Lodi

You mean so you can turn to where you want to blink, assuming you weren't facing that way already? Because you can blink while stunned ...

 

Taja

I'm running a 2vs2 team with a Holy Priest hoovering around 1900 most of the time. And although we usually have loads of fun it’s a depressive combo aswell. I safely dare to say that the following class combo’s should not ever lose to us: Warlock/healer rogue/healer Warrior/non-paladin healer. In the 300+ resilience range its virtually impossible to kill a healer solo as frost mage when your either running around the pillar, having to shoot grounding totems or face an unending supply of HoTs. And even though we manage loads of those teams it just feels that we won because there making all kind of stupid mistakes. Usually it just means kiting them away from eachother and forcing a kill on the dps outside of healing LoS.

Overall I just find it quite boring that in a night of playing you always seem to have the same combo’s and seeing a mage/priest or any other non popular class combo’s is very very rare.

 

Lady

After three month with frost spec in arena, i came back to Arc/Fire for Arena and was really surprised. I speak of 5 vs 5.

We ran a 4 DPS team with 2 MS warrior, 1 Elemental Shaman a holy paladin and me - we often play only 30 games a week.

As a frost mage (ever standard 17/00/44 or 5/00/56) we were struggling between 1650/1750 depending on how many time we met standard teams (warrior/Frost Mage/Chaman/Priest/pally) .
As a frost mage, i can't manage to get sufficient burst with the right timing into the battle and i'm unable to manage 2 healer with dispell abilities while avoiding their mage completly anihilate any incoming heal from our paladin...

Then i switched to Arc/Fire and, in an hour we get up to 1850, finishing the week 1807 within the top server teams. Only poor execution or wrong assist (coming from our inexperience, i can see it) prevent us for more win.

We encountered successfully many 1900+ team with standard composition using the same tactic.

For my part, the surprise is more "damned, i'm not dying while under focus with only a paladin healing me". I have a low 9k6 hp unbuff and 370 res with 834 spell dmg and a nice 33% crit with fire.

Blazing speed enable to LoS any ranged DPS and to evade contact with warrior, rogue or enhance shaman. The fact is, our elemental chaman is the one having the hard part.

Moreover. Having a warrior chasing me usually don't prevent me to land a 40 pyroblast with a CS at the right time. Once the first DPS down i switch to CS/Sheep with assist DPS.

Is anybody has some equivalent experience or had the opportunity to test the limit of this spec ?

 

Borland

You just use the concept - NEVER FOCUS FIRE AN ICE MAGE.
Once the enemy teams figure you are fire - you are as good as dead.
Esp if the enemy team has dot classes or more ranged dps than melee.
You will be focus fired asap , an stomped to the ground.
While blazing speed helps - you hardly can do anything
if the enemy rogue keeps spaming deadly throw on you while war intercepts you every cooldown.
Having a hunter or smt like that makes your task impossible - you will just die.
I personaly love arc/fire in arenas , thats what i play in 2v2 with my friend priest
(realy bad combo i know but imp AM is good), but beeng fire in arenas is ... not appropriate atm.
sadly
Trainable ice block can fix that imo , but until then - we are not seeng slow/pyro or anything that doesnt have ice block ...

 

Lady

I agree to your point that letting me focus fired by 3 DPS, will quickly bring me down - especiallt with only one healer available. Impact, blazing speed and molten armor are only providing a delay. The moment will come where i got no proc at all from badluck and got beated down.

The fact is : this is exactly the same way for our elemental shaman who has no way to evade and can't spec iceblock...

Moreover, my experience using frost is that iceblock is not sufficient as a defense. Priests became to good at the mass dispell game. In my opinion, Ice armour, Ice Barrier, Arctic Winds and Frostbite are a larger part of the frost survivability not even counting the "never ff frost mage" thing ....

Have you try ever tried it recently in an insta-gib team ?

Because, I thought exactly as you.... and i'm changing my mind... until i find the limit.

 

Aett

Iceblock isn't really a complete defense on it's own. It's major uses other than just stopping incoming damage are clearing whole stacks of DoTs all at once (especially UA), breaking CC, wasting warrior rage, and above all else: shaking mortal strike. One non-debuffed heal is HUGE in a 5v5, if you're being focused your healers are spamming heals, chances are they will get one good one in there before iceblock gets dispelled and MS gets back up.

I don't have a ton of experience as a frost mage but I've found that using iceblock in an almost offensive fasion is often more effective than waiting for a near-death moment. If it keeps you sheeping/counterspelling/dispelling/freezing-faces then it's likely a good use of the iceblock.

Another issue with specing arcane/fire is the loss of the water elemental. It's a significant souce of damage that has to be dealt with. It doesn't have much health, but it's either going to sit there hurting someone or it's going to pull dps off of the focus target, both of which are desireable.

 

Chri

I'd suggest trying elemental over frost. I've been playing 0/38/23 with a holy/disc priest, and the only teams we really have trouble with are SL/Siphon Warlock/non-Priest healer and Warrior/Resto Druid, we more or less stomp out rogue/healer and warrior/non-druid healer. Granted, we don't take our team all that seriously, pretty much just playing when we don't have anything else to do, but it seems like this spec works much better in 2v2 than heavy frost. Blazing Speed is a pretty strong counter to melee, and you can put out a pretty surprising burst with Combustion/Ice Lance.

 

Grillkohle

Random question, doesn't really warrant it's own thread:

How does a Lifebloom final tick heal for 3800?


Lifebloom 'blooms' when you dispel it, and apparently it does so on both the target and the receiver on a Spell Steal. Okay. Now, it's base amount it ticks for is 600, so that druid would have to get 3214 from his +healing gear. Wowwiki says (yeah, couldn't find any better source right now) that Lifebloom gains 46% +heal on both the HoT portion and the 'bloom'. Unless my calculations / assumptions are completely screwed up (and I have a feeling they are), to get 3214 healing the druid would have to have 3214 / 0.46 = 6986 +heal.

The Armory

Huh?

 

Xantcha

Frost mages have very strong and consistent burst damage on demand.

Icebolt -> Shatter -> Ice Lance -> Fireblast.
This is some of the best burst damage in the game, usueable multiple times in a fight and infinitely better than AP/POM/PYRO and hoping it crits.



Grillkohle - I've seen that bug mentioned before iirc, if you spellsteal when they have a full 3 stacks of lifebloom rolling, instead of the "bloom" only getting credited by the value of one lifebloom (which it should be ) it is blooming all three.

3814/3 = 1271 a much more likely bloom value.

 

Grillkohle

I tried reproducing it in a duel with a fellow druid though: When I tried spellstealing a Lifebloom from a full stack, all that happened is that I stole only one application of it, but it didn't bloom, neither on me nor on him. The only time I got it to bloom was when I stole a single one from him.

 

◊ Acustar

That's pretty much what I've found to be true, happened a few times in WSG the other day, stole a 3 stack LB, only had one 'stack' on me and it hit for 3300+. Most likely has something to do with this change from the PTR notes:

- Spell Steal now receives the proper amount of points from a stacked aura.

 

Lady

I think the frost burst damage and Arc/fire damage are quite different and that the arcane one is far stronger.

The best way to explain my thoughts is to run some numbers.

A well geared frost mage in S2 Gear, will have more or less 900 +dmg. let's say we're using a trinket (icon of the silver crescent for example) to climb up to 1055+dmg which give us :
- Ice-lance (frozen) : average 788 non crit, 1577 crit 0 res, 1261 crit @400 res
- Frostbolt : average 1656 non crit, 3311 crit 0 res, 2648 crit @400 res
- Fireblast : 1134 non crit, 1701 crit 0 res 1361 @400 res

The total duraction of your damage delivery (assuming 0 latency) is :

Frosbolt (2.5s) + Ice-Lance (1.5s) + Fireblast (1.5s) = 5.5s if we count it from the start. The freeze effect usually came from the WE.

The potential average damage of your burst is :

Non crit : 1656 + 788 + 1134 = 3578 damage

Full Crit 0 res : 3311 + 1656 + 1701 = 6668 damage

Full Crit 400 res : 2648 + 1261 + 1361 = 5270 damage

As the shatter will probably doing only one crit and the nova is likely to be broken before the fireblast hit, we could imagine that the following sequence is the more common :


Frosbolt crit, ice-lance hit, fireblast hit gives @400 res : 2648 + 788 + 1134 = 4570 damage in 5.5s

(this is still optimistic scenario as for example the frosbolt not criting while the ice lance does will result in less damage).

Sure, 4570 damage can kill a low life target. The best way to do it is using your WE's Frost nova .with a good timing

Now compare it to the Arc/Fire burst damage.

Numbers ran as follow for an equally geared Arc/Fire mage with Arcane Power Up :
- Fireblast : average 1566 non crit, 2740 crit 0 res, 2192 crit @400 res
- Pyroblast : average 3008 non crit, 5264 crit 0 res, 4211 crit @400 res

Blastwave is ignored in this calculation because it implies to be at point blank range which i cannot always assume.


Non crit scenario : 1566 + 3008 hit => 4574 damage in 1s

Full crit scenario @0 res : 2740 + 5264 crit => 8004 damage in 1s

Full crit scenario @ 400res : 2192 + 4211 hit => 6403 damage in 1s

The arcane/fire non-crit scenario roughly deliver the same amount of damage of the common shatter frost scenario.

I don't even factor the presence of blastwave or the fire vulnerability debuff which is - present as soon as i have no pressure... even just 3 scortch will bring 500 dmg on a non crit scenario. I do not factor ever dots ands the 14s remaining second of DPS with 30% increase damage.

About the delivery

The edge that frost has upon arcane is that his delivery is based on short CD while Arcane is a 3min / 15s length timer.

So frost mages usually claim "if you miss, you are dead - while if I miss, i just have to wait another nova cooldown and land another frosbolt" .

The fact is, Arc/fire as very few chances to miss, Frost have very high chances to miss.

To deliver your burst as an Arc/fire mage you have to :
- not to be cc
- Keeping LoS 1s
- Not beeing interrupt 1s
- Under the 31 yards
- Target do not gain immunity to magical damage in any way (totem , cloak of shadow or anything...)

To deliver your burst as a frost mage you have to :
- Having your WE out and being on fireblast range (or near it) => max 25 yards with gladiator 2pc bonus or using your nova and beeing at max (nova range 12 yards).
- Not moving
- Not to be cc
- Not having your pet CC
- Keeping LoS during 5.5s
- Not beeing interrupt during 2.5s
- Target do not trinket your freeze effect or gaining immunity to root or magical damage.

Simply put - as an arcane mage you can TIME exactly your attack EVEN UNDER DIRECT PRESSURE. When i see our target dropping under 40%, i land a counterspell on a healer via my focus-macro then immediatly blowing it with insta-pyro + fireblast.

A frost mage has to wait the 2.5s of the frosbolt then a few seconds more fore icelance + fireblast. And during this time anything can occur : healing, getting interrupted or being LoSed.

 

Xantcha

I'm ever so confused.

Your pyro only triggers a one second global cool down?

Why would you take into account the global cooldown triggered after fireblast finishes, whilst you don't for your Pyro-Fireblast situation.

(2.5) Frostbolt + Icelance (1.5) Fireblast = 4 seconds - the actual damage is all done in a 1~ second time frame.


IIRC, whether or not a spell crits is determined before it actually lands. The whole issue of the frostbolt-icelance shatter combo is that BOTH recieve the benefit of shatter - giving both a very high percentage to crit. (Fireblast too if you manage to land it before either of the ice spells land Edit: wishful thinking on my part).

The crit rates for both 'bursts' are so absurbly different theres no way you can realistically compare them crit for crit.

You try to argue that pyro is more useful because its more useable? How many times is it useable. Once. For a successful shatter combo, you require 2.5 seconds unmolested, which happens way more than you imply. Even under pressure it's hard to say that a Frost mage does not outperform Arc/Fire with its added survivability and dps.

 

Tower

You cannot get more than 2 spells off during a shatter, it's either FB+IL or FB+FrB, and the FrB really requires the PvP gloves + fire range talents. You could MAYBE get 3 to work if your target Blinked or Intercepted further away to allow your projectiles more time in the air, but that's very unlikely.

 

Aoife

Lady, I'm not sure your numbers are right for Ice lance and frostbolt damage.

With about 800 damage in my PvP gear, my ice lances are around 900-1k non-crit and 1900-2k crit on normal targets. Frostbolts around 1400 with 2.9kish crits

 

Aett

I think the big issue here is the question, how long are you going to live under direct pressure and how useful are you going to be under that pressure? You have no ice block or ice barrier, you have no pet to land extra frost novas, you don't have as powerful slows, you are less able to control melee in general.

In my experience, a mages primary purpose isn't burst. I can go with arcane/fire being better burst, but better PvP? No way. Mages are there primarily to help control the other team through snares, slows, and interrupts; arcane/fire isn't near as well suited to that as frost.

And really.. how often do frost mages actually get focused? I've found ice barrier to be an extremely effective focus deterrent.

 

Lady

I will check the numbers for errors - just by looking i admit the IL numbers seems weird ...

I will certainly not argue that I can obtain the same level of survivability as a frost spec. In fact, my experience as a frost mage in arena is you have usualy very little focus fire on you.

What I do when i'm focus is only one thing : kitting using impact and blazing speed - sometime blessing of freedom. If you manage to avoid LoS of ranged, this work long enough (usually until my paladin is oom).

This is the usual consensus as long as frost spec is concerned but most team use defensive settings and try bring control and heal first

I don't think we can say that frost is better than arcane.

I think that's an another role. As an Arcane/Fire mage my primary job is to ensure the we put one player out of the game in less than 15s. This is how my team works.

For this role Arcane, as I try to demonstrate is superior not in the damage part but in the dealing.

Once this done, I switch to control the healer or "kite" the remainging DPS a little. Once the pressure is over, there's no difference between frost and arcane their. When it's about to kite , Arcane has some edges.

This is why I am arcane . My burst is more usable. Not only because it's harder to avoid it, but also because It lands exactly when needed. 2.5s for a frostbolt is 2.5s for a heal to come.

Sure, frost will not be focus. Not being focus will not translate into ininterrupted & free of CC dps(fear, spell lock, CS or whatever). Moreover, it will switch the focus to another player on your team (that will not be able to iceblock).

In my team, being frost implies that our elem chaman is being focus. While under focus he will do nothing good - he's near useless in fact (part from the windfury + heroism thing and his own insta-burst).

So I respecced Arcane/Fire and we found that :

- While under focus i'm usually not CCed allowing me to burst the second it's needed.
- Many teams suffer badly from the lost of their first player and limit the pression on me if I survive the few first seconds (blessing of protection help greatly.

 

Borland

exactly. But its harder to pull off.
Just sometimes , if the warrior is smart enough, he start moving the moment they intercept - i.e. running to where you are facing - so when you blink they are halfway to there and we all know how bad is the timing with server - executes from 10+ yards range and such things (execute trough blink is stupid as well).


On the "priest/mage combo" :

Priest/mage is one of the worst 2v2 combos (after double dps combo with a hunter imo:P)
But to summarise - i play 5v5 as frost , 3v3 as frost and 2v2 as arcane/fire.
You need burst dmg as that combo , not the sustain effect.
Your priest is there to keep you alive , you need to do dmg.

Druid/war - dps the war a bit , dispell him . Then wait for cyclone and cs - go balls out on the warrior - then he drops down the bridge/out of los - fear the druid and finish the war.
If they try to dps you and just heal with dots - your priest is free to mana burn the druid.
War can be sheeped only as to allow your priest to escape if you miss to put the war in combat in the begining.

Pala/lock - dps pala until he bubles , counter the lock fear (strange i know , but it helps).
Then pala buble - have your priest dispell the buble and annihilate the pala.

War/pala - dps the war , wait for heal to cs on pala. If you catch the heal - dont bother sheeping the pala, just kill the war. Stay spread out to avoid both team members to be feared.
If the pala bubles before heal - cc the war and run away until buble goes down and kill the pala.
Dont bother sheeping at all - Blessing of sacrifice and dispell makes that useless move.

Mage+anything sheepable - dps the mage/sheep the other - your priest can negate everything that the mage can bring as survivability - just dispell the ice block and kill him.

war/priest - dispell war , sheep priest , dps war , continue dispelling/dpsing the war.
Priest will use trinket and try to run to fear ,(you can anticipate that with preemptive wotf) sheep again. All instants he can throw - renew/pom/shield will be insta dispelled anyway.
This team is a joke to your team actually.

Few general tips :
ALWAYS support your priest if he has melee on him - sheep rogues , novas , slows.ALWAYS.
He will die if you dont help him.

ALWAYS put the enemy war in combat before charge - ice lance running away from war while he closes up - works wonders - this way he cant charge you+intercept healer and he has to run all the way to the healer(while getting slowed on the way) or waste intercept on you.

Your priest can help you with keeping shadow word death on cooldown. This way if he isnt targeted - he will throw the hopping hot back to you. And every dmg counts while you are tryng to burst someone.

If you face two demo locks - remember - they have no real healing , and your priest can dispell their drain lifes.
Just focus one (while dispeling him and playng los games) eventualy he will go down before your priest is out of mana.
If they are playng the survive game with sl/sl build - just die ,
you have no chance unless 5 spells in a row crits and both death coils are ressisted.

And something VERY VERY IMPORTANT - if you see a melee+pala - NEVER let them dictate the combat to rage around a pilar. NEVER. They will always try this - warrior/rogue will stick on your priest and paladin will run around pilar and you can't realy do shit about it because he will just spam dispell himself and run - no casting spell will be ever allowed and you cant realy kill a holy pala with only instants (if you hit the heal with cs - he will just move 1 second and will be los to you again). You cant kill the war too , because the pala will move to your los and still seeng him (firemaw anyone :P). Btw you can use arcane missiles on him , and they will all hit him trough the pilar (confurmed as feature from GMs , not a bug) , but the pala will out of los and while you are moving again to catch up , he will be healing himself.
Stay away from the pilars and dictate the combat in open.

I hope i helped , cya

 

SyZ

I tried to partner with a Priest for my 2v2 but we ended up not able to get passed 1650 because I simply couldn't kill anything fast enough, given how I would have to spend probably 1/3-1/2 of the time trying to lock down somebody in a sheep/timely counterspell. If it was a double dps team they would almost always kill the priest before I could kill one of them.

 

Ishara

In a 4dps team is the only way I can see arcane working, but even then if their player outlasts your burst then you really are useless from then on. I dont doubt your success and wish you all the best with your team, but you will have problems facing teams that have extreme crowd control.

As a frost mage I love facing non frost mages cause after the first trinket they really arent getting out of sheep. (I know in theory they have a dispeller but in practice they have too much healing to do to pay attentiont to who is polymorphed)

 

Taja

Cheers for sharing a few tips Borland, Most of it we already use in our struggle to reach and stay 2k rating. The reason we still play the combo is basicly because the challenge it gives and we aint counting on the points from that team anyway. Around that rating it seems most of our opponents are becoming anything with either a warlock or a druid. Both which are the hardest counter. After so many games getting kited around the pillar we decided to just kill the dps instead of trying to kill a druid/pala kiting a (ironic) frost mage. Nagrand is one of the best arena's for this since you can kite a dps away from the pillar and start sheep/fears whenever they come out hiding, which is usually to late. Warriors tend to be the easiest target since they usually lack the patience to stay close to the healer, and dont have as much interrupts as a rogue has. All the priest tools seem more useless as the rating get higher, effectively mindcontrolling on blade edge doesnt seem to work so often anymore, and mana burn is hard get going without it being improved.

The last thing that just annoys me is that we basicly have around 2 minutes to get a kill going. That means our silence/fears at that point have to be perfect without any margin of error, after the 2 minuten you run oom against any druid/pala/warlock/warrior/rogue.

 

clancy

Don't worry about losing to warlock/healer, I find nearly impossible to beat that combo as well. Although when my team runs into a Warrior/ healer group is we usually try to pull the warrior as far away from the paladin as we can. I start some casual dps on him forcing the paladin to come away from his pillar. Once he does that we switch to the healer for what ever amount he is out for. My priest can usually get 1-2 mana burns off every time we do this. We just repeat it and hope the warrior doesn't get a mace stun every hit.

We used to be soo bad vs warrior healer combo b/c if the warrior would get on my priest, he would usually run around a pillar or tomb, and it was impossible for me to sheep or rank 1 frost bolt to peel him off since he was constantly out of LOS. So now we've made up routes to go so I could peel the warrior off him once he does go him so we can get the healer to come out sometime.

 

Taja

We have more succes just killing a warrior instead of mana burning the paladin, most warriors dont take note of there own hp it seems anyway . Agreed on the pillar running, its not like your priest is ever getting away from a warrior without your help so you might aswell stay in the open and force everyone in LoS where you can be more usefull. Even if you sheep behind a pillar you give the priest some time to heal up, lose alot of mana and healing the warrior while at it. But fact remains, any decent warrior that doesnt charge in like a maniac and just pays attention to his paladin shouldnt lose.

 

clancy

its easy for a priest to get away from a warrior sheep FN rank 1 frost bolt + its unlikely the warriors healer is going position himself to be out in the open. I don't see my team winning if we did that b/c paladins and druids heal for too much.

 

Borland

Apparently frost spec works as well. Arcane requires precise timing and luck but works too
I am frost right now , here is a movie that made me try frost again :

Bamodus Mage Arena PvP
and yes , priest/mage is awfuly bad combination whenever there is a melee/healer or lock/healer combinations.


edit :
Hey i didnt say i am successfull with that combo i got max to 1800 with that rating
mainly couse the priest is semi-casual player).
We both got good gear , with 350+ resiliance and 4(me) 5(he) gladiator piecess.
But its simply challenging combo to play. Often making us mad too(nerf spamable 1.5s fear).

Taja is completely right - 2 minutes , after that mana become an issue for us , while melees/druids drinking or lock lifetaping - and we are simply outlasted.