Hurm. Last time I tested that it had been fixed. I'll try it on beta tonight and see if it's happening again.

OK, looks like it's still working properly on beta. I assume they just didn't port that fix from 4.0.3 into 4.0.1. (Tested with and without the FFB glyph -- it used to be triggered only when glyph was present.)

I'm no longer having the issue. Either they hotfixed it or something that I did changed it. (I didn't change spec, but I did add some mastery (the first amount above the default 20%) to my gear)

Edit: I did change something. The FFB Glyph IS the issue (it must consider the FFB Dot another FFB spell and that's what consumes the second charge)

Confirming that removing the FFB glyph causes it to no longer consume two stacks of Fingers of Frost on live.

I haven't done enough work to answer your question, but I can tell you that simply removing DF from rotation brings Haste up to a very competitive position with Crit and Mastery. It seems a big part of the problem is simply that haste doesn't let us cast more Deep Freezes.

Playing around with frost for a few days confirms my opinion that Early Frost is a nearly useless talent. I understand the original idea behind it, but its no longer an idea worthy of a place on the talent tree.

If you wanted Rank 1 frostbolt to "cover" your target with two debuffs to prevent easy removal of CC, early frost doesn't help much. Not only is it likely to not be up when you want it, but it won't stack winter's chill anymore, making it half as effective.

If you wanted Rank 1 for a very fast snare, this is now an obsolete concept. When before you wanted to snare a distant target before it moved out of range, you now have a permanent pet with a 45yd range root on a 25 second cooldown. If you would have used it on a melee class getting in your face, talented cone of cold is now a better option, and you've always had frost nova.

It's even worse in pve. If all we did was spam frostbolt, early frost would still be a very minor dps increase. Now that I've seen for myself how much of our damage comes from other spells, I can't imagine wasting two points on it. This is the type of cool-sounding ability we like to see in expansion previews, but without any practical value I hope it gets pruned in the future.

Lhivera, when you said that crit after 33% would fall somewhere between Mastery and Haste, did that mean Mastery is best? Such that for gearing, the stat weights would be:

Hit to cap
Crit when below 33.33%
Mastery
Crit when above 33.33%
Haste

Not being able to test target dummy DPS accurately is a little frustrating - no deep freeze and skewed FrB/FFB numbers because of extended periods of inappropriate frozen status - and parses from this week on World of Logs show a disparaging 10k difference between the dps of top fire/arcane parses and the best of frost. Did any of our abilities get bumped around in last night's emergency balance? Is frost not to be considered an option until 85?

Some impressions from live server:

I compared arcane and frost on two, almost, static fights in icc25. (rotface & festergut)
- Arcane was about 5k dps better than frost. It seems that frost is not comparable against the other speccs.
Arcane had ~70k arcane blast crits and frost ~50k deep freeze crits.

General findings:
- Pet freeze has to be set on a mob to get the FoF charges. This need some training not to loose dps.

[Edit]: Bomb damage is really low. Owls bomb about double dps than mages.

Two related and hopefully not ignorant questions on the Shatter and the order of operations:

(1) How does boss crit suppression interact with Shatter? (If crit suppression still exists... I know there are various Blue posts which indicate that they want it to be harder to crit later-tier raid bosses than early ones) I would presume that if there is crit suppression, it would be factored in after Shatter triples the crit chance, for example: a mage might have a 25% crit chance, tripled to 75%, then reduced to 72% via a hypothetical 3% crit suppression.

(2) To that end, is the crit debuff from Shadow and Flame (the new Improved Shadowbolt, or any similar effect) applied before or after the tripling? In other words, do we have confirmation about the order in which various kinds of critical effect chance modifiers are applied? It wouldn't surprise me at all of Shatter "only" tripled our personal rate but target-side debuffs increasing spell crit were not tripled.

(3) <removed>

Forgive me if I'm asking something that has already addressed, but I don't see it in this particular thread, and I would prefer not to presume one behavior or the other without testing or prior research into related mechanics. My best guess is that Shatter triples only the mage-side critical strike chance (character-sheet crit plus spell-specific modifiers such as tier bonuses and glyphs), then the game applies any target-side modifiers to crit before making the crit-or-not roll. However, best-guesses can easily be wrong, and was hoping someone else has looked into this previously and could correct my assumptions.

Can you find links to blue posts talking about boss crit suppression? Ghostcrawler has clearly talked about increased +hit% requirements for later bosses. The reason being that skull level bosses have a fixed 17% chance to miss for casters. At the first tier level, this might be a struggle to reach. As gear ilvls improve, it becomes easier and easier to reach this cap so people start removing hit gems and enchants. Blizzard didn't like that end-content bosses were in essence "easier to hit" then entry-content bosses, so they are going to increase the miss rate on bosses like Deathwing versus Ragnaros. But I haven't heard anything about crit suppression.

I'm pretty sure it triples your crit chance including boss debuffs but it doesn't hurt to ask to make it clear for all. Can anyone confirm this?