Frost Cataclysm Discussion [4.0 thread] - Page 9

Lhivera · 10/14/10, 8:27 PM

Originally Posted by Zeldyrr

Can you find links to blue posts talking about boss crit suppression?

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> The problem with hit scaling in raid tiers

Instead, we are just faking the bosses gaining levels. We haven't worked out the exact mechanic yet, but imagine they are level 88++ or level 88.3 or level 88 SKULL SKULL BAD SKULL. As you get more powerful and get better gear, they get more powerful... exactly like all those bosses you handled while leveling up. Rather than critting and hitting the more dangerous opponents more often, your relative power stays about the same.

Zeldyrr · 10/14/10, 8:40 PM

Interesting. I remembered the post title "hit scaling" and didn't remember the part about crit scaling. This brings up a couple question:

(1) Does this make haste more powerful (per rating) at the higher tiers of raiding because you can't "haste less" on bosses?

(2) Now I am curious how this "reduced crit chance taken" debuff will interact with shatter as asked above. Any insight?

Serjery · 10/15/10, 12:56 AM

Just to confirm again: Have they hotfixed the ffbolt dot taking a fof charge on live?

Also, silly question but does the crit % chance reflected in your spell bar change with respect to Piercing Ice? Or am I supposed to take the current value and add 3% to reflect my accurate crit chance?

Im sitting at 33.2% with molten armor and 3/3 piercing ice according to my character stats page.

gaerthe · 10/15/10, 1:25 AM

Originally Posted by Fröstler

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.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with this. We did ICC 25 tonight and I tried out frost on Rotface. Compared to the other mage who I had been running even with as fire, I fell back a bit over 3k dps behind him. I know I made a number of mistakes, but I find it hard to believe they would have equaled up to 3k dps.

World of Logs report

What are other people seeing?

I find this very disappointing because frost is more "fun" than fire so far.

--- Edit

After thinking about it some more, I may need to reforge to actually be able to do good frost DPS. My crit sat around 50% raid buffed. Approximately 40% of my damage as ice lance/BF-FFB, which meant I was over the crit cap for that part of my total damage (ie useless stats). If I reforged some of my crit to mastery, I would gain damage on that 40% damage.

Napkin math:

[removed broken math - need to rethink this]

nostie · 10/15/10, 2:38 AM

Originally Posted by gaerthe

After thinking about it some more, I may need to reforge to actually be able to do good frost DPS. My crit sat around 50% raid buffed. Approximately 40% of my damage as ice lance/BF-FFB, which meant I was over the crit cap for that part of my total damage (ie useless stats). If I reforged some of my crit to mastery, I would gain damage on that 40% damage.

First -- Frost DPS is not going to be competitive assuming equal skill. Both Fire and Arcane are still going to smash frost for multiple reasons. One of these is the fact that we simply have too much crit and haste and we do not scale well with either of them. I'm confident that at level 85 we will be more competitive due to the lack of combat ratings and the presence of mastery on gear.

Second -- Remember the stat priorities that were clarified earlier based on Lhivera's math.

Originally Posted by Adyssa

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

When you reforge, you want to reforge from haste, not crit (assuming this math is correct).

Andoras · 10/15/10, 3:18 AM

What are other people seeing?

I find this very disappointing because frost is more "fun" than fire so far.

I was Frost for our whole raid on Wednesday. We had a bug that wasn't allowing us to do Heroic ICC, so we just plowed through normals to have fun/try out specs/etc. Here was the result for the night:

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

We were short quite a few people and had 2-3 with major issues that were making it hard to raid, so kill times went long and I'm pretty sure I could have pumped out quite a bit more DPS on a # of those fights. Here's my Armory if my EJ account doesn't have it as my main. The World of Warcraft Armory - Nybbas @ Eonar - Profile

I basically just reforged every single item into Mastery. I went with the assumption that Haste > Crit so I did Crit first, then Haste. Thought being that at least Haste would lower the GCD on the instants. It seems from reading here that I was wrong on that, but my results were good enough that I"m relatively happy with the spec and with some tweaks on my end(I sucked at using Freeze on CD) I can see it being viable/close to viable.

Lhivera · 10/16/10, 5:23 PM

Some rough estimates here -- my sim can't handle gems or enchants yet, but otherwise it's using mostly iLevel 359 gear for this. Time to OOM as Frost, using Mana Gems when mana deficit reaches or exceeds 32000 and using Evocation when mana deficit reaches or exceeds 62%. Switching from BF-FFB on FOF only to BF-FFB on BF proc provides a very small improvement (on the order of around 10 seconds).

Always assuming 2/2 Master of Elements, 870 Combat Regen, and regen from pally or mana tide.

3/3 Enduring Winter: ~8.5 minutes
2/3 Enduring Winter: ~7 minutes
1/3 Enduring Winter: ~6 minutes

That's assuming absolutely non-stop casting.

elusivedotone · 10/16/10, 7:48 PM

Hi guys long time reader of EJ first time poster. I have always loved frost and progressed to LK as frost pre icc buff. Im glad to see all the great changes to frost with this last patch and upcoming cataclysm.

A few things I noticed while doing some testing on dummies, FoF procs a LOT, FFB BF still eats up 2 charges of FoF (Which has been stated in this post already), and ice lance is doing a lot more damage than FB's during FoF.

Was curious how other mages are handling their FoF procs in terms of if DF is on CD and you arnt using CS to recast DF. Im wondering because FoF tends to Proc like nonstop for me. Is it more beneficial to cast FB -> IL -> FB -> IL... if getting continual FoF procs. Or would using FFB BF on every proc be better after FB -> IL for first FoF charge then FFB BF to clear the remaining FoF proc. Or would it be better to just use FFB BF cast just to refresh "Pusing the Limit" buff from T10 for the haste.

Ive tried doing some testing on the targetting dummies, but each time the results were skewed a little due to different debuffs on the target at different times of testing. If anyone has any thoughts or data would be much appreciated.

Tyrian · 10/17/10, 3:30 AM

Using Ring of Frost extensively during Beta heroics, I was surprised at how incredibly useful (and fun) the spell is. We know it might fall into a sharper niche in 10 man raid content, but firstly lets talk about how it actually looks now:

- The latest Animation is perfect: YouTube - WoW Cataclysm , new mage Ring of Frost | 15.10.2010
- Two concentric circles, with the inner one giving a visual distinction between Rof 'charging up' and being active to Freeze targets. Looks a bit like a Stargate when it's being dialled.
- Strikes a good balance between the animation being too noisy (like several beta builds ago) and too uninteresting (like the start of beta)

In terms of use, the 2 minute cooldown is perfect. It's short enough that I feel encouraged to use Ring of Frost liberally, and compelled to give the spell a good location on my action bars. A three minute cooldown, however, instead felt like it served to just push RoF towards the 'gimmick category' spell - and served to discourage frequent use, and as a result, you wouldn't give it prime real estate on your action bars.

With one click, an astute mage can use RoF for enormous benefits. Pull an extra pack? Stun them all in RoF before they reach you. Your healer got stunned/interrupted? Use RoF to stun all current mobs to lighten the healing until they can catch back up. Your tank can't reach those incoming adds in time? Stun them. Starting the zerg phase on a boss? RoF any current adds and focus the boss instead. Several adds casting and don't know which to interrupt? Stun them all, with careful placement of your RoF.

I found myself often using the spell as a way to temporarily lighten the load on healing on difficult pulls, not necessarily just to freeze mobs for full duration far away from combat.

Ring of Frost doesn't agro PvE mobs until they are actually Frozen. They just sit there under the ground animation, until the inner ROF circle finishes rotating and Freezes them. Therefore, Mages can initiate difficult pulls safely out of combat with Ring of Frost, allowing tanks to go in afterwards with ease.

Much of this sounds obvious, and will be to those on beta familiar with the spell. But the best thing about Ring of Frost is: it doesn't use itself. You still need a skilled, astute mage with good situationally awareness of their surroundings. They can opt to use RoF either aggressively or defensively. But it still doesn't use itself, and not everyone will be able to leverage the full situational power of the spell.

I do hope the spell doesn't get pushed into a too-fine niche for 10 and 25 man raiding. It's up to Blizzard encounter designers to avoid that happening. But in terms of levelling and heroics, the spell has stunning potential. Pun intended!

Incoherent · 10/17/10, 1:20 PM

Some testing on live shows:

Frost specialisation has lowered to 15% extra damage, rather than the 25% in the Talent summary.

Also, I am confused by the Mage resources thread showing coefficients. It has Frostbolt at 2.5/3.5, I see it being definitely 3/3.5 or 0.857143.

Cataclysm Mage Resources

elusivedotone · 10/18/10, 4:09 AM

Following up on my last post, I got to finally get into ICC 25 tonight to test frost out. I found that casting FB -> IL for each charge seemed to work out best, and I tried to use FFB BF on last charge, but often times I ended up just using FFB BF to eat both charges to try to keep Pushing the Limit up as often as possible, and due to the fact I kept getting 2 stacks of FoF constantly. I opted to not use Pet Freeze every time it came off CD, I tried to wait it out if there was a time where there were no FoF charges up. More importantly I was trying to keep it off CD to time it with DF in case there were no FoF charges up.

But heres a report if anyones interested. Would love to see some other frost mages reports. World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Lucronax · 10/18/10, 10:39 PM

Here's one: report

I agree that it's more beneficial to use Pet Freeze only if you aren't getting FoF when DF cooldown is up. I also used it in a couple situations where I had BF ready but no FoF was proccing. I myself do NOT put a Frostbolt in between every Ice Lance as elusivedotone does...This is definitely a DPS loss as you can certainly have a case where a chill effect hits while you cast your first Ice Lance, allowing you to cast three in a row. I think using the other strategy would waste that, although it is a little bit easier to cast and react to.

elusivedotone · 10/19/10, 12:01 AM

Originally Posted by Lucronax

Here's one: report

I agree that it's more beneficial to use Pet Freeze only if you aren't getting FoF when DF cooldown is up. I also used it in a couple situations where I had BF ready but no FoF was proccing. I myself do NOT put a Frostbolt in between every Ice Lance as elusivedotone does...This is definitely a DPS loss as you can certainly have a case where a chill effect hits while you cast your first Ice Lance, allowing you to cast three in a row. I think using the other strategy would waste that, although it is a little bit easier to cast and react to.

Looking over the reports on roughly a 5 minute fight we both have about the same uptime for FoF +- 1%, You seemed to be doing more dmg with frostbolts. in terms of FoF IL's we both had around the same give or take 3 or 4, but the damage seemed to be about the same +- 1k. So I guess if you are FB then IL, IL IL, how you are doing more dmg with FB instead of it being somewhat on average with IL's eludes me, unless you just have unlucky FoF Procs. Otherwise from the data is seems to be showing you are hitting a lot more FB's over IL FoF procs or arnt getting as many FoF procs. But whats strange is the uptime seems to be the same. Datamined from Sindy 25n and LK 25H Attempt 10. Im looking exclusively at FoF Uptime procs, # of IL, dmg of IL/%, and FB dmg/%.

Zeldyrr · 10/19/10, 10:04 AM

(I posted something similar to this on the official forums but I thought the topic could benefit from an EJ discussion of it.)

There are two competing macros on how to control the water elemental:

Macro 1
#showtooltip
/cast Frostbolt
/stopmacro [target=pettarget, exists]
/petattack [pet]

Macro 2
#showtooltip
/cast Frostbolt
/cast Waterbolt

I noticed with macro 1 that there was a pause between Waterbolt casts. A quick combatlog test (and it would be great if someone could reproduce these results) showed the following.

Avg time between casts macro 1: 2.4510
Avg time between casts macro 2: 2.1287

I wasn't a naked mage but I took off anything that would proc haste for the test of macro 2. I'm seeing a speedup about about 13%. If elemental damage is about 15% of total, using macro 2 would be about a 2% increase in overall damage.

Some questions:

-- Does the new spell queue system affect the second macro in a good/bad way?

-- The second macro has the "disadvantage" that the elemental will switch targets if you do. This could be useful in raids (everyone off X, kill skull!) but annoying perhaps while doing tricky kiting of multiple mobs. Is there a way to combine the two macros?

-- Any reason NOT to just add a /cast Waterbolt to FB, IL, DF, FFB? What would be the ideal macro?

Unlike utility versus marginal damage talents, this is "free" damage I think as I don't see any downside.

Adyssa · 10/19/10, 10:11 AM

It's shouldn't be a DPS loss to put a Frostbolt between your Ice Lances, so long as you don't make a mistake. Fingers of Frost procs on the chill effect's application and a charge is used up on casting a spell. So, even if you have 2 FoF charges and are in the middle of casting a Frostbolt, if you use Ice Lance directly after the Frostbolt, it will use a charge before the Frostbolt applies the chill effect. You can see it drop to 1 charge and then go back up to 2 if the Frostbolt's chill effect procs FoF. You could effectively hold onto one charge of FoF this way and bank it for Brain Freeze procs and Deep Freeze.

The only time you could waste a charge is when there are multiple targets and the chill effect spreads via Piercing Chill, giving multiple procs when you only have space for one.