Would be interesting to see the difference in simulations.
As far as I know the current numbers are 40% chance for AM to proc from any dmg spell (including Ice Lance)
Brain Freeze has 15% chance to proc from chill effect spells (mainly frostbolt).

Wonder how a frost build with Improved Arcane Missiles would perform.

What about fire power?
Ignite does depend on crit rating but fire power gives you always 3 % fire damage for FFB and flame orb explosion.

For the crit rating I come to 74% crit rating where ignite is better, but I do not know how good the flame orb explosion is.
But what happens if I use FFB if no FoF is up?

The talent description indicates that the slow will only be applied if the slow effect doesn't already exist somewhere else, allowing for the scenario you described. I am not sure how it actually works in practice though.

Here is a thought; If fire mages are allowed to run around and cast scorch and pyro on the move, what would happen if they added a chill effect (of whatever strength is appropriate) to ice lance?

Since I am not in beta, and it's really difficult to get an idea of the overall picture by just reading individual people's posts and comments, I'd like to ask a question. How much of the new frost scaling will be available when patch 4.0 hits live servers? As in, will we see a similar increase in average DPS we expect to see in Cata for frost mages?

Will reply to this in the Arcane Topic.


In Raiding Hunters can keep slow on targets without having to ever stand still? We’ll be able to kite at a distance without having to stand still (CoC and Frostnova can be a bit dangerous sometimes).
For PVP it will become harder to run away from the Mage. The mage will be able to keep running towards the fleeing player while spamming Ice Lance instead of standing still to Cast rank1 Frostbolt whenever the slow is gone.

As for real combat, it’s quite hard to say, I think players like Affix and Vileroze will be better at answering this, but here is a try:

• !!!- While you need to reposition yourself you'll be more inclined to put a slow up on all the melee classes. Currently you will only put slows on all of them through CoC when possible.
• Dead zoning a warrior+ healer will be easier. Warrior will slow you for 50%, normally and you try to keep CoC on warrior but when you can't reapply CoC you'll be using Ice Lance to slow him. If you’d be using rank1 Frostbolt the warrior would have a good chance to get a charge on you or run into melee range.
• Whenever a melee gets close to you, you try to make distance by either slowing/rooting him or blinking away. When the class has the slowing/root effect removed you have to stand still and cast rank1 Frostbolt. This causes the melee classes to get closer to you. But when you can apply a slow through Ice Lance you can keep moving and thus keeping the same distance or increasing the distance from melee player.
• Most healers won’t bother dispelling slows on their melee partner while there’s an enemy mage. The time they would dispel is when an enemy is almost dead.

Now as for a Fire Mage specifically. It's pretty much the same as above. But unlike frost or Arcane the Fire mage needs to make a choice of doing damage while on the move or putting a slow on every melee. Another difference is that Arcane and Frost need to choose when to stand still and do dmg on the player despite them moving towards you and Fire might be inclined to never stand still.

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What is interesting is my lvl 84 mage has 9,61% haste and my Frostbolt has 1.83s cast time. On live I have 19,85% haste and my Frostbolt has a 1.92s cast time. Maybe were just overreacting about the rank1 Frostbolt and we will be fine with this new Frostbolt + Curtain of Frost (if they increase the range of Curtain of Frost).

Isn´t early frost meant to cover the loss of rank 1 frostbolt? We all agree that its a very weak dps talent, but it does mimic the utility of rank 1 frostbolts somewhat.

edit: I don´t think blizz will ever make ice lance apply slow. Being able to move and deal damage is really neat, but being able to m ove, deal damage AND apply snares all at once just sounds unbalanced. Frost pvp revolves around snaring while fire pvp revolves around mobility. After all whats most important is your relative mobility compared to your oponents right?

I'm not expecting Ice Lance to get a slow either. But I figured i do some Theoriecraft behind it.
I believe were not all on the same page of what rank1 Frostbolt meant. To me it was the combination of a quick slow and it being spammable. Hence Early Frost isn't exactly the replacement for it.

But I've mainly used rank1 Frostbolt in TBC, I havn't used it as much in WoTLK because of the large amounts of haste.Hence it would be nice to have a rank1 Frostbolt, but I wouldn't mind to see how pvp will go without it. I do believe that increasing the range of Curtain of Frost will help a lot to replace rank1 Frostbolt on catching the flag carrier / fleeing player.

You're right, we're on different pages if you're thinking of rank 1 simply as a faster snare. Frost pvp in wotlk has never lacked enough mobility or tools such that rank 1 was all that important to save time on a snare, especially in the confined space of the arena. Rank 1 was mostly useful for quickly covering a target with both the slow and winter's chill prior to a polymorph, so that the first dispel had a much smaller chance of removing your CC, especially if the only enemy dispel was a warlock. Since winter's chill is gone it won't work the same even with early frost.

Also while loosing old tools we are gaining new tools. You can freeze the flag carrier from more than 35 yards range and while that tool isn´t new the ability to follow that up with freezing the flag carrier with one of your fof procs is, and also a more powerfull tool for stoping them in their tracks. And for shorter range theres the new CoC with added freeze yummyness. Sure, none of this is spammable. But I think frost will manage, especially since you do get a fast snare every 15 sec.

Also since you can now place your water elemental a distance away from the mage with the "Move Here" button, you can effectively reach opponents with your elementals freeze at a much greater distance then the mage himself would be able to reach. You could send you your elemental, freeze, hopefully he'll blow his cooldown trying to get out of the freeze, and since the FoF should still be up, blink in and deep freeze after that. Sounds like a lot of fun playing frost and I'm glad I continued to play it on my mage.

Unless you have 3 adds in a triangle or 4 adds in a square around a boss it shouldn't be too hard to position the freeze so it doesn't hit undesirable targets. It's exactly the same as positioning Blizzard so it doesn't break saps and sheeps in heroics.