Warning for Incoherent: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.

• bartolimu · 02/10/09, 11:23 AM

Post: Raiding as frost
User: Incoherent
Infraction: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.
Points: 0

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

I find your username amusing given the circumstances. Long, rambling diatribes that also violate our No Whining rule multiple times should be avoided in the future.

Original Post:

In the context of the thread, there's nothing wrong with a glyph that gives me 5% extra damage "Raiding as frost" - how it affects me outside of the raiding environment is not relevant, or is it?

First time poster here, been playing as deep frost near exclusively since about v1.6. With the exception of a short stint early in TBC and the idiocy of the Blizzard damage cap in Mt Hyjal, I have never had a an issue with the makeup of frost, it has always been at least competitive if played right and often more importantly can bring an element of control to the raid. Now, it's broken. Deep frost IS no longer competitive. It will always be beaten by anyone who can Bash the Mole with their Power Aura's with FFB spec. The only way to make frost work is to not be deep frost, to take away the flavour of what frost is all about - control, and go deep into Arcane for TtW. This offends me. I'm a Frost mage, not some Frost-Arcane hybrid.

I find myself taking exception to the perception that frost is boring, that it is just frostbolt spam. In Molten Core it was, at that stage there were no cooldowns to juggle. Sure you can just spam frostbolt, use cooldowns when they're up but with the arrival of the Elemental, Cold Snap, Icey Veins, trinkets, Heroism (Alliance, no shamans in the early days) Frost became more about balancing fight duration against long and short term personal and group/raid cooldowns . Now that is being sabotaged by the influx of proc based abilities and trinkets. That's not necessarily all bad, it does add an element of interest to the coordination of things. But it means that the performance delta between a well played and a poorly played mage narrows dramatically.

If Blizzard do see fit to give us a PvE relevant 51 point talent, or some other way of letting us properly go "Raiding as frost" I just hope it demands some semblance of skill in order to utilise effectively and doesn't force us out of what frost is all about. In that sense I might agree that the Frostbolt Glyph is wrong. On the other hand I don't see that sacrificing control for damage output is at odds with the concept of Frost. A roof full of soft snow dropping on you might slow you down more than a three foot icicle impaling you, but it wouldn't hurt as much.