Frost cant really compliment fire other then shatter/elemental precission but playing with fire and molten fury compliments frost pretty nicely.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent-bc=RZVghzbfhRocZVAMcodxo

This build would probably be pretty good, played like you would play an elementalist atm.

If they moved it back it would be an interesting dps combination with Water Elemental. I won't get my hopes up though.

Frankly... I think deep arcane and frost go well together because much of frostbolt's dmg boost is accessable with early frost talents or replaceable by deep arcane talents... unlike scorch.
Given current gear you don't even need Elelmental Precision for a support nuke unless you will be using the support nuke regularly on +3 bosses or mobs.
Generally there are very few non-boss mobs that are +3, even boss encounter adds.
Granted.. the range and mobility limits of AM might mean your support nuke is far more important in boss encounters where you may need to use your support nuke on +3 mobs.

For deep arcane/frost... who cares about Shatter...
Frostbite + Ice Lance feels like a dirty, dirty PVP support tool for deep arcane... especially since you will still have AP and PoM frostbolts available to abuse as well.
Of course I was never a real fan of Shatter anyways... I tended to abuse frost for control instead of point blank burst.

Anyways, I can't wait to actually test out the intricacies of various combinations to find out what works out best in practice. :D
I think there will much more variety available to fit various playstyles now (not jsut for mages either).
I'm pretty happy about much of what I hear. :D

Elemental isn't horrible if you're into that type of thing with
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...10205010200000
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...10205010200000

Frostbolt with molten fury perhchance. Add in impact on molten armor / scorch and blazing speed. Eh it's not my thing but i'm sure someone would like something like this.

Or you could switch it up and get combustion for pvp scorching instead.

My feeling is that frost simply has not had its overhaul yet. The first iterations of fire and arcane were very lacking. Fact is, when the initial set of talents came out I on this board advocated a 31 fire/30 arcane build, since all the new talents sucked compared to old ones.

Since then they massively buffed the fire talents and also gave arcane the stuff it needs (crit ungimper, better slow), but frost is still weak. Arctic winds and frozen core suck - hard. They are by no means on par with all the other new talents. They are due for an overhaul and I am sure they will get it.

So before we mourn the death of frost, lets see what it looks like post buffs. Frost needs a niche. It doesnt have the highest DPS (thats deep arcane) it doesnt have the highest DPM (thats fire), it doesnt have the most sustained damage (thats fire again), and with arcane getting slow and prismatic cloak, even the survivability throne is in danger. Ice block is nice and will always be nice, but you can't hang the entire tree on that one talent.

Doesn't look like anyone has referenced this yet

http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/en/64546461.htm

I'm starting over as a Draenei mage, and I will go for shatter first and then head into the fire tree all the way down to Dragon's breath. Shatter is too powerful to pass on, both for grinding and pvp.

I don't see why dispell resistance doesn't fit perfectly with Prismatic Cloak. As it stands now this talent doesn't strike me as something I'd want to spent points on over talents that enhance my damage (after all, mage defences lie in avoidance not strength, and a weak defense boosted by 4% is still a weak defense).

Okay, ouch. Ignite in and of itself is mean, basing it off improved crit damage is even meaner.

EDIT: This is all incorrect here.

EDIT: I'm an idiot.

OTOH, getting Spell Power precludes maxing out Fire Power, getting Empowered Fireball, or picking up Elemental Precsision. I think my quick DPS estimate was an ARCANE/fire built having higher DPS, but it being cancelled out by the arcane/FIRE/Elemental Precision's hit percentage against level 73 targets. But I was using a pretty low crit% in that calculation. Getting Spell Power in Frost still allows a mage to pick up the majority of the useful talents, except for Winter's Chill and Water Elemental.

For those who have been wondering, here's how I've been calculating, using frostbolt as an example:

Base spell info
597-643, 330 mana

Base damage with gear
((597 + 643) / 2) + (3.0 / 3.5 * 0.95 * 1.1 * 700) = 1247

Avg. damage with misses, crits and caster-side modifiers
1247 * (83 + 10 + (28 * 1.0)) / 100 * 1.06 = 1599.4022

Avg. damage with target-side modifers
1599.4022 * 1.1 = 1759.34242

Average damage/efficiency/threat
Average JoW tick: 74 * (83 + 10) / 100 / 2 = 34.41
DPS: 1759.34242 / 2.7 = 651.61
DPM: 1759.34242 / ((330 * 0.85 * 0.9) - 34.41) = 8.07

Pretty sure there were more errors in the post as well. I believe the question about "spell steal" global cooldown was actually a question of counterspell global cooldown from the community.

Seems like the questions got garbled in transmission. :(

Well, that suggests there's at least slim hope for the prospect that Frost might yet be altered to have a justifiable niche.

One other thing - this was brought up in another thread, but didn't really go anywhere. Since spirit has been de-emphasised on a lot of top-end mage gear, how would people feel about changes to Mage Armour and Arcane Meditation to reflect that?

Basically, you could turn Mage Armour into some kind of equivalent of Demon Armour - have it give a flat mp5 value that rises with new ranks of the spell. So, say, +20 resist all and +25 mana/5, or something.

Arcane Meditiation could change to be more like Dreamstate for druids, although probably toned down a bit - say 3/6/10% instead of 5/10/15%. That would synergise nicely with the other int-dependent talents in Arcane like Arcane Mind and Mind Mastery, and fit in with the (apparent) strategy of emphasising Int more for TBC mages.

This is referencing priest/druid but the quote:
"I would caution against using level-up itemization to extrapolate what the itemization is like at level 70"
Holds true for all classes probably.


http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/us/35964115.htm

Refresh blue tracker more. :p

You're right. I misremembered how Ice Shards was written and couldn't check easily. So yeah, it's 225% Frostbolt, 245% Fire, and 175% Arcane. For some reason I thought that Spell Power was going to be the talent that brought Arcane crits up to the level that Frost and Fire had, so I thought it was going to be exactly like Ice Shards in terms of overall power.

-EDIT-
Bah, someone beat me to it.

Surely, this has to be true (and don't call me Shirley). As others have pointed out, I don't see a compelling reason to go deep frost anymore. Literally moments after the Arcane tree changes, I had changed what was an attempt at a deep-frost build (I love frost) to deep arcane + shatter that was 1) better damage when needed and 2) more versatile. I have to agree with whats been said above. Ice Block does not a tree make. It's a great talent, huge in fact. In the levelling game, shatter is one of the best talents in any tree (I'd argue), but it becomes irrelevant in dungeons and raiding.

What is deep frosts identity? Now that DPM is gone and Arcane + Frost (shatter for levelling, channelling for raiding) is better than Frost + Arcane in virtually every meaningful way, what gives? In a related note, I've read that ice barrier's top rank now adds 160 to the spell's absorption. So, it's close, as estimated, to 1000. Doesn't that seem a bit weak, given the sta scaling of the xpac?

It will make questions like 30/0/31 vs 31/0/30 easier, but it's still a talent to pick up for a point if you're going deep frost anyhow. That's pretty much how it has always been viewed though. At least with Ice Floes it will be ~1000+ every 24 seconds. Not amazing, but it helps somewhat.

Having more HP in general means that the fights last longer, meaning that you'll get to use IB cooldown more than once... Bad excuse to make it not to scale better, but anyway.

I'm just excited to have two more spells that are shorter than my bolts and not on a cooldown. I've thought mages needed something like a frost shock, snare or no, for a long time. Arcane blast was just icing on that cake.

Currently rank 6 Ice barrier is listed as 1175dmg absorbed. With Ice floes, thats 1200ish dmg absorbed every 24seconds.

One of the problems with playing a mage in pvp is once you're targeted, the spells you can cast become limited to basically instant casts and damage output drops. With deep frost, the mage has the survivability to do damage easier.

Roll into an arena with something like this spec and you have one very hard to kill mage.