no more suppresion rooms, no more tunnels before fankriss. AoE encounters need to be meaningful or not done at all. Not something thrown in that confirms our gimmick need for a couple of aoe classes.
Trouble with AoE encounters is that you tend to outgear them like the nefarion adds at the beginning. Started as needing a bit of aoe but now that we are geared it's quite a bit quicker to just single target and blast them down. AoE scales horribly which is why most of the "should we aoe" or "should we single target" decisions are made for you by the developers which imo is dumb. Hey look a large group of mobs with low health. I wonder if we should aoe? Hopefully new ranks of our aoe spells will help for awhile but after that it will be the same prediciment as we have right now.
The problem is that this argument about out-gearing things applies everywhere. Twin Emps was designed around flasks. Eventually your tanks have the HP/mitigation to no longer need them. This fact doesn't mean that the flasks are outclassed or useless. It just means that you don't need that particular strategy anymore and are free to use another. Shadow Priests can tank most of the 5-mans in the game (parts of Dire Maul excluded, naturally) if they are overgeared enough. Not sure if this fact means anything about warriors' usefulness.
AoE is a core component of the game, and each class has that ability. We just happen to do it best, with frost mages being the very best of all. As long as new content requires AoE until it is overgeared, then mages will be in demand unless some built-in limitation prevents it (mobs immune to all schools but holy, or something like that).
The whole "gimmick" thing applies to every aspect of the game. Tanking, Healing, DPS (ranged and melee) are all "gimmicks" in that the encounter design requires certain roles to be fulfilled. All scripted boss encounters are "gimmick" encounters to one degree or another. Not all are equally fun, for sure - but to say AoE is a "gimmick" is only meaningful if other aspects are not a "gimmick."
I think you'll see a lot of use for slow in raid/boss encounters so 41/0/20 is by far the best "raid" frost spec because you'll also have the option of high DPS going the Arcane Blast cycle if needed for "Huhu" style end of boss burns. I really wish it could be put on multiple targets again but even in its single target format its still useful. We'll take a simple example everyone here should be familiar with: Sulfuron. The 4 adds all have a Dark Mending spell they heal with. Since they aren't immune to slow (I haven't found anything that gives me an immune message yet though the movement imparing effects don't always seem to work) it should make that significantly easier to interrupt (yes the fight is easy anyways but this is an example). With the slowed movement speed it opens a lot of options for kiting adds in fights where you may have had to tank them in the past. You can have 1 mage kiting instead of a tank/2-3 healers dedicated to the mob.
The reason that fire is catching frost in DPM is all of the +% damage and +% crit scaling so well with the gear available now. Frost really needed a 3.5s cast nuke in order to compete gear scaling wise. Thats the same problem with Arcane Blast, actually worse since it starts at 2.5s its only getting 71.5% of your +damage. It really isn't something they can correct without making a fire mage that has +0-400 spell damage very inefficient and hard/next to impossible to play.
The new frost talents are pretty pathetic except for Empowered Frostbolt and you end up having to take a lot of garbage that doesn't help your DPS to get there (which is what makes 41/0/20 the best DPS frost build). If they put Empowered Frostbolt on the same tier with Frozen Core, Ice Block, and I CoC (heck move one of them even) you'd see some 34/0/27 type builds that could get quite a bit closer to fire in raid DPS and DPM. This is especially important since when you look at TBC fire DPM you aren't getting Clearcasting or Arcane Meditation so the DPM on individual Frost Bolt in a vacuum can be worse but your overall fight DPM is better because of the added regen and free spells.
Mages are getting differentiation between the trees, it is still damage, damage, and damage but Arcane is now high DPS, poor DPM, by far best threat management (40% vs. 10%, stacked with Blessing and Tranq Air in a raid provided you have some sort of mana funnel you could go nuts on the DPS) -- Fire is best DPS but watch that threat -- Frost is good DPS, good DPM, good toys, none of it is going to blow your socks off but at the end of the day you're pretty darn good at doing everything.
Some people are saying the Water Elemental isn't a survivability tool but I've found it really good at that in some bad outdoor situations I've gotten into. You can throw him out, Ice Block and then have him Frost Nova/kill stuff, if he dies you can Cold Snap and do it again. This buys you a lot of time to get yourself out of the situation without dying. He's much more of a soloing survival toy to me than the "way to bridge the raid DPS gap with fire". If you want mad DPS go fire and stop trying to talk them into making frost/fire into the same thing with different color nukes. Frost DPS is viable in raids now, it isn't ideal but the level of play from the mage can more than make up for the spec except in top 1% raid situations.
I'd have no problem with mage damage being hugely nerfed if the idea was to make mages more of a control/lockdown class. This would pretty much entail removing GCD from CS and making slow trainable and letting it work in PvE -- I think a class whose role is to keep things snared, spell-locked, polyd, spell-snared, nova'd, ae kited, silenced etc would be extremely useful/fun to play if encounters allowed for it.
But that's wishful thinking, and while people emphasize the 'utility' of mages in PvE, everyone brings utility to a group in BC. Mage utility has seen really no increase in BC, and the new spell ranks and talents do increase damage to some degree, but these are largely offset by the various nerfs (ignite nerf, threat reduction nerfs, no more rank 1 scorch nerf etc) -- I'm not confident that in a raid a WoW 2.0 mage at level 67 would outdamage a WoW 1.0 mage at 67.
The other point made that the nerf to fire is significant because fire is the only "fun" raiding spec is of course, just opinion, but it is a rather common one. The fights for mages where we get to use our class abilities (say KT with poly and CS) are so trivial such that any mage no matter how mediocre is up to the task (this is much like hunter tranq shotting), and such mechanics are no fun if they aren't a challenge; however, making them too challenging just puts the rest of the raid at ends with the one class still mastering the 'class mechanic' aspect, and is perhaps poor design.
The problem for mages is that in your typical tank-nuke encounters (which 90% of fights boil down to still anyways at least from a mage perspective), mages do pretty much just mash their face into one button -- none of their core class abilities are going to do anything (blink, nova) and the success or failure of the attempt is generally out of the mage's hands. (this is true for all DPS for sure, I'm not saying its a mage issue -- other classes have damage cycles at least somewhat more attention requiring than mages however) This problem was alleviated to a large degree by rolling ignites as it gave mages the shared task of managing ignites to be optimal and if nothing else provided entertainment. =p
The new mechanics of arcane will probably provide entertainment for some. The theorycrafted damage output on how much arcane does in BC in my opinion has been greatly overstated and the mana cost seriously understated, but...that's a digression into class balance which is not my concern.
I suppose some might argue that encounter design has moved away from class roles -- a lot of encounters (well in Naxx) require just moving around or positioning yourself. However, in many fights, you just figure out the non-class side of the fight and then its back to standard min-max class mechanics. Also, to me, a lot of these run around and "stand here" and then "stand here" fights feel extremely gimmicky, I'm unsure how long players will be enthusiastic about them.
This metaphor is perhaps inappropriate and cheesy, but consider choosing a class like picking a char to play in a fighter. You pick that character to USE his/her/its ABILITIES, you don't just throw standing punches and kicks and parry/block all the time. "Homogenizing" DPS roles makes little sense in this context, who wants to play a fighting game where all the characters have no special abilities?
I don't think I really made the point I wanted to make which is that to me mages in BC are a very weird class, they're still pretty fun, probably the most fun class to casually play -- all the cooldowns in casual play are powerful and short, the class is the most responsive still with blink, nova, snares. The thing I always loved about the class is that in PvP and non-raid PvE, even if you fail, there was almost always a solution, you just may not have seen it (unlike say a priest where if fear is resisted, you sometimes just die). Optimistically, the past few weeks of nerfs which for those who forget are molten fury nerf (perhaps necessary), elemental precision nerf (really unnecessary), impact nerf (DR are back, though supposedly this has been nerfed recently on live too?), ignite nerf (you don't roll with each other at all, you don't gain benefit from self rolls), counterspell nerf, ambiguity on ice lance damage (been changed around a lot, this current version is one of the worst imo), empowered fireball nerf (really unnecessary, it was very weak for a tier 8), magic absorption nerf (lol who cares), and the threat reduction nerfs, are all leading up to something. Hopefully, the discontent over a few of the changes (like CS) will provoke devs into changing their mind as it did with Ruin back in 1.9.
Overall the BC changes for the mage have been extremely poor, and that's not a whine, I'm somewhat indifferent on how 'powerful' the class ends up -- you don't need play a top tier character to win necessarily and I don't think the class imabalances in WoW have ever gotten too out of hand. I feel the chages are poor just because they're very out of touch with class mechanics and the player base. To some degree this was true with the mage revamp, which really gave mages a lot more "power" but didn't address a few of the gameplay frustrations/concerns. Perhaps its naive to think players can influence the direction of the game, but hopefully the player feedback throughout BC will encourage the devs to reevaluate some of their decisions. I know that when I look through a lot of our new (and old) talents and ask myself "Do these talents make sense for this class?" -- the answer is resoundingly 'NO'.
(I apologize for wall of text!)
radikalnoise.com :: Dicks, Strats, Drama, eFame, and More Dicks
FH - LF 1 Baller PvE Mage
All noncrit DoTs (not Ignite) generate Combustion charges (Bug?)
10/31/06, 9:52 PM
Similar Threads
