I'd quite like to see Brainfreeze integrate Ffb too. It makes more sense that the talent that induces fire into frost doesn't use the most obvious candidate for the spell. Not least because FfB includes a chance to proc FoF of it's own accord, and due to BF's low proc-per-minute count there's more likelihood of a high FfB DoT uptime.

Forcing crit, however, is a little excessive. Not least because it'll have diminishing returns: if it procs with FoF simultaneously, you'll be getting less and less value as gear goes up because you're wasting +50% crit charges on a +100% crit spell.

Sorry, I'm probably being dense here. Why would you expect HS to refresh on every crit if the charge wasn't being used? Whenever I've received a second HS from not firing off Pyro as soon as it's up, it's been off the back of 2 addtional crits, rather than one

Just looking for some clarification

Toejam,

The statement you are quoting is commenting that, if it were possible to proc hot streak twice off of three crits, then it would follow that if you were to crit twice, and gain hot streak, critting a third time would yield a second hot streak. This would mean that there is either some type of inconsistency with when hot streak procs, or that the second crit is counting towards the next set of two.

So, no, he's not expecting HS to refresh on every crit. That's the point, because it's not possible to gain two hot streaks from three crits. What is possible is that you can:

A) Gain Hot Streak and use it simultaneously with your next fireball
B) Gain Hot Streak and use it before your fourth fireball lands

In either of these cases, it will prevent you from losing a second hot streak, if all four fireballs crit. It's a very simple mechanic.

Actually I was having a minor brain-fart. I forgot that Brain Freeze was not the 51 talent, but I was more referring to the the fact that we we don't have FfB until 75.

I agree this seems a bit excessive, but I just want the spell to be worth casting when it procs. If not a guaranteed crit, then how about immunity to resists (full or partial).

Another neat idea that would add a bit of complexity and simultaneously remove RNG from Frost rotations could be to make it like Maelstrom Weapon but use many of the non-frost tree related spells.

Brain Freeze
When you deal frost damage , you have a 100% chance to reduce the cast time of your next Fireball, Frostfire Bolt, Arcane Blast, or Pyroblast spell by 20%. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts 30 sec.

Having read the discussion on 'brain freeze' applying to both fireball and frostfire bolt, I've actually become a little surprised that it doesnt function like that - especially now that the newer version of brain freeze can't result from fishing for a proc with ice lance. The mention of having reasonable 'uptime' on the ffb dot seemed like an interesting bonus too.

The little-reasonable-man inside me predicts ffb will never be tied to brain freeze however - which leaves me wondering just how poorly the talent will scale into the future. Nobody should look down the path of character progression to see a point where "once I get those pants, I will take 3 points of out brain freeze, because I will lose damage by casting it.". Not really a satisfactory state for a 40+ point talent in any tree.

When all is said and done, I do appreciate the dpm increase of the talent, as an alternative to clearcasting - but clearcasting is more attractive nowadays since it shares a seat next to Magic Absorbtion, one of my new favourite talents. That doesnt save it from the concept of 'good now, bad once I get enough gear' - which should be viewed as a design error in my books.

Having a brief think for other spells or talents that are a 'tide over' until you get a replacement or better gear leaves me with very little. If I could think of another good example maybe I could let go of the 'ffb on brain freeze' dream.

Slightly off topic here, but still: Has there been any news about plans to make Mirror Image scale? Or has that been implemented already / with what spellpower coefficients / what about hit, crit, haste?

My concern is that it will move from a mediocre damage-boost cooldown to a very, very crappy one if the damage doesn't scale, and last time I checked it did not scale at all.

This would be pretty devastating as well if you were a FFB mage. A mage with zero haste would cast a 3.0 second FFB, then all subsequent casts would be 2.4 seconds, which means this is essentially free haste for them.

Protip: Check the OP.

Also - anything at all in the new beta push? Going to fix some things in the OP soon(tm).

Nothing that I can see, except the reported change to character stats on the achievements panel.

This idea is interesting. I would put it at a rate more like by 10%, stacks 10 times. You also excluded the mana reduction aspect of the spell which I would scale at the same rate. While that ramp time may seem a bit too high, in practice you can take advantage of the reduced cast time spell earlier than when its at 100% .

In order to maximize dps on a single dps boss fight the ideal time to use it is when the casting time is less than or equal to the GCD. Conversely, if you were in an aoe situation, and you toss a blizzard out and Brain freeze stacks to full, you have a free instant spell on the tail end of the AoE.

Naturally FFB would have to be excluded from proccing the stacking affect, so perhaps the wording would have to change to "Your frost bolt has a 100%..."

If you chose FFB as your reduced cost spell, with a 3.0 sec cast time, it would require 5 stacks to reach the GCD (assuming 0 haste), and you would get a GCD cast at 50% the mana cost. It would be worth playing with the idea if I were a dev.

Regarding changes to Brain Freeze, namely to make it proc an instant Frostfire bolt instead of a Fireball:

The current state of Brain Freeze is already considered too powerful (bursty) for PvP, and called for a nerf to the number of abilities that can proc it (specifically, Ice Lance removed from those).

Changing the proc to a FFB would again make Brain Freeze eligible for a PvP nerf - an instant cast nuke that hits roughly as hard as a Frostbolt, snares and can be specced for Ice Shards and Ignite for huge crit potential?

I would love to see FFB in Frost's rotation (that would justify its multiplier in Chilled to the Bone), but if it's going to be via Brain Freeze then some part of the talent has to go.
Reduce the proc chance, remove the instant cast or mana-free component - something.

Unless they ninja-changed spell penetration without any note, "yes" on both questions. Spell penetration is not useful at all unless the boss has resistances other than those given to him by his level advantage (e.g. supremus).

As for the Mirror Image, the OP answers the question about spellhit, wasn't aware they fixed it. No info on crit and haste though. And as for the image not inheriting spellpower, that's something they *should* consider fixing since a flat damage boost will get weaker and weaker as gear improves.

Ardanell, yes, your conclusions are correct. Earth and Moon instead of Curse of Elements will have no effect on your average boss fight, but WILL result in loss of dps of frost mages vs Rage Winterchill and fire mages vs Supremus.

Thegoodman, I strongly dislike that idea because all I'd do is replace my frostbolt button with a macro with a castsequence that used a frostfire bolt every 6th cast (not 5th, because the 5th charge would take time to appear, just like the problems with the way the old arcane blast debuffs worked). I want REACTIVE play, not simply a rotation that's always the exact same. Yes, this means I REQUIRE RNG to have fun playing in PvE. Without RNG, I may as well just be pressing a "Calculate Now" button in a spreadsheet over and over again. How this can be reconciled with PvP concerns, I have no idea. RNG vs no-RNG is one of the biggest reasons I believe a game that attempts to simultaneously cater to the PvE and PvP crowds without serious changes in game mechanics when entering a PvP situation will always fail miserably at the attempt. Competitive PvP can't stand in RNG, but fun PvE can't stand in its absence.

Interesting note: Mirror Image is still triggering an instant-cast gcd when cast. Tidal Force used to function the same way, and it was thought that this was intended functionality. Tidal Force recently got it's instant-cast gcd removed in either this build or the last. I wonder if we can expect similar treatment for Mirror Image.

I added it to my consolidated bug thread on the beta forums, which is updated for 9155.

sorry but what exactly do you mean by "instant-cast gcd"? Is it a normal gcd like after fireblast, or something more subtle?

My point is to make a crappy talent not crappy. RNG or Not, Brain Freeze is sub par. RNG is fine as long as its chance is high enough to not allow long strings of not applying. Hotstreak is a great example of a terrifically implemented RNG situation that increases as our gear increases. A flat out 10% chance of event XYZ is hardly exciting and, for me, does little to increase the fun factor of raiding.

How does removing the RNG make it a less crappy talent? An increase to 20% would buff it, but it may as well be a 20% chance to proc per cast instead of 15%, then, and would be more interesting if it were, so why wasn't that your suggestion?

Anyway, this is moving off-topic quickly since "wishlists" don't really belong here. I'll just say that anything that's guaranteed to proc at the same time every time is less interesting than something that randomly peppers a proc that demands a response. If I can just macro it, it's a boring change.

As far as PVE is concerned, I don't think anyone can argue that brain freeze ought to work with FFB too. It would make a lot more sense to spec that as frost too. However, I fear that it really wouldn't work in PVP. An instant cast that snares/procs frostbite, does lots of damage seems really good. I am pretty sure if you want the talent to work better in pve you first need to remove its instant cast part, then you can make it do considerably more damage. Doing that however would nerf the talent in PVP.

Or maybe were just looking at brain freeze at the wrong angle ? It could be intended to be mostly better dps on the move and a mana cost reduction, not really a dps increase. Fact is, people want frost to do more dps, then changing brain freeze is probably the bad way at it.

I'm not sure if the tooltip has been updated to reflect this, but Maelstrom Weapon is a ppm, and is not actually a 100% chance. In addition, the procrate is just random enough to prevent enhancement from having any specific rotation, but instead operate on a priority list of using their highest damage attack that is currently off cooldown first. i think this is also the direction elemental is leaning (with lightning bolt, Lava burst, chain lightning, flameshock, etc.)

last i checked, PPMs don't work for spells? though it wouldn't be hard to integrate, i'd assume. just give each spell a base proc rate depending on its cast time

Concerning spell penetration, i remember i have read a post on this forum (the previous topic for 2.4 theorycrafting I think) stating that CoE is usefull on several boss who have a bit more resistances.
Thereby, spell penetration was useless (and still is) for us because even if some boss had a little more spell penetration, the CoE was doing the job by the way (execpt for the 6% unavoidable).
Perhaps it should be usefull to test it with and without CoE(with Earth and Moon) on boss and check the mitigation?

ps : good luck Ardanell with the genesis start

Spell Penetration is quite simple. Most mobs, and I mean literally 99%+ of mobs, have 'none'. None that can be mitigated by any mechanic available (except for possible bugs). This is quite easy to test and prove by casting a ton of spells without COE, and then cast with COE (looking only at the different in amount/total of partials, not the actual damage increase). You notice quite fast that repeating the tests over and over the results are pretty much the same as flipping coins. This pretty much indicates that there are no results. Of course, on very extensive tests you won't see any real gain from it.

It comes into play on mobs having innate resists. The classic example is supremus, which has roughly 200 FR. But theres also illidari council that puts a buff from time to time increasing magic resistance. There are a few examples but they are really few and far between. For the most part, its never going to affect your gearing decisions, or spec. It might however affect your play. For example, on our early illidari council kills I was trying to save my movements/evocations (if applicable) and scorches when the buff was up rather than when its not. But again, to my knowledge, its the only raid boss having a buff applying spell resistance (rather than spell mitigation dampen magic style), so really its the one and only time it applied. There was also the ghosts in karazhan that did that.