In an effort for Blizz to improve the Frost/Arcane spec, the glyphs, elemental/replenishment and shatter combos...
Any hints that Blizzard may bring back the Arcane/Frost spec? or does it exist viably right now?
in BC it used the 3 arcane blasts and 3 frostbolts rotation
Oviously the LK rotation will have changed because it was based on the 1st type of Arcane Blast
And although not a pure frost spec or a Frost/Arcane spec, since you're using frost probably about 50% of the time I had a feeling your still "raiding as frost".

The Frostbolt glyph..It just annoys me.

As a frost mage you glyph for more damage, but as a result you loose what it is to be frost....or have to resort to casting a spell from another school - FFB.

As a FFB mage you glyph for more damage and loose nothing....while happily doing far more damage than the frost mage.

Sorry this in no way pushes the conversation forwards, just a need to put things into words Oo..

The concept of Shatter has been part of frost mages sense beta. I believe that what ever Blizzard is going to do to change frost mages, Shatter will always be central for each part of the game. How Blizzard has built beyond that, along with the poor raid implementation of Shatter, is how we got to this point.

If we want to present a united front to Blizzard, I believe what they would be most interested in is what parts of frost do we like, and which aspects do we not like. I have faith that Blizzard can make frost fun, as long as they know what makes it fun for their players.

I would really like to see a reason to use frostfire bolt in frost. I think this spell was meant to be a frost and a fire spell, and it should really have a viable use for deep frost as well as deep fire (as a side note I think it would be really awesome if it showed up in both spell pages). I don't want to see it replace frostbolt though, part of what i like about frost is its quick nuke as compared to fireball. How about if Brainfreeze would either give a free instant fireball or a beefed up frostfire bolt? Brainfreeze retains pvp usefulness, allows for mobile dps in raid, and gives a reason to cast ffb in raid. I'm pretty sure Frostfire Bolt doesn't get much pvp usage so Blizz could really beef the heck out of it and bring frost up to par for mage raid dps.

The frost survivability argument is really overdone. The only thing frost has over the other trees is Barrier. As a tradeoff we get no pushback resistance and barely any talents to lessen our threat.

The fact our pet is an integral part of our damage output has to be considered. If the pet dies early for whatever reason, our damage output plummet. This is an issue other specs don't have to deal with. The upside for a "fragile" damage output should be higher damage, not lower. Now, Im not asking for more damage than the other specs because of this, but technically, the situation is backward in a way. If anything this should be the factor that counterweight our oh so awesome survivability.

Then turning the spec that is supposed to be the best at control into arguably the worst at it just boggles the mind (no more quick rank 1 frostbolt, or snaring thing by default). The whole thing seems like a jerk reaction from Blizzard because they are effraid to make frost too strong for PVP. Thing is, last I checked, Arcane is the pvp spec, or at least it is the competitive pvp one. Frost do alright in battlegrounds, but in arena, it's something else.

The problem isn't so much the 5% increase in damage in pvp, it's the 5% and 12% from torment of the weak. They need to go ahead, make separate rules and say "ToTW doesn't work in PVP", or make it increase damage on players by only 2% or increase crit rate on ToTW'ed players by a few percent or something.

To have two cooldown for pushback protection isn't in favor of frost when the other two trees have pushback protection virtually permanently. Meanwhile fire can AE disorient and knockback, and arcane can be permanently on the move to deal damage and can also snare/slow on the fly with no cooldown or cast.

But yeah, true, we have a second ice block.

In most raiding or group senarios...the water elemental is usually 10% or at most 15% of the frost mage's damage. And of course whether you have the water elemental glyph, managed your cooldowns correctly, your elemental was damaged by aoes, your current stats(water ele does not currenrtly benefit from haste on gear or icy veins), and certain buffs on the elemental, should all change the value of your water elemental.

IF blizzard wants to conserve the lacking dps of frost in a raid, the water elemental needs aoe damage reduction and/or become a permanent pet (they can nerf the water ele if need be). Now, I've seen the water ele on the Sapph fight, he does just fine due to the frost immunity, but these immunic defenses are only situational at best... he just gets vaporized on most fights ( 4 horseman.. etc) but the magnitude isnt as great as the Mirror Image pets because of the health difference.

I think we can generally agree that the problem is in the implementation, the realization of Frost's scaling past 10-man raids, and pet death. Additionally, this causes a true Frost-DPS spec by saccing talents in the tree for TTW to still be behind other specs in damage to far more than the intended level. Plenty of potential solutions have been presented here and on the official forums, and we know the devs are taking a hard look at it.

Analyzing everything, I would imagine the simplest, effective solutions to obey the K.I.S.S. principle would be to:
1) Make pet obey the caster's spell stats or similarly scale with haste/crit and have the survival mechanic like other pets to avoid insta-death...getting rid of the frost immunity as a cost for this is honestly fine by me, although I imagine it would cause some heartache.
2) Make Deep Freeze apply a dual debuff similar to FFB's burn/slow that causes Stun/Freeze status (without actually freezing the target, essentially what FoF does). Even if something is immune to the stun, it is still considered Frozen for the duration. Heck, make un-stunable targets get a longer debuff if you want.
3) Make a Brain Freeze provide an instant FFB instead of FBall,

These two changes alone provide obvious and measurable increases in Frost DPS [noting that +50% crit on three (after haste) Frostbolts is worth one GCD] as is. I imagine, however, that while a pet overhaul IS in the works, it will be a global temp-pet change, and incidental. They've also hinted that something more interesting is in the works, probably involving Ice Lance and frozen status.

As a matter of personal preference, I would like to see Frost have an option to 'mana dump' with a new spell similar to Pyroblast or Arcane Blast mechanics, with frost flavor. It could be long cast spell that gains the benefits of Frostbolt DAMAGE buff talents (but not, for instance, cast time reducation), and does 2x [or more] to Frozen targets. This would justify the spell having a lower base/coefficient and effectively be a 'raid boss only' spell in implementation, since your PvP options for a 6s cast spell that requires a Frozen target to be worth it in any sense of the word are slim to none...although concievably this could cause issues with a stacked Frost arena team or the like.

Regardless, at this point I think discussing it is rather like discussing upcoming Warlock changes that we just don't know about: it's hard to speculate when you don't KNOW what's in the pipe. I do hope the devs will give us some preview so they can at least get a community reaction [and so Lhiv and others can go to bat] before actual implementation and we end up with an agreeable solution.

Not sure how interested everyone is in looking at more Frost WWS reports, but I have a couple from this weekend.

Both runs I was flasked the entire time, with 46sp food, and I was working with the shaman to optimize bloodlust with my cooldown usage.

Full Naxx 25 Clear. FFB mage with roughly equivalent gear to me was present. I was having DC problems for the first part of the raid. I was LD for the entire Razuvious fight, and about 25% of the Grobb fight.

Naxx10 clear. Missing elemental shaman for this run, so caster DPS wasn't as high as it could have been.

My gear is full Naxx10/Heroic with 6 pieces of Naxx25 gear. I have noticed my DPS rise vs other people as we have all garnered more Naxx25 gear (along with my focusing on sp/haste rather than sp/crit).

Those are execellent statistics showing how well a geared frost mage can do in raids.

I was also wondering if you missed out on any important buffs or debuffs on the boss that would make you optimal. I'm pretty sure youhave the potential to be at least 3rd on most fights. I think there was little enchant/gem issues, but if you were to think ahead, would you do better next week? Taking into consideration, there could be combinations of errors from you and/or others that would affect your damage or dps. I also had guessed the fights, before looking at the stats, where you would be outperformed by the FFB mage (which were the long fights, except Thad..he did come close)
This just goes to show why is frost hindered on the longer fights.... it's the poor scaling and lack of extra crit bonus damage,and to a lesser extant, the death of the elemental.

A few fights also begged the question if you ran out of mana at all?

• Concerning that haste is 3rd to hit and SP, but above crit rating; it consumes alot more mana esp if you dont have arcane meditation.
• There's no real self regen while casting if you dont have AM talent
• Some fights you constantly put on ice barrier.
• You're probably not using mage armor.

And many of these frost issues can be fixed if Blizz looked at:mana returns(replenishment soon btw), buffing the water ele for pve, making deep freeze boss viable, and scaling. And a frost "mana dump" spell? It seems it will be unlikely before we see that soon.

For the 25 man raid, we didn't have a boomkin, but we did have SP/EleShaman/RetPal, so I think most of the buffs and debuffs were covered. We also didn't have an Unholy DK, and it took us until Maexxna (I think) to realize and get the Lock to start casting CoE for the +% to spell damage.

For the 10 man, we didn't have a boomkin, elemental shaman, or ret paladin. We had SP/lock, so we had some partial buffing.

What enchant gem issues do you mean?
There were very likely errors, with the lag spikes/DCs I was seeing during the first half of the raid.

Molten armor for most fights, and I don't really run out of mana, unless half the raid dies and the fight goes on way too long. If I eat a mana explosion on KT, I might evocate right before he summons the guardians. If there are kiting issues on Gluth, I may spend a lot of mana blizzarding down chow, and I sometimes need to evocate after the second decimate.


I only put on mage armor for Sapphiron, and then just for the extra resists. Mage Armor + Magic Absorption + running around to duck behind icecubes = 75% mana at the end of Sapphiron, normally.

I am hit capped (exactly) in raid gear now, and mana is a bit more of an issue since I started reprioritizing haste over crit. To combat this I could:
Don't use a gem / haste pot with my first trinket/IV activation. Save the gem for when I can use it to get to FM, or use a mana pot instead of haste.
I could wear mage armor rather than molten.
I could not put up Ice Barrier during the moments where I don't DPS - hiding behind ice cubes on Sapphiron, running with the infection or for a spore, etc.
I could spec back into Brain Freeze rather than Ice Floes.

Until I see a fight where I normally run OOM before the end, though, I will keep up my current strategy, as it seems to be working.

If they're going to keep brain freeze, they could at least make the first few fire talents good enough for a frost mage to pick up, while keeping fireball specs equal. If done properly, that could increase frost dps and make brain freeze an actual dps gain.

Another thing they could do is fix ice lance scaling (there is no real reason for any spell to have a significantly poorer relative scaling to others), then the points in arcane aren't as wasted.

And there are really a lot of creative things they could do with frost to buff it in pve and not buff it in pvp, that it would be silly and pointless to list them all. For survivability, the survivability gained by frost right now is obviously so not worthwhile of using that it shouldn't be used as an excuse for frost's lower dps - if it does then it needs to be made more useful in PvE (that is, have it not cost so much DPS to use survivability abilities while also increasing dps to not be so far behind other specs).