Something that has often been said is that Ice Lance's poor scaling makes using it in conjunction with FoF obsolete at reasonably good levels of spell power. I searched the big thread to see where this was originally discovered, but it seems to have eluded me.

I was investigating whether an Ice Lance on a phantom 3rd charge of FoF would be advantageous over 60% of a non-Shatter Frostbolt. My math, ignoring Torment the Weak or Spell Impact, came out as so:



Where the left side is Frostbolt and the right Ice Lance (hit ignored, as they must be equal on both sides). Frostbolt should have 4% more crit from Emp. Frostbolt, which is where that comes from. Otherwise, this is a fair model, neglecting Brain Freeze or further FoF procs. The problem is that for, say, 1800 spell power and 40% crit (the crit may be a bit ridiculous, but higher stats on both counts should push the balance toward Frostbolt), we get 2140 for 60% of a Frostbolt, compared to 2800 for Ice Lance.

So, idiot check time: am I missing something big? Is this more than made up by further FoF procs and/or Brain Freeze? Or is the math just...wrong?

Ice Lance on the 3rd looks quite good until you start adding adding the math for FoF uptime.

Your sequences then look as follows:
1) Ice Lance (100% FoF) + FrB (15% FoF, from the cast before IL) + FrB (15% FoF, from the last cast) for IL on the 3rd charge.
2) FrB (15% FoF*) + FrB (27.75% FoF) + 0.6 (1.5sec) * FrB (27.75% FoF) for spamming in the same time frame.

*15% FoF because the alternative to cast IL as third charge means that the FrB 2 casts ago did not proc FoF, but the cast immediately before our FrB in question may have procced it.

You can rearrange 2) mathematically into
2b) FrB (15%) + FrB (27.75% - 1*12.75%) + 0.6 * FrB (27.75% + 12.75%/0.6), which then is
2c) FrB (15%) + FrB (15%) + 0.6*FrB(49% FoF)


So, you'd have to compare 1 Ice Lance under FoF to 0.6 Frostbolts with 49% FoF chance.
Ice Lance not proccing FoF wrecks its viability for DPS.


[Edit]: Hm, that's not enough to make Spamming overtake Shattering.
Brain Freeze might do it, but I think back when we checked it, Brain Freeze procced of any spell, so that was not it.

When you push spell power to 2.5k, the difference is 7%. The Frostbolt Glyph pushes that to 2%.
I calculate everything with 50m cast delay, so they break even around that.
I think there was something else, or my cycle numbers are off.


I think that 2/2 Magic Attunement should be mentioned as option to grant your healers 127 spell power.
People may or may not agree, but it's something "unique" that Frostfire specs and other classes cannot bring.

Is, then, (2c) - (1) = .6 FrB (49% FoF) - IL (100% FoF)?

If so, I still get Ice Lance coming out ahead. Not by as much, but it seems significant (about 300 damage difference at 1800 spell power and 40% crit). Do you think a correction for Brain Freeze is what makes up the gap?

I think it is important to note a comment by Lhivera as you try to calculate the value of squeezing in that extra IL on FoF procs.

If you miss just one of the IL and get a non-frozen IL hit (or crit), it takes a number of successful ones to make up for the lost DPS. Just how many it would take would of course depend on how much of an advantage it is but Lhivera estimated at 6 or more.

To assume perfection and never missing this based-on-latency combo is I think unrealistic. I can get it most of the time when farming but most is not all. The worth of the IL on the phantom 3rd charge is already a tricky calculation but I would think you have to work in the fact that it isn't a 100% guaranteed combo in there somewhere.

This needs more love.

With moderate-to-bad latency (250-600) I've missed like, 1 or 2 total FoF combos since the patch, even at point-blank range. If people are having difficulty with this I don't have an explanation, unless they're still trying to time their casts. Of course it's probably not intended and all that but while it works I'm using it.

I probably missed the theorycrafting in the megathread, but how does Brain Freeze work out for frost PvE DPS?

Roywyn, I've added your 2/2 Magic Attunement suggestion.

Aside from, as Zeldyrr reminds us, Lhivera's observation that missing one shatter bonus on IL is hard to make up, could it not also be to do with the bug that a new FoF proc from the 2nd/3rd FoF spell munches the new proc? I've also asked Kavan to have a try at making a FrB-FB-IL spell combo in Rawr but I doubt he will want to model that bug.

Azrayne I don't have the math about it either but, according to Rawr, using Brain Freeze no more than 20 dps improvement on plain Frostbolt spam. With 3/5 Ignite it can be up to 50 dps higher than Frostbolt spam. It also scales pretty much equally with Frostbolt (even at 4000 spellpower it's roughly the same dps!). However, the big reason for taking it is that the Fireball from the proc has no mana cost, saving average 13-14 mana per second, or around 4k mana on a 5 minute fight.

Gediablo, I didn't have WWS of my own guild, but after about 2 mins of searching for a random raid with a frost mage I found this one Wow Web Stats where Raffreddato got 3.7k from his water elemental on Gluth. Also, here you can see it was worth like 50k mana raid-wide Wow Web Stats

OP makes mention of trinket macro (and im sure there are plenty of other posts to show this) but is there anyway someone could post them?

The water elemental mana restore is not replenishment, it is a separate effect. Since it's not applying a buff to you, it doesn't show up in your character sheet either, you just get 0.6% mana back every 5 seconds. If you pay attention to your combat log you should be able to see the mana gain (I know it shows up on Scrolling Combat Text).

One thing I've noticed is that the water elemental mana regeneration has a gigantic area of effect so it will get your entire raid without you having to worry much about positioning it.

Does this mean that it stacks with replenishment from a shadow priest and etc?

I hate to spoonfeed, I'd rather have you thinking about what you want to put in your macros yourself than just blindly use mine. The reason is that sometimes you'll have trinkets which have a clicky 'use' effect, and sometimes you'll have trinkets which proc 10s per 45s. The former can stack very well with icy veins, haste potion, and that's why you'd use a macro to get all those off at once - but it's still a choice for you of which things you want to stack. The latter is more of a timing thing - if you can guess when the proc is coming (or when it's not coming) then you might use icy veins in anticipation, or hold off your water elemental for a while to let coincide with a proc. You might want to put a potion use only with a modifier or whatever.

Just a question concering the mechanics: I noticed the ingame tooltip of Finger of Frost to differ from the Wowhead version. Ingame, it says "Your next 2 frost spells treat the target as if it were Frozen."
Is the tooltip wrong? The instant fireball does benefit from the effect, I am sure...

On the frost builds, I also enjoied the great AoE dps of Blizzard in the WotLK instances / heroics, but in Naxx I specced out of it because the trash is so rediculously easy compared to the bosses, that you just don't need that great AoE.
However, I did run into mana problems regularily (we don't have a retri pally, and only sometimes a shadow priest/hunter), so I specced into 3/3 Arcane Meditation and I'm quite happy with the spec overall.

18/0/53 - took 1 point out of Arctic Reach, since Fireball only has a 36 yards range anyway.

You are correct, the tooltip is wrong and hasn't been updated. Your next two spells, regardless of tree, treat the target as Frozen.

I've been considering a similar build, and I'm glad you posted this. I'm thinking of having a 'need mana' raid build and a 'have mana' raid build for Frost. The former looks pretty much like yours, but I wonder if with the increased amount of crit we're recieving that Master of the Elements may be better return...anyone have numbers on this? I can test once I hit 80, but am currently 78. The latter build, which assumes optimal raid mana [likely in 25 mans, not so much in 10s], would be a more traditional heavy-frost with Blizzard spec. I hadn't even thought about dropping a point in arctic reach, but if we're using Brain Freeze religiously, that actually makes sense.

Is the fireball even worth the 1.5 cd it doesnt hit as hard and has no ignite w/ that 18/0/53 build so would you even bother to include it? it seems almost a waist since people traditionally stack haste w/ frostbolt due to the less important crits.

Brain Freeze is worth the talent points and the cooldown even without Ignite. Very simply: it seems to have better average dps as Frostbolt spam and moreover gives better damage per mana. The only situations you'd want to hold off on using the BF proc is when your haste puts your instant casts under 1 second, for example when using Icy Veins during Heroism/Bloodlust. See also my response to Azrayne in post #33.

The reason fireblast wasn't used was more to do with its ignite munching the ignite from the previous fireball. The latency problem hasn't been an issue since 2.3 when we stopped using /stopcasting.

Edit: Debuff slots aren't limited to 40 anymore. See post further down thread. OP again readjusted to reflect this.

Instant casts still suffer from higher latency despite the changes re stopcasting. I believe it's because you can't use the pseudo-queue that you get with casted spells while under the GCD. You can see this modelled in some theorycrafting tools e.g. Simulationcraft.

Rather than replacing Glyph of Water Elemental with Glyph of Fireball, why not just skip Brain Freeze and go 11 into arcane. You get 2 - 3% crit + 3% crit for someone else (which is generally superior to the dps gain from Brain Freeze + Ignite), equivalent mana efficiency from clearcasting, and the option to get utility talents like Magic Absorption or Magic Attunement.

I'm ussing a Frost base 18/0/53 spec for raids/heroics, so far i think is very good, tried frostfire and arcane specs, but i see they too much mana depend.

For FoF i ussualy cast FB+FB+IL binded IL on mouse button, with no lag allways get the crit.

Read this post from the author of SC himself. If you have a G15 there is negligible lag, but he's added the option in SC of "100ms penalty for people just hitting the key 4-5 times right near the end of the GCD." However: point taken, I think this warrants some further research (echoing Lhivera's opinion from beta) into whether frost players are better off just spamming FrB and not bothering with FB and IL neither casts nor talents.

Regarding your comment about Focus Magic, I think I have already suggested in the OP that this is the highest raid dps talent.

I hadn't really considered this, but this makes me ask: how many mages use their visual GCDs as a marker instead of establishing a tempo/rythym/whatever? Lag-lost DPS for instant casts is only lag-lost if the mini-queue that accounts for lag truly doesn't let instant casts in properly [i.e. letting you pickup right off that GCD]. I'm going to test this and try and get a combat log, because based on play experience I do NOT recall losing cast-time from using Brain Freeze fireballs or fireblast/ice-lance. However, that's just a gut reaction and perceptions like to skew themselves towards a bias...so I can't say for sure. Again, I'll test my theory and likely prove it wrong, but we'll see.

Regarding Focus Magic, I feel silly for forgetting about it. And much as I love brain freeze [free, instant, full spellpower wieght!], even with Ignite I can see Focus Magic being superior. Crit-rating may still be a sucky stat, but free crit-% is still amazing.

I prefer Focus Magic, because it's a nice Raid-Buff, of course it's useless when you are farming solo. And even in an Instance with only Melees, you can buff it to the Healer.