Quite right Lhivera. Its really a trivial dps gain at current gear levels, and will only get less powerful as we gear up, making Ice Lance probably not worth casting again by the end of Ulduar. Even if they made Ice Lance 5x damage against raid bosses, the problem of its scaling will always catch up, and Frost will still only have a 2 spell 'rotation', or say, pool of spells it uses while dpsing. The Ice Lance glyph is a nice idea, but really what they ought to do is replace the current Enduring Winter talent with a new PvE oriented DPS spell that triggers replenishment. Im not a Dev and dont know what spell that should be, but these proposed changes arent really going to change Frost in PvE much.

Yes this change doesn't seem to do anything, its a step in the right direction though.

Only a 5x would make it viable, is blizzard willing to go there we don't know.

I'm not sure if Blizzard reads these boards but the glyph should be something along the lines of when you use icelance your next two frostbolt spells damage are increased by ~20%.

I disagree. It's not even a step at all. The fact that it wil require a trade-off with another major glyph will make it equivalent, at the very best, and does nothing to improve frost raiding damage output for bosses.

Frost raiding dps is at the very bottom of this list for casters and it has the worst scaling as well, so there isn't even much hope for the future unless a more drastic change is implemented. What we need is an improvement, not an equal alternate just to give us an extra button to push in a rotation.

The only way the icelance glyph would be a step in the right direction would be if it were reduced to a minor glyph. This initial change doesn't even qualify as major, by first impression.

Step in the right direction for blizzard I mean, they are thinking outside the box and have cleverly thought up a way to make improvements to the frost tree with no effect to PvP.

Aye, it could well be a partial solution. We really need to avoid analyzing it around the latency exploit, though; numbers should be calculated based on the talent working as intended -- FB+IL, not FB+FB+IL -- because that's the situation the DPS is going to be balanced around, and it's the only option for people without very steady latency. Balancing around bugs and exploits is bad.

Incidentally, anyone else notice Glyph of Incinerate? +5% damage, in exchange for...oh, wait, in exchange for nothing. Granted, it's a smaller percentage of their total DPS, but it rankles. It rankles, I say!

I think it's more along the lines of a bandaid fix that was easily thought up since it is the only way Blizzard can effect one aspect of the game without effecting the other, without changing talent trees.

Honestly, I was expecting a lot more then what I'm seeing right now. It looks like frost wasn't even looked at at all, and the replenishment thing was something they've wanted to do that fits right in with their normalizing of every aspect of each of the classes. The frostbolt glyph was not addressed, our raid rotation(lack there of) and damage was not addressed, and our 51 point talent was not addressed.

Piss-poor attempt at fixing the problems imo.

I hate to say it, but I'd almost have to call this a nerf. No, they didn't direclty do anything to frost mages directly, but we're losing 5% chance to crit on winters chill (yes, I know that effects everyone) as well as 5% DPS loss from razorice (not that it was that common anway since all the mages floped to arcane from FFB). Warlocks also picked up the 5% crit debuff (as expected).

The overall impact is a watering down of our unique abilities in a raid environment. End result is that I'll do less DPS than before and there's even less reason to let 1 mage stay frost.

The ice lance glyph does show that they gave a glancing thought about us, but that's still a pretty ineffective solution. When you compare the DPS gain to any of the other glyphs, I don't see many frost mages grabbing it.

Hopefully as the PTR matures Blizz will see some of this and adjust as needed.

*edit - anyone know how the 10-people that get replenshment are determined?

Drawing overall conclusions at this point is silly. There are clearly unannounced mage changes (such as the assumed reduction to 5% crit debuff). Evaluating changes as they come out still has value, but drawing conclusions on where we are or anything that requires a big picture view cant be done well yet.

I don't think it shows they considered Frost at all. They quickly tried to fix a problem they have clearly not looked into.

Replenishment is given to the 10 raid members with the smallest mana pool remaining (total mana or %, I am not sure).

While I think the glyph of icelance is a move in the proper direction, I seem to be the only one that doesn't enjoy spec fixes through glyphs.

I agree. Robbing from Peter to pay Paul doesn't fix anything. The DPS loss from dropping a glyph combined with the DPS gain of adding a new one will likely never been a significant increase to any spec. If it is, the glyph is clearly overpowered or the previously used glyph is grossly underpowered, regardless, there is a new issue and in the long run there was no fix at all.

You can only have 3 major glyphs, so glyphs are always going to be under a microscope in terms of benefit/cost. No matter what Lhivera says, people are using/abusing the ghost FoF charges already. Making ice lance viable as the third charge will neutralize about 1% from the brain freeze talent benefit and thus further weakening a deep frost build.

Converting the water elemental regen to replenishment is a nerf, if your raid already had enough replenishment sources (you can only stack so much replenishment), so some DPS improvements to frost are still hopefully being designed.

I haven't been able to test very much on the PTR, because my client keeps crashing every few minutes (and sometimes every few seconds).

Sadly judging by the fact they added a glyph for Deep Freeze it leads me to believe that they think the talent is fine as is.

Of course they are. That's not a reason to design the new shatter combos around that fact, it's a reason to fix it so they can't.

If it can't be fixed (and of course it can, by making it a short timed buff instead of a long charged buff), then they should still be building and balancing the new combos around the assumption that charge 1 is a frostbolt, and charge 2 is an Ice Lance. Because that's the described behavior of the talent, it's the behavior most people will expect from the talent unless they're one of the extreme minority of players who participates in forums like this one, and it's the behavior that works consistently for everyone, regardless of latency.

PvP sort of needs the long duration FoF though. It allows for movement and it allows for crowd control effects to fade off.

This is from Roywyn in the 3.1 thread, but it should probably be mentioned here too - unless something else get adjusted, the added replenishment to frostbolt probably won't work very well. Gonna need someone on PTR to test. If we keep overwriting ourselves we could spec 1/3 for Enduring Winter to only overwrite ourselves 1/3 of the time - but that's a pretty lousy fix.

I'll have to do some number crunching, but if the only thing to gained by going from 1/3 for Enduring Winter to 3/3 is 10 sec of WE up time - those may be 2 points that can be freed up for something else. We used to get 10 sec of up time and more raid-wide mana battery effect.

The usefulness of WE glyph is also affected negatively, but at first thought I'd probably still keep it.

We probably need to do some number crunching with IL on the "ghost" 3rd proc as well as what Lhivera did with casting it on the 2nd proc. I'll agree with that being a bad design - but if its in the game then we should know the numbers both with and without it.

The 'arcane shatter' was hotfixed within a few days after the patch. There's a reason the shatter combo has been around since the introduction of ice lance - to keep frost spec mages competitive with damage output. Similar to the 'ghost hit' that was around for so long... easy fix but a neccessary bug/mechanic to keep the frost spec as a viable tree.

Unfortunately, these gimmicks and little tricks aren't enough to keep frost competitive any longer. The weaknesses in scaling and PvP nerfs keep adding up to the extent that frost is the worst raiding spec amongst all casters.

Now in light of the new focus on mana regeneration, developers are making frost an alternate or supplement to shadow priests, but so far without the improvements needed to make us comparable in DPS output.

I'm concerned that it will degenerate to the point where frost is only decent for PvP and will remain a gimp spec that the raid may need to force us into for progressive content. (I.E. only 1 or none shadow priests in the raid)

The single target DPS gap must be addressed! So far a blue post concerning PvE shatter combos and a disappointing glyph change are all we have seen. It's a far cry from what the spec really needs. (/point at deepfreeze and frostbolt glyph)

The FoF ghost charge shatter combo is a very different beast from the frost nova or freeze shatter combo. The old (pre-WOTLK) shatter combos rely on the travel time of frostbolts, but FoF is consumed when the cast ends instead of when the spell hits. I guess you could change FoF to be consumed on spell hit and that would make it work like a true shatter combo... The only problem there is that it procs on cast end (before the spell hits), so you would have to guard against the spell that triggers FoF from consuming a charge.

Some solutions:

- FoF procs on cast and consumes on hit, but only if the spell was cast before FoF procced (use a time stamp or counter on each spell).
- FoF procs on cast and consumes on cast, but a 0.5 second grace period follows the 0 charges left phase and allows an instant cast after the second charge, if the second charge spell didn't leave the player in GCD.
- FoF procs on hit (but now it might become detached from frostbite, which in reality procs on cast) and consumes on hit, but frozen status is checked at cast. (I haven't analyzed this option very deeply, so it might have some truly awful flaws.)

Whereas a single player can ignore the PvP aspects of Warcraft with relative ease, Blizzard can not ignore PvP when they change frost talents and spells. If we're here to discuss ideas on how to improve frost, the least we can do is follow the same constraints as Blizzard and that includes taking PvP into consideration.

We're not talking about shatter combos, though, which are based on flight time. We're talking about a latency exploit that functions in direct contradiction to tooltip text. They are completely different things.

Yes, single-target DPS needs to be dealt with. What I'm saying is, it needs to be dealt with by designing around, and balancing around, valid mechanics, rather than bugs and exploits.

Also: yes, another great option is to make it one charge, 15 second duration, consumed on hit instead of cast. This allows the PvPer the time needed to make use of the charge, and it permits two casts in a very shatter-combo-like fashion -- by beating the flight time of the first spell with an instant cast.

As far as ignoring PvP concerns -- I'm really not. I'm concerned that the tree as a whole overemphasizes PvP, and could really use a talent or two focused on PvE. Most trees have talents that are focused on PvE or PvP, and may have some incidental usefulness in the other realm. Permafrost, for instance: primarily a PvP talent, but it doesn't hurt that it makes for a stronger snare on your Blizzard in PvE. Frost needs a lot of PvE help right now, and that help could be provided by focusing talents like Fingers of Frost on PvE. If this hurts Frost in PvP, then perhaps the PvP-focused talents need to be improved to balance that out. In short, the tree could really use some better separation of PvE talents from PvP talents.

I see your point, but I disagree. I prefer it when the builds were much more generic and are useful for both PvE and PvP - like how frost was through most of TBC. But I guess I've already been outvoted by blizz. Their solution is dual specs (maybe multi in the future).

Once PvP and PvE are eternally seperated by dual spec's then maybe more of this seperation will be possible and they won't have to worry about alienating anyone. I still think that's a loss for the game though to such different goals and now the paths to get there are seperating even further.

Did a little more accurate math. I'll show all the math if anyone's interested, but since the actual spell damage calculations are extremely simple, I figure most people here know how to do them, so I'll just give the conclusions.

At 2500 spell power, and 36% crit before Shatter (40% on Frostbolt), with Frostbolt Glyph and with Spell Impact, DPS of Frostbolt spam with Molten Armor glyph is virtually identical to the DPS of using Shatter Combos with the Ice Lance glyph.

If the Ice Lance glyph is increased from a 4x to 5x multiplier, then using the Ice Lance glyph and executing Shatter Combos perfectly should result in about a 3.5% DPS increase over using Frostbolt Spam with the Molten Armor glyph. That strikes me as about the desired delta -- maybe even still a little too small, but it's enough to motivate a good player to do the combos.

Chances they'd give it that big a boost strike me as pretty close to nil, but it could be done. Perhaps if a downside was added, like a short cooldown on the spell?

Edit: Adding the math to clarify:

Assuming: 2500 Spell Power, 100% hit, 36% crit before Shatter, 18/0/53.

Frostbolt
Crit: 36% + 4% (Empowered Frostbolt) = 40%
Crit mod: 1 + 0.4 * 1.09 = 1.436
Damage mod: 1.06 * 1.05 * 1.05 * 1.05 * 1.12 = 1.3743324
Base dmg: (799 + 861) / 2 = 830
Gear dmg: (3 / 3.5 * 0.95 + 0.1) * 2500 = 2286
Avg dmg: (830 + 2286) * 1.436 * 1.3743324 = 6149.55

Frostbolt (w/Shatter)
Crit: 40% + 50% (Shatter) = 90%
Crit mod: 1 + 0.9 * 1.09 = 1.981
Avg dmg: (830 + 2286) * 1.981 * 1.3743324 = 8483.47

Frostbolt (w/Molten Armor glyph)
Crit: 36% + 4% (Empowered Frostbolt) + 2% (MA glyph) = 42%
Crit mod: 1 + 0.42 * 1.09 = 1.4578
Damage mod: 1.06 * 1.05 * 1.05 * 1.05 = 1.3743324
Base dmg: (799 + 861) / 2 = 830
Gear dmg: (3 / 3.5 * 0.95 + 0.1) * 2500 = 2286
Avg dmg: (830 + 2286) * 1.4578 * 1.3743324 = 6242.91

Frostbolt (w/Shatter + Molten Armor glyph)
Crit: 40% + 50% (Shatter) + 2% (MA glyph) = 92%
Crit mod: 1 + 0.92 * 1.09 = 2.0028
Avg dmg: (830 + 2286) * 2.0028 * 1.3743324 = 8576.83

Ice Lance (w/Shatter)
Crit: 36% + 50% (Shatter) = 86%
Crit mod: 1 + 0.86 * 1.09 = 1.9374
Damage mod: 1.06 * 1.05 * 1.05 * 1.06 * 4 = 4.955076
Base dmg: (221 + 225) / 2 = 238
Gear dmg: 1.5 / 3.5 / 3 * 2500 = 357
Avg dmg: (238 + 357) * 1.9374 * 4.955076 = 5711.98

Ice Lance (w/Shatter, hypothetical 5x multiplier)
Crit: 36% + 50% (Shatter) = 86%
Crit mod: 1 + 0.86 * 1.09 = 1.9374
Damage mod: 1.06 * 1.05 * 1.05 * 1.06 * 5 = 6.193845
Base dmg: (221 + 225) / 2 = 238
Gear dmg: 1.5 / 3.5 / 3 * 2500 = 357
Avg dmg: (238 + 357) * 1.9374 * 6.193845 = 7139.97


Here's the idea: you can expect one FoF proc per 7.67 Frostbolt casts, because the cast on the second charge cannot reproc Fingers of Frost (this is a bug, which should be fixed). So the choice is between 5 regular Frostbolts and two Shatter Frostbolts, and 5 regular Frostbolts, one Shatter Frostbolt, and one Shatter Ice Lance.

Frostbolt Spam (w/MA glyph): (5 * 6242.91 + 2 * 8576.83) / (7 * 2.5) = 2763.91
Shatter Combo: (5 * 6149.55 + 8483.47 + 5711.98) / (6 * 2.5 + 1.5) = 2723.83 (-1.45%)
Shatter Combo (5x): (5 * 6149.55 + 8483.47 + 7139.97) / (6 * 2.5 + 1.5) = 2810.38 (+1.68%)

If the Ice Lance glyph required level 80, what would be the harm in increasing the multiplier? Its only going to be useful to players in pvp or leveling while they are below 80, and regular shatters already do fine in those areas. It would then only be a problem for the the next expansion to deal with, but perhaps Blizzard will decide to do some core changes to frost by then. Although I am still keeping my fingers crossed for more changes.