indeed, in order for pyro ignites to be a problem you would need for another ignite to be on the mob when you launch the pyro and for the pyro itself to crit. Considering that yuo won't be cancelling your thirdt fireball to use hotstreak, the only 2 spells that could risk interacting for a negative ignite result would be a normal fireball and a normal pyroblast. The odds of both of them still calculating as crit and also bugging out the ignite are far, far lower than previous iterations of hot streak.

If blizzard are still worried about debuff limitations in raids then they arn't showing it. Firemages could potentially now get 5 debuffs up on a target (scorch, pyro, ignite, fireball, FFb).

They could work around it though, like giving fire a single dot debuff, all fire dots adding to it, excluding ignite for potential implications. So ffb/fb/pryo dots all stack in one debuff.

With the frost talents implemented, has Torment of the Weak been fixed?

Comparing Arcane Missile damage without TotW, with TotW on a clean target, on a frostbolted target, and on Dr. Boom without debuffs and with a FFB debuff should give a good picture if it works and how.

I'd be grateful if anyone could check that.


Also, Ignite/Pyro isn't that much of an issue since you most likely can't lauch the Pyro after the triggering Fireball crit.
At 50% crit chance, it's a 25% chance to lose the Ignite of Pyroblast (either spell should crit similarly hard).
I'll model that as Pyroblast having only a 30% (instead of 40%) crit multiplier, or probably tie it to your crit chance actually.


[Edit]: Improved Water Elemental with 66% uptime over 6 minutes at 70 with 12k mana pools ends up as roughly 12k*0.6%*0.66 = 48 mp5. It's like a free Blessing of Wisdom or Mana Spring raidwide.
That's for casters, it's obviously worth less for Hunter and Melee Paladins/Shaman.
Not great, not terrible.

But it seems it's terribly bugged now according to several testers.

Hey, Xentropy: in your thread on Fingers of Frost, it might be worth pointing out the collateral damage of this version. 51-point talents are generally being designed to be useful for raiding as well as for PvP or some utility function. Just going over the Mage and Warlock stuff:

Living Bomb: Useful for single-target boss DPS as well as AOE and PvP.
Arcane Barrage: Useful for pretty much everything.
Haunt: Useful for pretty much everything.
Metamorphosis: Not finished, but they've said it's meant to serve as a burst damage cooldown, useful for pretty much everything.
Chaos Bolt: Not finished, but they've said they're working on making it useful for raid DPS as well as PvP.

Deep Freeze was similarly useful for raid boss DPS as well as PvP/soloing with the uncharged version of Fingers of Frost. Changing to the charged version eliminates Deep Freeze's usefulness for raid boss DPS, thus devaluing our 51-pointer.

Improved Water Elemental is still broken. I summoned mine while I had very little mana. I was solo at the time, no party/raid interactions at all. Over the lifetime of the WE (it lasted all 60 seconds), I received 2 ticks of mana (which were in fact 0.6% each) and it received 4 total ticks of mana (also 0.6%). It should've ticked 12 times, not 6, and as far as I'm aware it should have ticked on both of us, not only one.

Further testing seems to point to it only having a 5-yard range (or something very small--even standing next to me in normal pet-heeling distance it didn't affect me), and while it's moving around it can miss giving ITSELF a tick. I have to tell it to Stay and stand directly atop it to get my ticks of mana. Obvious bug, which I have now reported.

Lhiv: I'm about to give up on it. A 15 second timer IS more useful for soloing (since you can carry a charge over to another mob) and people seem to be in love with it for simply working when it used to not work at all. It's hard to convince people that it could be better another way when while it was the other way it was broken entirely. It's also hard to convince people of the raiding merits of *anything* while raids aren't even implemented. I'll continue to post in favor of a timed rather than charged FoF but doubt I'll receive much support from the official forums. (In-game I brought it up in General just for people's opinions and the general response I got was lolfrost, go fire to raid. Sigh.) Now people are saying 4 seconds isn't even long enough to cast *one* frostbolt and an instant. My only assumption is that they are all fire or arcane mages who spec'd frost to try out the cool new toys and have never even heard of a shatter combo before, much less know how to cast an instant while a bolt is in the air.

Edit: Another bug, actually reported by one of the people liking the charge version in my thread. Every spell uses a charge, including non-frost spells. This includes molten armor procs. I'm reporting that as well.

I know this isn't talent discussion, but is anyone getting a good sense of what the best Mage professions will be in LK? My investigations are bringing up some interesting benefits:

Engineering: On Use haste boost for gloves
Enchanting: Ring enchants and BOP epic wands
Blacksmithing: Extra sockets, including a possible extra Meta gem socket (is this correct?)
Leatherworking: Nerfed drums, but also the new +70 dmg bracer lining
Inscription: Extra glyph spot
Tailoring: Haven't looked into this too much, but I assume there will be some nice items.

Those are all looking like pretty decent bonuses, but what will win out?

For the sake of raiding frost mages everywhere, please don't give up. I have other friends with beta access making posts in your thread (if they ever wake up) but here are two more arguments you could make:

-- Fire now gets dynamic casting, having to work in instacast Pyroblasts into raid rotations. This is great game design. Frost can't do its signature move, shatter combos, but instead occasionally gets to throw a fireball in the mix? This is bad game design.

-- Has Blizzard considered the implications of a 15-second timer in PvP since you can use a FoF on a different target? Imagine a 2v2 matchup with a healer and DPS opponent.

1) You get an FoF proc on the DPS target.
2) You hit the DPS with one spell, getting the shatter crit. Your partner hits the DPS target as well.
3) The healer starts to heal. You have him focused and nail him with a DF, stunning him.
4) You and your partner unload on the DPS target.

If you have 15 seconds to have a guaranteed ranged stun on any target, that is potentially too powerful.

(Posting this 2nd point will not make you any friends.)

As an addendum on Zeldyrr's second point, you could always make the argument that this really needs to be a raid-focused talent. The PvPers, they've got ways to freeze their targets. Shattered Barrier? That's all theirs, they're welcome to it. Fingers of Frost, that one's ours, and it should be designed primarily to meet our needs.

Catty, but frankly, unless they've got something completely different up their sleeves to change up the Frost raid playstyle some more, this issue is the determining factor on whether or not my Mage gets retired, so I'm looking to see all the stops pulled on getting this reversed.

Not been looking into deep freeze's damage from a PvE standpoint myself so here's a simple question, assuming the DF does enough damage for a global cooldown wouldn't making it so that it doesn't require your target to be frozen to be cast but rather the stun is only applied if the target is frozen a feasible change?

That would of course not give any reactive casting for frost but it would lessen the one dimensional playstyle as well as allowing it to be more flexibly used in PvP although you'd always try to use it on a frozen target.

It wouldn't, actually. The whole idea behind a Shatter Combo is this:

Shatter Frostbolt > Shatter Deep Freeze or Shatter Ice Lance, but
Shatter Deep Freeze or Shatter Ice Lance > Non-Shatter Frostbolt

You cast an Ice Lance or Deep Freeze at the end of the combo because you can't cast another Frostbolt before the Freeze expires. That's the only time it's advantageous to use one of those spells on the boss. You'd never inject a Deep Freeze cast except as the finisher on a Shatter Combo, so the change you suggest wouldn't make it usable for raid DPS. (Unless the damage were greatly increased, but that'd make it pretty overpowered outside of raid DPS.)

Quite simply, it's literally impossible to make Shatter Combos useful or Deep Freeze useful for PvE DPS with a charge-based version of Fingers of Frost.

Ok then but could finger of frost be (ab)used in the fashion combustion currently can? double dipping the last charge that is meaning:
shatter frostbolt(1 charge)
shatter frostbolt + deep freeze/ice lance(last charge)
?

So fof is a loss in fun but it is also a gain in damage output which might have been why they changed it, arguing to revert it would then not be very productive. Maybe this loss of 'fun play' can be achieved in another way.

Er, no. We just got done explaining that it's both a loss of fun and a loss of damage.

FoF 2 charges: 2 shatter frostbolts.
FoF 4 seconds: 2 shatter frostbolts + 1 shatter deep freeze or ice lance <----- better for both fun and damage

Oh yeah true but only works for 25% haste or greater though.

They could just make deep freeze do more damage than frostbolt... that would essentially do the same thing as having a somewhat restrictive timer.

That would grossly imbalance it in PvP, unless it'd be reverted to have a cast time again.

No, it works with any value of haste greater than zero, plus whatever you need to compensate for latency. That's assuming a 1.0 second flight time on Frostbolt; if the flight time is longer, the required haste is reduced. Take a look again at the timeline that's been posted explaining the sequence. With zero haste and a 1-second flight time, you cast the second Shatter Frostbolt and the Ice Lance or Deep Freeze exactly as the buff expires.

Does anyone else think this talent will make arcane explosion do massive amounts of damage? A mage can easily take enough damage in 2- 5 secs to kill him from multiple mobs, so your getting a spell damage boost of what? 900-1200 now, and what at 80? you could easily let lose another 2 AEs before the initial extra damage wore off.

Ha, rather than edit an old post that may not be seen, I'm quoting myself to correct myself.

You CAN actually break the current implementation of FoF to allow for three casts in one proc. I have now managed twice to cast an icelance just as my second frostbolt is casting, and successfully gotten the ice lance to be considered under the effect of FoF. (Definitely had just one charge remaining, target was not frozen, frostbolt+icelanced, icelance crit for >2k, thus triple damage as if target were frozen. Frostbolt also crit.) It is possible the icelance was somehow using the charge instead of the frostbolt and the frostbolt just happened to crit, but it seems very likely two casts at nearly the same timestamp can both benefit from one charge.

However, the timing must be PERFECT, and this means people with higher amounts of lag may be SOL. I have <50ms to the beta test server but >100ms to my normal live server. I wonder if I could pull it off live or not.

More like 0% haste, as Lhivera showed above. He assumed a very conservative 1.0 second travel time meaning a FoF proc will occur 1.5 seconds into your FrB cast, another frostbolt is cast ending at 4.0 followed by a deep freeze still under the FoF buff. Any gains of haste only bring this combo closer to the "guaranteed" realm.

0.0s - Start Frostbolt1 cast
2.5s - Frostbolt1 leaves hands, Start Frostbolt2 cast
3.5s - Frostbolt1 procs FoF, Frostbolt2 is 1.0 seconds into cast ]
5.0s - Frostbolt2 leaves hands, Start Frostbolt3 ]- All under FoF
7.5s - Frostbolt3 leaves hands, Cast Deep Freeze/Ice Lance ]

That still wouldn't change anything, You still only get two spells out of the new FoF rather than 3 from the old version. Your suggestion helps the whole "want to cast something other than frostbolt once in a while" issue, but it doesn't address the damage nerf unless they buff DF to overpowered status.

DF causes its own gcd. I fail to see how this changes in either iteration of FoF.


On the glyph 1 hour cooldown, it seems odd that between arena games I can respec frost-fire-frost, I can change all my gems, enchants, threads, and gear glyphs, but I can't change inscription glyphs back and forth. Has something been changed nerfing respeccing that I am not aware of?

Maybe add a side effect: If your target is immune to the DF stun effect, XXX more dmg is dealt? (It could even be a glyph).

Easier solution just to bring back the 4 sec timer of course. That could be lower dmg under some circumstances though (where you are moving).

If DF gets it's cast time back to 1.5 seconds there won't be a gcd and you will be able to operate to the full extent of the 5 sec stun while if it's instant cast you lose a global cooldown of the stun.

Oh and I realise I been a complete moron regarding fof, sorry for that.