Heh, well, the ISB change is that it's now a buff on the Warlock, not a debuff on the mob, exactly the same as they did with Fingers of Frost.

There's really only three ways they can fix Fingers of Frost to make it provide the desired effect of increasing interactivity of DPS in PvE Frost:

1) Change it to a short, uncharged buff. This exactly replicates the behavior of "real" shatter combos.

2) Provide a spell that is better than Frostbolt on the second charge (without requiring an Ignite build to make Frostfire Bolt into that spell). It needs to start dealing higher damage on a Shatter than Frostbolt, and scale well enough to continue doing so.

3) Change Fingers of Frost so that only spells with snares can proc it, but only spells without snares can consume the charges. This encourages you to toss out a couple alternate spells in your rotation to get the crit bonus -- perhaps a Fireball and a Fire Blast at lower levels, a couple Ice Lances at higher levels.


Blizzard is terrific in PvE as long as you're specced for Frostbite to get tons of Shatter crits. Ultimately, when bugs are fixed, it should work with just FoF as well.


There is: you gain much stronger AOE burst DPS, many more stuns (Frost gets one on a cooldown with a conditional cast, Fire gets both offensive and defensive autostuns -- for Frost to spec into those autostuns requires giving up some snares/roots), much higher burst, a DOT. Just off the top of my head.

We could argue 'til we're blue in the face whether the scales balance, but ultimately: it is imperative that no DPS spec have a clear advantage over another, or the goal of letting people spec their characters into the tree they prefer for character definition purposes (whether you care or not, this is an RPG) without being excluded from PvE content cannot be met. If other things wind up unequal, then you keep working to balance them -- you don't nerf DPS to compensate.

Which I realize you implied at the end of your post needs to be done -- but I feel we need to be very careful, given the history and prevailing attitudes about Frost being a PvP spec and it's OK if it fails in PvE, to make this very, very clear.

Here are a few interesting remarks Ghostcrawler made in the rogue forums that directly relate to mages:


WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Rogue Talent design intentions

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> [Concern] State of Rogues In Raids

Lhivera,

There is one additional way that they could fix Fingers of Frost that would make everyone involved happy (PVE, PVP, everyone). The solution is extremely simple and elegant in design (though I have no idea how difficult it may be in programming).

Make Fingers of Frost a two charge self buff with a long duration as it is now, except that the charges would be consumed on hit rather than on cast. This is the essential difference between current Frostbite/Shatter combos and Fingers of Frost. Allowing the charges to be consumed on spell hit allows the mage to "sneak" in that extra instant cast spell because you have once again given them the benefit of the travel time of the Frostbolt.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of Combustion that consumes a player buff on spell hit (technically spell crit, but you get the meaning). I have to imagine that there are others so that the ability to code this change seems within the realm of possibility.

The problem is, ultimately, there's really only 2 things that are important in a PvE raid environment.
1. How much dps can you sustain?
2. Can you survive to do that dps?

For the first one, frost does get inferior pushback mitigation compared to fire and arcane, which harms dps on certain fights. However, it goes gain mana efficiency, which Blizzard wants to count for something in wotlk.

For the latter, frost is clearly superior with ice barrier, cold snap and a shorter cd for ice block. Later raid environments usually have tons of raid damage being thrown about as well as debuffs. Frost clearly has an advantage. Fire has a disadvantage with playing with fire. If dps is equal, there's really no point to speccing frost and fire will be the worst of all the tress. At the very least, if Blizzard wants to make the specs have equal dps, playing with fire should be subtracted from the equation and count as "free dps".

Isn't the "on hit" really determined when the spell leaves your hands, though? I thought they calculated hit/crit/etc. before it visually hits your target.

In how many BC raid encounters were Frost Mages the preferred spec due to higher survivability? Something like...what...none? Close to that?

Survivability is occasionally of value, but very infrequently. DPS cannot be balanced against survivability; it has been in the past, and the result was that Frost was considered an off-spec for raiding. Added survivability cannot be considered anything other than situational utility, no more valuable than burst AOE.

But isn't that what Frostfire Bolt is supposed to help solve, Hinalover? Using FFB instead of your FB during a fight where your spec's magic type is highly resisted or negated by the boss?

Though I'm kinda glad that it's also enabling Elementalist builds to come back. I remember using one back before patch 2.0, when Ignite still stacked and Shatter combos still worked. That spec really ruined rogues, as I recall.

Other way around. FFB was intended primarily to encourage elementalist specs, with the resistance/immunity fight benefit largely ignored (since it doesn't really encourage anyone to stay in a sub-par spec for an immunity fight). If a boss is fire immune, people will spec frost or arcane, because both should do higher damage than out-of-spec FFB spam, unless you have both Ice Shards and Burnout in your normal build.

I would say Felmyst, Illidari Council and Archimonde would be advantageous to frost. You could argue to Naj'entus and Kar'rogal as well. Just because an encounter where frost is better is a joke doesn't mean that there are some fights where frost has an advantage.

What Roywyn asked is still unanswered. If frost does competitive dps with fire, is there any point to speccing fire? I would say none.

I thought it was supposed to be both. When people first observed that Frostfire Bolt benefited from most fire talents and most frost talents, in my mind I had believed, "Wow, that's addresses exactly what the problem was before!"

And the reason I thought such is because of how developers claimed, "One of the strengths of the mage is that they can deal damage of several schools," and it was shot back, "using an untalented Frostbolt when specced for Fire was much too weak in comparison with the inconvenience of sitting out for a boss or respeccing". Because Frostfire Bolt benefited from nearly every talent that Fireball did, when there was a boss fight with fire resistances or immunity, Frostfire Bolt, unlike Frostbolt, would still provide high damage--less than the spec's primary nuke, but adequate damage for that one fight.

Of course, even if it did hold true to this idea, the situation will always be that respeccing into a different school for a certain school-immune fight would be better than using Frostfire Bolt (if not elementalist spec). But not everything Blizzard creates is for the min-maxer, and I don't think it's too crazy to believe that many guilds would be fine with a mage doing ~8% less damage for one fight using FFB instead of making them go respec and then summoning them back.

Currently, DPS numbers do not support that though.

While the hit/crit/whatnot may calculate when the spell leaves your hands it certainly doesn't hit/damage until the end of it's travel time. Again, the Combustion buff does not fade from you when your fireball leaves your hands it fades when the fireball actually strikes the target at the end of it's travel time. I really don't see why Fingers of Frost shouldn't be programmed the same way. This is exactly what frost mages are asking for with regards to a "raid viable Shatter combo".

Again, the original intent, as stated by Blizzard, was to make elementalist specs viable. I'm not even sure they've ever mentioned its uses (or lack-there-of) on immunity/resistance fights. Many people have defended it by mentioning said secondary uses, but this is a hardcore theorycrafting thread and secondary usage (read: flavor) always takes a backseat to hard numbers. Out-of-spec FFB does not have the numbers on its side, even for immunity fights.

As long as all specs do competitive DPS, the point to speccing any given tree is that it's your preferred playstyle. In PvE, everything any of the specs can do outside of DPS is pure flavorful gravy. Any spec that produces superior DPS is the preferred spec, regardless of whatever the others can do.

One can argue, however, that frost's added survivability contributes more to dps than better aoe or w/e deep arcane brings to the table. Assuming equal dps among the specs. I think we're coming full circle to the old dps vs. utility arguement.

For me this is more of a flaw in encounter design than in talent trees. Its not frost's fault that bosses don't challenge healers for raid healing to the point where your DPSers would consider survival. Encounters only demand single target DPS so players only spec to provide single target DPS.

Could be, but the practical upshot is still that if you reduce DPS to compensate for survivability, the spec stays home more often than not, and that's precisely what Blizzard is trying to change in WotLK; therefore, you can't do it.

You could do that, but you certainly don't have to. But to achieve the stated goal of allowing people to raid with the spec they want, you do need to do as Blizzard has stated, and shoot for very similar DPS from all DPS specs.

ETA: Or, alternatively, design enough encounters in such a way that extra survivability matters enough that raid leaders are happy to take someone who does less DPS if he's easier to keep alive. Either way works.

People just need to start looking at survivability as Yet Another Utility Function That Doesn't Really Carry Weight With Raid Leaders. Similar such functions would be the ability to stun/snare/disorient trash mobs, the ability to produce very high AOE burst, the ability to make food/water/portals/summons, etc.

If a function like that actually matters to the extent that a raid leader is going to say, "OK, yeah, we can give up 10% DPS in that DPS slot, because he can do X/is easier to keep alive/whatever," on a consistent basis for whole runs rather than just an individual fight now and then, then that function can reasonably be balanced against DPS. But I don't think anyone can seriously argue that Frost's extra survivability, or indeed any of the non-damage functions Mages bring to the table, justifies such a tradeoff.

Remember when Hunters did lower damage than Mages and Warlocks, and the justification was that they were "low maintenance"? Remember how many hunters got to come on raids that didn't require Tranq Shot back then? That's why such a tradeoff doesn't work.

I was talking about Winter's chill (Winter's Chill - Spell - World of Warcraft), not related to FoF.

Has anyone done an official conversion of point for point comparisons for crit to spell damage and crit to haste for 3.0? Crit should be a lot higher up there in usefulness now due to burnout and hot streak; just wondering if there's been a comparison yet.

Also: 11/50/0 or 0/50/11 for level 70 come 3.0?

I've been told to wear more stamina on both Naj'entus, Illidari Council and Eredar Twins. That's a dps loss if ever there was one. In fact, lots of strategy guides do have mages do that. Frost can overcome that while fire just makes it worse. Sure, it's not for every fight but it's significant enough that if frost and fire does the same dps, min-maxers will all spec frost.

I see two contrasting viewpoints. On fights like Brutallus where the enrage timer is pretty hard, the highest dps classes will always be chosen. On fights like Eredar Twins with tons of raid damage thrown around and where the enrage timer isn't hard, dps classes, especially hard to keep alive ones such as mages, do get asked to trade some dps for survivability.

Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree, I guess. The situations you describe are so very, very rare, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that more people were forced to spec Frost for the increased survivability in TBC than were forced to spec Fire due to the higher DPS. As far as I'm concerned, Blizzard's taking exactly the right approach there; they know that the vast majority of the time, DPS is what matters, and if everyone's going to be able to spec the tree they want to for PvE, DPS needs to be very close to equal (not exactly equal simply because that's unachievable and will vary significantly from fight to fight).

So, I'm happy with their intent (if not their implementation so far), and I'll leave it at that.

Check my signature for damage equivalents for fire specs. For arcane, crit is much lower, like half of that. For frost, crit is lower and damage is higher due to elemental scaling.
Values for spirit dropped by 1/3 since the spirit-mana factor was nerfed. Value of intellect dropped by 1/5 since the Replenishment nerf. Value of mana in general dropped a bit since the Fireball was added to Spell Power.

For level 70: 0/53/8 unless you're swimming in +hit that you can't ge rid of. Then 11/50/0 and 0/51/0+10 are equal.
If your paladins are terrible at using judgements and make you run out of mana, then you have to go 11/50/0 get some spell hit gear.

When Northrend opens: 0/0/61, +40 spell damage on weapon, redo keybindings on the boat and you'll never ever look back.

As far as I know, people explicitly reduced their DPS by speccing 0/40/21 instead of 0/45/11+x for double Ice Block on Twins (and it wasn't bad for Felmyst either).

Be totally honest to yourself:
Imagine you have a Zul'aman raid and can choose spec either a frost to Shield and double Ice Block on Akil'zon, Jan'alai, Malacrass, Zul'jin (you know parts that applies to), slow and pet freeze/stun Scouts, slow tiger packs, slow/control Dragonhawk hatchlings or spec fire to disorient mobs going for a healer next to you, randomly RNG stun mobs and destroy any attempt of controlled AoE with Blastwave.
Would you really not spec frost?

Honestly, if Frost/Fire/Arcane in their current shape all were on par, the only reason not to spec frost would be some odd obsession of absolutely not being able to shoot blue fire instead of white/red one.

I've forced myself to play a bit as fire spec, and really often wished I was frost specced to be more useful for myself or the group.
I've actually managed to wipe three times to a rather trivial giant kill quest in Storm Peaks. I probably wouldn't have lost a single HP as frost spec, which was one reason why I was a bit careless there.

Personally, I feel that fire would need Ice Barrier and passive Blazing Speed to be considered speccing if all specs were to be equal.


Before the frost crowd attempts to lynch me for things I haven't said:
I'm not saying that frost has to do inferior damage.
I'm saying that if damage was equal, speccing frost would be the only sensible choice right now.
The current solution is that frost does less damage. A better solution would be that fire utility/survival was on par with frost, or at least even remotely comparable.