I mind it, rather a lot. No, of course it's not everything that goes into a good raid encounter, but it's an important piece of the puzzle. Somewhere in-between the ridiculous timer-watching of Affliction and the snoozefest of Frost is what they need to be shooting for; they've hit the target with several specs, and hopefully they'll do the same for ours sooner rather than later.

Regarding Deep Freeze, he's been kind of all over the map on that. My main concern is that he says it's supposed to be normal for the 51-pointers to be only situationally useful and often not usable in a boss fight, but that's just not the case; Deep Freeze is almost, but not quite, alone in that regard. Still, he does seem inclined to bring it into PvE in some capacity if he can figure out how:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - I <3 Ret

You need FoF for your single-target DPS (it allows you to get the Shatter crit bonus against targets that cannot be frozen, such as bosses). Since it also provides a crit increase on Blizzard identical to that provided by Frostbite(*), FoF should have priority.

(*) Actually, I've never really looked at this, and maybe someone knows off the top of his head: if you have an FoF charge, every target will be crit on the next Blizzard tick; if a target is frostbitten, does Blizzard get the crit bonus only on that target, or for every target on that tick?

I would assume that frostbite would induce shatter only on the frostbitten target while a FoF charge would cause all blizzard targets to be shattered, for 2 waves.

From my experience aoe leveling, a much larger number of crits occurred during FoF procs while blizzarding (presumably ~50% of the targets). That was with the FoF-requiring-frostbite-for-blizzard bug, so it'd be hard to say how that mechanic really played out. But I assume that since FoF is a buff and frostbite a debuff that frostbite would cause shatter to happen on all targets of a blizzard.

The question is whether the crit is calculated separately for each target, or once for the entire wave. But since other AOE's calculate separately per target, it does make sense that each tick would calculate separately per target as well. Which should point to FoF providing significantly better crit rates on Blizzard than Frostbite does.

Korwiin: If you performed that test before today's patch, you were affected by a bug that prevented FoF from proccing on improved Blizzard if you weren't also specced at least one point into Frostbite. That bug should be fixed as of today.

I'd like to confirm that anecdotally. Before our raid in Laggramas was called I was getting FoF during Blizzard. You can see my Frostbite-free spec on the Armory.

So, with Magegraf apparently predicting Frost performance running only about 100 DPS below Fire, did anyone give it a try last night so we can get a look at real-world results?

I did some quick target dummy tests in IF while I was still frost spec to test the blizzard/crit question. FoF and frostbite but no imp blizzard. I wanted to see how the damage done is recorded by Recount (and presumably the log).

Crit% in the character stats = ~16%

Blizzard hitting 1 dummy = 104 ticks (13 waves) 33 crits = 32%
2 dummy = 160 ticks (10 waves) 51 crits = 32%

Each target counted as a separate hit. So from this (and unfortunately I didn't have imp blizz to test) I would assume that a FoF charge would be consumed by the first 2 targets hit and not per wave. If the way Recount parses the logs is consistent with how the game mechanics deal with blizzard. Therefore FoF may not be that much better than frostbite. But since the PTR was down I didn't want to spend 150 gold to test it out.

I was able to convince my guild (note, I am an officer) to let me try frost out last night. I'm more than a little upset that WWS somehow died during the parse and I have no data to show from a full Naxx clear. The hope is I can try one more week of raiding, next week.

The anecdotal data I have is not promising. In game mods such as Recount had me 10th to 12th on DPS and a huge percent behind an FFB mage and a FFB mage trying out FB/TtW. When I spec'ed FFB previously I was consistently top 5. However there are so many caveats that I want more data before I draw any conclusions. (The biggest being is that I have too much crit on my gear. I've been forced into FFB since LK-raiding started and as such have been going after crit gear.)

It is very clear to me that there is much work to be done if Frost raiding is to become viable. The most shocking thing to me is that frost raiding is undeniably boring. And I say this as someone who raided frost from ZG to Sunwell. As much as I detest keeping scorch up, reacting to hot streaks and keeping LB ticking is interactive and fun. Spamming frostbolt is not. I would react to brain freeze but if I missed one it was with the knowledge that it really wasn't that big of a deal. I have no active trinkets, so there was very little to manage other than IV and WE. With raid-wide heroism I could not influence heroism timing to suit my WE most of the time. Sometimes I had a WE out when heroism hit, sometimes I did not.

Comments in other mage threads here about "I'd still bring a frost mage with poor dps for 'goodies' like better AOE on trash and WE mana regen" are complete bull in my opinion. Frost DPS is going to have to equal (and by equal I mean be with in + or - 1-3% depending on the fight) or it will remain a choice for non-serious guilds only. Yes frost has better survivability. Arcane has better mobile DPS. Fire/frostfire have automatic damage scaling on low health mobs and pushback resistance. Handicapping Frost because of its benefits while ignoring the benefits of the other trees is going to forever doom the spec. Until/unless that attitude changes, I'm very pessimistic about frost raiding in general.

I will do my best to figure out what happened with WWS and get it working for next week. That is unless I just give up and spec arcane by then.

Yeah, I expect there aren't many people well-geared to showcase Frost...if you could trade a lot of that crit for haste, it could make a substantial difference. And of course, being tenth with a range from 1 to 10 of 300 DPS is a very different thing from being tenth with a range of 1000 DPS, so that'd be good to know as well.

Well, yeah, we know there's some definite work to be done in making the spec more interesting to play. Most of my suggestions list are focused on that problem, I just unfortunately have no way to get Ghostcrawler to read it. And of course if you did have active trinkets, you'd just be macroing them to Icy Veins, so no real added management there.

As for the DPS difference, I think it could probably go as high as 5% on stationary fights while remaining viable. Remember that shorter casts do provide a small but measurable advantage on mobility fights; Frost won't see the advantage on a high-mobility fight that Arcane does, but it will see some advantage over Fire and Frostfire.

Lhivera, what about having Deep Freeze be used to make ice lance viable for raiding? Something like having it make the target considered frozen and increases ice lance damage or crit chance for example?