Infraction for TigaFin: 6. Do not post unless you have something new and worthwhile to say.

• Aldriana · 10/01/09, 5:20 AM

Post: Raiding as Frost (post 3.2)
User: TigaFin
Infraction: 6. Do not post unless you have something new and worthwhile to say.
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Don't wishlist.

Original Post:

Thanks for the kind words. I came up with the deep freeze debuff idea several months ago. It requires a spell change (new spell mechanic code), so i haven't pushed it as hard as before.

A debuff that takes a GCD to apply and does no damage on its own also adds a decision-making process. You have to figure out if the target is going to stay up long enough for you to catch up with the lost GCD (and lost FoF proc). That's why the duration needs to be long enough: one lost GCD every 30 seconds is already an up to 5% damage loss (with zero haste). If you risk it and apply it on a FoF ghost charge, you don't lose any FoF damage potential.

If the debuff per stack is a 3%/6%/10% (or 4%/8%/12%) damage increase (maybe as increased crit damage rather than straight up damage), then once you have three stacks up (within ~45 seconds of entering combat), further refreshes of the debuff are worth much more. It might make sense to make the duration of the debuff really long (like 2 minutes), so that you wouldn't have to worry so much about luck (getting FoF procs to apply it) and you could also reliably keep it up on two different targets.

Let's try and see what the tooltip for the spell would look like:

"Stuns and freezes the target for 5 sec. In addition, the target becomes brittle for the next 2 minutes (15 seconds on PvP targets), increasing the damage of your critical strikes by 10% for one debuff, 20% for two stacks and 30% for three stacks. Only usable on Frozen targets."

A fully debuffed target then has a 2.717 crit modifier for frost spells (2.09 * 1.3). Assuming a 64% chance to crit (frost soft cap), the DPS increase is (64% * 2.717 + 36% * 1) / (64% * 2.09 + 36% * 1) = 123.6%. However, that's with a ramp-up time of around 45-60 seconds even when you use cold snap and it means you have spent three GCDs and FoF charges for the ramp-up and have to keep using one GCD and FoF in less than every two minutes (per target).

I'm tempted to implement this in SimulationCraft and see how it would affect our DPS. Based on the calculations above, I think it would put frost neatly where it should be on boss DPS.

I would also put a spirit scaling component on brain freeze crits - just to make spirit more useful to frost and help keep brain freeze an interesting talent.