hi there,

as someone stated a few posts ago that wowstats are always welcome, i decided to post one here.

Wow Web Stats

some notes:
- spiderwing is excluded. we cleared it the day before and aborted due to heavy lags.
- i passed at any boss in plaguewing, so overall-data isn´t representativ
- we encountered some lags during fights, especially thaddius
- it seems they added some huge amounts of frost.resistance with 3.0.8 to sapphiron (resisted/missed ~14%)
- buffs: didn´t flask, just used potions/food

thus so far, if there are any questions, just let me know

You can do what you want, of course, so long as recruits keep coming to you who are willing to bow to your demands. And in Naxx at the moment, it's clear anyway that trash and boss adds are relatively unimportant, so if you are having trouble with it, you are probably correct to push raiders into higher DPS specs. Frost survivability and AOE are probably of some use at the high end of corrent content, i.e. Malygos and Sarth3D, but if you feel you need to max boss DPS on those, I won't second guess you.

However, we don't know what's going to be in Ulduar, Thematically, it seems unlikely to be a new Hyjal, but one never knows.

We simply don't know what dual specs are going to involve, so your observation is purely speculative. It's obvious that Blizzard (wisely) got a touch of cold feet after announcing the idea. For all we know, dual spec when implemented will simply involve the game saving specs and toolbars and placing a 'lexicon'-like device in every mage guild and battleground sign-up zone where you can instantly load one of two saved specs, at zero cost but with a cooldown of one hour. We don't even know for sure if dual glyphing will be supported.

(If Blizzard asked me for advice, I'd propose exactly the above, with a separate glyphed spellbook saved for each spec.)

If we weren't on the second expansion, with many major raid dungeons already under our belt, it might be reasonable to say, "Oh, but the next one may find good trash-clearing specs valuable!"

But that's not the case. Nothing we have seen indicates that Ulduar will involve such a massive change in design that players will consider trash specs useful. What's telling is that Blizzard already considers trash specs useful, in content where players don't -- so it's even less likely that Blizzard would think a major change in design would even be required to make them useful.

We actually do have a good amount of info on this. We've been explicitly told that glyphs will indeed change along with the spec (and that actually gives me a use for this terrible feature; I can use it to toggle my Frostbolt glyph on and off for my otherwise-identical specs, assuming they make changes to the Frost playstyle so that I take my Frost Mage into a raid instance someday). We've been told many times that it will be trivial in town, and more recently, "slightly less" trivial outside of town -- with the examples of out-of-town toggling restrictions being "possibly requiring a cheap reagent" and "possibly requiring two other people to click on a "respec portal" for you. We've been told explicitly that a cooldown is highly unlikely, because the whole point of the feature is to make it "unnecessary" for the top guilds to portal people back to town between encounters to respec the old-fashioned way.

Yes, naturally things may change in development, but given the stated purpose of the feature, and everything we've been told so far, our speculation is probably pretty accurate.

They actually might have following or not so much different view on frost spec:

- You enter Naxx for the first time in roughly ilvl 200 blues. At that gear level, frost is completely competitive spec. So in order to actually beat the instance for the first time, frost is a good choice.
- Once you gear up in T7 or T7+, you have the instances on farm status, i.e. the boss DPS is no longer a challenge. In that case trash clearing speed actually does have an impact on how well the raid performs (though admittedly, I am usually limited by tank's ability to hold aggro on AoEable pulls), since it's the total time needed to clear the instance, what actually matters, not just ability to down the boss. If the spec is good enough to beat the instance in sub-par gear, it will surely be good enough to beat it in better gear.
- Some achievements require more DPS (Quick Werk), but at the same time some require survivability (Undying/Immortal), some pure skill.
- They can have another look at frost DPS for 3.1.0 and adjust it (hopefully they will!)

Otherwise, I am obviously not excited that my favorite spec is now relegated as "leveling", since arcane is better in both PvE and PvP, and has the most monotonous playstyle.

I wonder if terrible frost crit scaling could not be salvaged by enabling scaling of FoF chance with mage's crit chance

What about Blessing of Kings? Who can replicate this?
Isn't it a crucial buff for tanks and classes that benefit from base stats for their damage dealing (mostly melees).

Wouldn't changing Mind Freeze from instant fireball to instant FFB be a decent way to increase frost DPS as well as making the talent more useful?

An instant fireball from Brain Freeze is nice but it doesn't receive any direct damage boost from frost talents, nor does it proc FoF.

Was it already discussed in this thread? (The impact of casting instant FFB over Fireball)


EDIT: It seems fireball from Brain Freeze procs FoF atm?

Yes. However, Brain Freeze is not the problem.

I repeat: any solution to Frost's scaling and damage output that does not include Ice Lance and Deep Freeze is short-sighted.

Hi,

Here's another WWS log including a frost mage (myself, Helmork) : WWS Report. It's a first half of Naxx 25 log.

I was running my current spec, a 18/0/53.

First, some notes about my spec/cycle/stuff :
- I went 18 in arcane to get Torment the weak (I tried a spec without it and it is clearly a huge increase in DPS on bosses) and Focus magic. I tried before to go fire to get ignite (to improve brain freeze fireball) and, while it worked a bit, it isn't a good idea anymore for me currently
- I gave up Brain freeze (for the moment) : previously, my cycle was frostbolt spam/ shatter combo on FoF / Fireball on Brain Freeze, but after some tests, it appeared that, with my current stuff (it wasn't true before I had more than ~ 10% spell cast bonus thanks to haste) spamming frostbolt wasn't doing less damage (I tried with several combinations, without Ice Lance, without Brain freeze, with Brain freeze on "third" FoF proc). So the current cycle is frostbolt spam, with using Elem and all CD the most wisely possible (using unefficiently the CD hurts the resulting damage a lot)
- I tried to focus on haste stuff, without giving up totally crit (...and, sorry, I still haven't received proper shoulders, no haste excuse for them * shame * ). At each percent I get in spell cast bonus with haste, I've seen a very consistent increase in damages each time.
- during this run, I was almost all the time without flasks (I just had one on a failed try on Thaddius)

Concerning the results, you can note that this spec/stuff can reach 4,3K DPS on Patchwerk (WWS report).
Without brain freeze, I'm a bit less efficient on mobility bosses (like Heigan)than before, but I've been not playing completely properly for this first run, being rather coward on Heigan (I think that I'll be able with my haste to cast a Frostbolt between each move) for instance.

It might be possible to gain Brain freeze back by removing some point on Blizzard and maybe half Artic reach. I don't consider decreasing Frost channeling, as with the DPS increase, I'm starting to have some slight aggro problems (really not often, but on some specific fights/moments). I would also try to avoid removing ice barrier too, both for Gluth kitting and to ease healers quite oftens.
But, currently, I think that trying to get Brain freeze back isn't worth it. I might try it later anyway.

To sum up my current feelings on what you need to have a decent PvE frost damage: haste stuff / TTW / proper elem and CD use.

Hope it will give you additional data to study the frost case I'll try to remember to record other combat logs (especially the second half of Naxx to have full data)

I personally would like to see frost become competitive to the other raiding builds, not so much, because I have any particular interest in frost, or consider more viable PvE speccs really neccecary for mages, but rather, because it would be a consequent approach to what blizzard had already been promising pre-wotlk in official posts.
And that would be making most speccs competitived in PvE and PvP without having any build being unquestionably superior to others.

As I see it, frost just has too weak of a main nuke. That being said, seeing how FB has replaced FFB as THE deep fire main-nuke, I do not see how it could be wrong to give FFB to frost as its main nuke for now.
Its actually the only tree, that hasn't had any new spells (raid-wise) implemented since tbc, as well, as the fact that even the mechanics of the tree are staying unchanged to a large extent.

If ttw and ignite would be possible to be specced into at the same time, while the deeper frost talents offer more support to the FFB spell, that would somewhat offer potential for a raidspecc. Of course this concept would actually need a lot of tuning still (makeover of BF aso), but alltogether I feel that this would fix the dps-problems of frost.
On the other hand it would do very little, to change the monotony of playing as frost.

This is just what I could imagine to be a relevant solution to the problem of frost being a sub-par raidbuild currently.

One way to get it back is to drop Ice Floes (or Iceberg as it appears it is called in French). The reduced cooldown on Icy Veins only adds a small amount of damage, and that on Frost Nova can also be lived without.

I spend most of my time in 10-man content, and your parse looks very similar to everything I've seen. I generally run 2700-2800 DPS. As an 18/0/53 build I'm generally in either the number 1 or 2 slot for DPS and overall damage (even if you exclude all trash).

I'm always the only mage in my naxx group, and often the only caster at all (I don't think my guild even has a lock at 80 anymore). So maybe my experience isn't that universally applicable, but I always end up laughing at FFB mages when I pug Arch-10/25 with them and I out DPS them while providing them with focus magic and the crit debuff.

As the only caster I get all the +crit gear and the +haste stuff. So I have a good deal of gear versatility, although it’s all still mostly pre-T7. I can play around with rawr, but with the 10-man buffs we have, I can't even get my theoretical DPS for Fire or FrostFire ahead of where I am for Frost. I've played around with arcane, and the DPS boost is nice, but we don't have any real replenishment in the 10-man runs and I run oom way to quick (could still be a bit of a L2P issue there on my part I admit). But raid wise, going from being the only (although only 1/2 power) replenishment to being a mana sponge didn't help either.

Just to be clear, my point is that frost is perfectly viable, if not the preferable spec, for 10-man raiding. For the casual readers bumping into this thread, all of the arguments against raiding as frost are only really applicable to 25-man stuff where you can really stack on the buffs and frost just doesn't keep with the scaling.

And even in 25-man content, when your raid is still in T7 or pre-T7, and doesn’t really have anything on farm mode, you find that frost does decent DPS, although you do get bumped out of the top slots. The "Frost is 15% behind" comments are only really applicable to fully T7.5 geared players with optimal 25-man buffs. For T7 geared 25-man raids we’re probably a lot closer to 5% behind. For those raiding with iLevel 200 blues and some Heroic gear we’re about 5-10% ahead of the other mage specs.

Yes, I’m concerned that as the content expands we won’t have the scaling to keep up, and I’m glad to have some very vocal frost mages arguing the point. I do want to see us get “fixed”, but I don’t care to turn into a fire mage clone with a different colored fireball either.