Looks good, I personally would use the 2nd Deep Freeze prior to the 2nd Orb, doubt it matters in the bigger picture of things, just on the subject of possibly wasting FoF proc's (which is unlikely in either scenario), maybe I just wanna try to fit two 6 digit numbers on my screen before the 1st one fades, who knows?

Has anyone with beta raiding experience tried these openings and can comment on thread issues? I imagine with 2 6-digit crits and FFO/IL spam and double-IV the tank might not be able to generate enough threat during MI uptime. That would require us to Invis and the lost dps by that might not be worth the "grand opening" in the first place.

Surprisingly, threat was never an issue for me, even if I was doing close to ~30k DPS for the opening sequence. Invisibility was unnecessary. However, this could potentially change depending on the tank class in question (I always ran with a Blood Deathknight), their level of gear, balance changes between beta -> live, whether tanks use a cooldown on pull, whether they get parries or misses - and their level of skill.

Unlike current potions, Volcanic lasts 25 seconds. Do Frostfire Orbs check our spell power on a tick by tick basis or upon cast? I ask because if they inherit spellpower on cast you can get the second one off at the end of your trinket/potion timer for the benefit of having fewer overlapping Fingers of Frost procs... though you delay the start of the cooldown, which would be very fight dependant.

And also on the topic of the opening sequence, since Deep Freeze is back to a static cooldown is Icy Veins best delayed a few seconds until we're throwing Frostbolts instead of all of these instants?

When Lhivera and Vontre ran their sims, concluding Ignite was strong and worth the points to Frost mages, was Frostfire Orb proccing Ignite included? I was under the impression it wasn't, as players were unsure if that functionality was a bug or intended by Blizzard. Regardless, how much will this (further) increase the value of Ignite to Frost mages?

Shouldn't be a whole lot. I just posted an update right now, dps went up about 100 points (for the Frostfire Orb fix).

I had a similar decrease when I removed FFO Ignites (as I had concluded, obviously incorrectly, that they weren't going to add them).

I wonder if the spell is still reset by Cold Snap? The reason I decided it probably wouldn't trigger Ignite was that it was obviously a hidden spell within the Frost tab of the spellbook, and Ignite and Cold Snap were both probably checking which tab the spell belonged to. It could be they just moved FFO into the Fire tab.

ETA: That priority does still look right to me, though frankly without having averaged hit and crit damage, even the small variance in my sim results is enough that I'm not getting consistent results on that. Vontre's built on more mature code and probably has more accurate results that can give a better idea of relative value.

The one thing that I think does change is that Crit is now less valuable than Haste after 33%. Though I'm testing with T11 gear -- priorities could be somewhat different at lower gear levels.

I am showing that the values aren't as dramatically different as I used to be getting, either. Only about a 25% spread between Crit, Haste and Mastery. Hit is still considerably stronger than any of those three -- but Intellect is considerably stronger than Hit.

The Simulationcraft Mage model appears to be shaping up nicely, though no profiles have been set up yet and there are still a few mechanics that need implementing. When it's ready to go, we should be able to get good numbers for lots of scenarios quickly, with full-raid sims.

It seems there was a bug in the interaction of Molten Armors backlash damage and the Shatter talent, and that has now been fixed so that it only works when the target attacking you is frozen.

This is not a change to the Shatter talent.

I get crit as being damn near useless once you break the soft cap. Potentially because magegraf measures by increasing stats by 100 at a time (except for hit). This makes perfect sense though because Fingers accounts for such a huge portion of your damage, especially with those Ignite blasted Frostfire Bolts. I do ensure that every Brain Freeze pairs with a Fingers proc, that was yielding the best dps in my simulations.

So a quick, yet incomplete, summary of frost magery:

Talents:
WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie.
There may be a point or two moved from Enduring Winter to somewhere else, but that is basically the highest dps frost spec from my understanding.

Glyphs: (As understood from post #276 by Vontre)
1. Glyph of Deep Freeze
2. Glyph of Frostfire Bolt
3a. Glyph of Molten Armor (if below or at Shatter "soft" crit cap)
or
3b. Glyph of Frostbolt (if at or above Shatter "soft" crit cap without Glyph of Molten Armor)

Stat Weight Priority:
(Under Shatter "soft" crit cap)
1. Intellect
2. Hit
3. Crit
4. Mastery ?
5. Haste ?

Stat Weight Priority:
(Above Shatter "soft" crit cap)
1. Intellect
2. Hit
3. Mastery ?
4. Haste ?
5. Crit

Rotation:
(See post #280 by Tyrian)



Feel free to correct me wherever I may be wrong.

Please continue to discuss changes to the original post. I'm away (Thanksgiving) and won't be making any changes for a while. I do understand that the OP is out of date and in need of updates.