I was specced 18/0/53 Frost yesterday for a 10-man 3D Sartharion run, just because I was bored playing Arcane/Fireball/Frostfire day after day and wanted to try something different.
Turns out, something different is not much more different than spamming "2" since both Brain Freeze and Fingers of Frost procs mean absolutely nothing when using Frostbolt under any situation is higher dps than instant Fireballs or FoF'ed Ice Lances. The only fun part of the encounter for me was to keep the water elemental alive at the beginning. But it immediately turned into a hassle as more and more drakes were added to the fight with more AoE damage being thrown around.
All of this in return for a very subpar dps potential, and I can now definitely feel for the frost mages clinging to their raid spots. I feel sad to see how clueless and in denial Blizzard seems to be when it comes to Frost PvE compared to our other beloved specs.
I responded too and got the forum maintenance thing.
I am really trying not to flame. I am sorry if I come off that way. It is not my intention but the outlook is pretty grim and the stock response if getting old.
These latest changes are frustrating for frost, to say the least. The raiding concerns for us continue to be completely ignored by every indication and with every update and new release of information it continues to slide rather than improve.
From a different point of view, the spirit changes effectively nerf our BiS items. Due to our mana efficiency, we always use molten armor and our best in slot will never have spirit on it. I'm not sure if the 'incidental' spirit we get with tier gear will be enough to compensate for the overall loss of crit on molten armor. So as we gets better gear for the spec, molten armor gets worse. It will still be better to have gear without spirit on it, but now it will have a small penalty associated with the best items. It won't be much fun having a minor drawback everytime you finally get that nice upgrade.
I imagine we'll eventually see most of our best in slot items including spirit, so it may all come to a wash, but in the meantime it is a slap in the face that does nothing to address our lagging single target DPS. I'm not sure if PvP frost mages use molten armor, but if they do the spirit change to molten armor is a pretty hefty nerf.
The 4 piece set bonus proc ability for brain freeze is another kick in the gut, as far as I'm concerned. With no synergy within the frost tree, it will continue to be only a mobility, situational ability that is unable to proc FoF and results in a break-even talent for DPS. Brain freeze points are better spent in ice floes. The set piece bonus doesn't make the talent any less annoying and out of place.
The initial change to Winter's Chill is also very distressing. By giving it to locks who can maintain the debuff better, it no longer makes winter's chill a 'must have' talent for frost mages. Unfortunately, frost mages have nothing better to do with those talent points. So while it may help a fire mage from having scorch duties, frost mages will still be picking it up. Multiple sources means more uptime for the debuff however, so maybe this is the counterbalance to global nerf.
I am still hopeful that we will see additional changes once PTR results start showing up. The impact of a 5% crit reduction to all dps casters is just too large to be ignored. There should be some balancing neccessary to compensate casters, just to remain competitive with melee DPS, so I feel it's still safe to say that there is more to come prior to the release of Ulduar.
Viable raiding hopes for frost keep looking slimmer and slimmer, but there is still potential and I think we'll see some large adjustments implemented before too long.
I'm not sure that the Spirit change will be so bad. As I see it you'd need about 550 spirit to get back your 3% from Molten armour. Raid Buffed I don't see this as being too hard to reach and even significantly exceed. You'd never gear for it specifically, but since a lot of Haste gear has Spirit, I think that Frost mages might actually gain from this change.
However, getting that 3%/5% crit back from normal amounts of spirit requires, blessing of kings, mark of wild and divine spirit. So, in order to reach that in a 10 man raid, you should bring a paladin, priest and druid. If you have just one paladin, you can't have wisdom, so you had better have a shaman or another paladin. Of course you'll bring a shaman, because they bring such wonderful buffs...
Like I said in the other thread, if you play frost, compare [Cowl of Vanity] with [Gothik's Cowl]. I may not have gemmed perfectly in that other thread (+19 sp is probably best for both), but it doesn't change the fact that those items now have virtually identical DPS value for a human frost mage with a blessing of kings buff, using molten armor. In that sense, even this small amount of scaling works OK.
Ideally, yes, we would love to get Frost into PvE and Fire into PvP in a bigger way. In the grand scheme of things though, mages have Arcane, Fire and Frostfire specs doing very competitive dps with each other in PvE and Frost and possibly Arcane as viable in PvP. That's definitely an improvement over where the class has been historically, so while it is something we want to work on, it doesn't feel like a crisis.
So there it is in plain English.
At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.
Thanks to all for your help and advice here. Time to move on an try again for 3.2 I guess. Hopefully they'll at least fix the replishment bug. Otherwise it's not even matter of accepting my lackluster DPS - it's a matter of not getting raid kicked for munching the replishment. In hind sight I was happy being a sub-par performer. Now I'm an outright liability.
When the official Blizz responce is basically, "you're right, you're broken, but we're really busy people and we don't really care anyway" what else do you do?
I hear the fishing tournaments can be fun...
On a more serious note, I'm thinking I'll keep 2pc T7.5 (shoulders and gloves?) and add 2 pc T8/8.5 when I get it. But the new T8 gear with spirit doesn't look like any real improvment over the T7.5 stuff without spirit.
I suspect I don't need to explain this to mages, but we can't make Ice Lance any better without making Frost even more dealy in PvP. We talked about making the glyph better, and we still might, but the problem is most PvE Frost mages take the glyphs of Frostbolt, Molten Armor and Water Elemental already, *and* inflating the glyph to something like 8x damage would make Frost mages the most insane leveling spec in the world.
Since I can't post on the US forum, I'll just say that if I had a decent choice of glyphs that didn't include the frostbolt glyph for single target DPS, I'd probably take one. It's an annoying glyph that doesn't fit the frost tree in any way. I boycotted it for a long time and have only used it for about 11 days and I still hate it.
I think they just have their hands full balancing (um nerfing) overpowered classes, so they decided not to put too much effort into fixing frost for 3.1. As a software developer (who should spend more time thinking about work projects and way less about frost DPS), I can understand the need for priorities. As someone who plays a frost mage, it does sadden me. As a former game designer (from over a decade ago), it's just irresistible to me to come up with ideas on how to improve the game and it's of course frustrating when what seem like obvious flaws with reasonably easy solutions get passed over because of other priorities.
What could potentially be interesting is for people to talk about their experiences going from frost raiding to either arcane raiding or FB/FFB raiding. I've done both transitions and I must say it took a while to get my "arcane feet wet" as it were.
As an example, when I tried out FFB raiding I noticed I had a problem with queuing the next spell. With frost, since it was just frostbolt forever, I got into a rhythm. I would hit my '3' key once, right before quartz told me I was entering the latency period. The server would have my command queued and I would immediately start casting it when the server said I could.
With insta-Pyros on HS procs or Living Bomb casts, you get a ~1.2 second period where you are in the GCD. You can't--or at least I never could manage it--queue spells during the GCD. To me it seemed like the server didn't get sent the command. So I learned after a insta-Pyro/LB not to press the key for FFB (or LB or scorch) once but to pound it like a nervous monkey. I would then cast the spell the moment the GCD ended (+latency of course). Until I learned to repeatedly pound the key, my FFB damage was piss-poor as there was a break in my chain casting after insta-pyros or LB casts.
I had never read about this effect and certainly I wasn't trained to do it after years of raiding frost.
Things like this might be helpful for the remaining frost raiders as they try arcane/fire.
As I just wrote to Zeldyrr privately: to hell with it. With the introduction of dual specs and announcing that it's all right if your preferred tree sucks for raiding, because you can just respec, Blizzard has officially abandoned all pretense that WoW is a role-playing game. I re-upped for a month in March as a gesture of faith that they really meant it when they said things like:
...we don't like the idea that Arms, Frost or Disc are only for PvP and Fury, Fire or Holy are only for PvE.
I'm out of patience. I'll find something else to do.
And you know what? It's not because I'm a Frost purist who won't play anything else. I have a hunter, a few warlocks, a Fire Mage, an Arcane Mage, a few others. It's just because when it comes to being jerked around, even I have my limits.
At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.
In my opinion these problems will not cease to exist until they finally separate arenas and PvE once and for all with different talent trees, and different mechanics. With the way things are happening, like arenas going professional and lots of sponsorships going around for cutting edge PvE, I see that happening before WoW closes its doors for good, though. Don't really know when.
Ideally, yes, we would love to get Frost into PvE and Fire into PvP in a bigger way. In the grand scheme of things though, mages have Arcane, Fire and Frostfire specs doing very competitive dps with each other in PvE and Frost and possibly Arcane as viable in PvP. That's definitely an improvement over where the class has been historically, so while it is something we want to work on, it doesn't feel like a crisis.
That makes me so sad, angry, confused and whatever which you can describe like feel like a crisis.
At least they finally clearly admit that Frost sucks in PVE. Man, everyone including me be happy that I don't have access to that forum at the moment because I would not be nice.
I'm out of patience. I'll find something else to do.
This! Really considering this...
Unfortunately I was told to respec to fire 3 days ago, because I managed to get a gear (mostly 2nd BiS) where frost and fire specs start to be a huge "damage done" difference I cannot afford to insist on staying frost because I'm kind of trial in this guild and I have no BC raiding experience - I'm happy I was able to apply as frost to this guild (thanks to guild split and word from a friend of mine).
After Naxx 10 and 25 run as fire I have to say that I really don't enjoy the game as I used to.
I'll probably give a shot to arcane because it might scale better in 3.1 and maybe I won't hate it so much as fire. But I doubt. Other option is to join a casual guild progressing Naxx while others are farming Ulduar already. Hey, what a fun!
I really don't know what to say, how to contribute, how to help. I feel like everything possible was said and/or whatever new we could say is just useless to say. It's like there is no hope for raiding frosts till WoW 3.2.X.9
</QQ>
I would like to thank to all of you. It has been a joy to read your posts and contributions to this thread.
Respeccing/rerolling is the way to go IMHO.
I always wanted to try LOTRO. It is the way to go IMHO. Hey Frodo, wait for me, I can't swim!
I am going to wait and see before I get too discouraged. I have the luxury of being able to raid as Frost no matter what, the limitations to our guild progress are never due to my personal spec choice, the dps across our raids is normally rather spread out.
I think we now have a far clearer idea of what Blizzard are balancing things around, the comment about giving an 8x damage Ice Lance making Frost an insane levelling spec is telling. They are including ease of levelling in their ideas of class balance. I can deal with that, even agree with it. What makes Frost a superb levelling spec though, is not single target dps where an 8x Ice Lance would be relevant, it’s AoE and control.
Refocussing on “raiding as frost” and thinking about the impact on that of the changes that we know about.
Winters Chill now 5% instead of 10%. Warlocks apply a similar debuff.
They won’t stack, will they be simultaneously apply’able in the way that WC and Scorch is not? No big deal in any case as I see it since the debuff potency has been reduced so much. I was always dog-in-the-manger’ly mildly disgusted with the change to make WC apply to all spells since it dropped Frost relative to other casters due to Frosts poor Crit scaling. This reduces that discrepancy somewhat.
Less personally bad for Frost than most other casters. Bad for overall raid contribution.
Molten armour now dependent on Spirit for it’s crit rate adjustment.
For me personally this will be a slight buff particularly raid buffed. Happy to see a use for spirit again after the for-me-disastrous-but-since-rendered-irrelevant-by-gear-swap-GCD change to Evocation way back.
Quite good for frost.
Glyph of Molten Armor now dependent on spirit for crit bonus.
A slight nerf compared to what it used to be, potentially a slight buff with enough spirit.
Mediocre for frost
Glyph of Mirror Image makes 4 copies instead of 3.
I will test this for sure. I see it as a little buff when MI is used like a (wildly RNG dependent in AoE situations) uber-trinket. Whether it’s worth getting is debateable
Improved Water Elemental gives Replenishment on Frostbolt hit.
If this is killing replenishment then bummer – that’s a bug and should be fixed. Personally I’d take it anyway for the extended WE uptime.
Glyph of Ice Lance gives 4x damage on Frozen targets of a higher level instead of 3x on all frozen targets.
Is this actually going to happen? I don’t see it in the patch notes now.
I was looking forward to testing this. I am not convinced that it is insignificant simply because I cannot see how a shorter cast, higher dps spell than our main nuke can always be bad. Although it scales very poorly with gear and reduces the FoF proc rate, I do see it as having other advantages, similar to and over and above those offered by haste. Namely reducing temporal DPS granularity for situations where you must get out of the Fire, and pushback. And it’s always there for the FoF proc, unlike Brain Freeze.
A good thing. Maybe not as much as we would like or need. Bad because it uses a glyph slot.
As I see it, mandatory Frost glyphs are still Frostbolt and Water elemental. The third slot is up for grabs. In a dual spec scenario, (not sure, can you reglyph?) I’d be taking the Frostbolt and Ice Lance glyphs for boss TtW spec, Molten Armor and Mirror Image for trash AoE spec.
Warlocks getting a WC type ability opens up the possibility of dropping it and putting points back into “flavour” talents. This makes me very happy. Really.
I think Incoherent's description applies to my situation as well... "the limitations to our guild progress are not due to my personal spec choice". I was #1 on a number of fights (Grobbulus, Anub'rekhan, Razuvious), and #2 or 3 on most of the ones where i wasn't kiting etc.. Much lower on Sapphiron and a bit lower on Kel'thuzad. All bosses added up, including kiting on Gluth, tanking on 4H and breaking out webbed people on Maexxna (not the best job for a frost mage, because it makes keeping up WC very hard and doesn't allow me to consistently take out the spiderlings when they spawn) I still ended up #2 on total damage done.
So yeah, many others have catching up to do and I suspect 5kdps with N25 gear will be enough to stay at least average when doing Ulduar. If everyone else significantly picks up their game, I might become a liability and then I'll just step aside and find something else to do.
The replenishment change worries me a lot. Speccing just 1-2 points into enduring winter might help a bit, but it still leaves a random element. I assume Blizzard has seen the bug reports on replenishment timers resetting, so I think it might be fixed before 3.1 goes live. Given that it's unlikely to be a high priority, they might just do a quick fix where they put a timer "this effect can not happen more often than once every 8 seconds" on it... The proper fix would be to change replenishment so that new buffs don't reset the timer for the next tick, but it's possible that they "don't have the technology for it". It's kind of hard to guess what kinds of limitations the WoW server engine imposes on the programmers.
The lack of improvements on frost mean that I will be raiding with a bit of guilt. There's always the nagging "you would do 1000 dps more using another spec" even if I'm doing more than average DPS in our raids. Fortunately the guild & raid leaders seem reasonably satisfied with me so far.
i feel disappointed, but in hindsight I guess I took a leap when I assumed that promises to get hunters re-tuned for Ulduar raiding meant that frost would be revised as well. it seems they only had a half-hearted goal of putting ice lance into PvE and even their own evaluation of that was that they failed with it.
I don't think the role forums system is working perfectly. It's a million kids vs. a few community managers and two or three developers from Blizzard. You can't promote good behavior on such a forum by using just punishment (bans) as guidance...there needs to be a reward system for making good posts: maybe just a simple points system when Blizzard mods and developers are allowed to give out or take out points, but possibly also rewards for eaching a high points score ("MVP" and possibly write access to "inner circle" discussions. Frost discussions just got lost in all the noise and misinformation on the Blizzard forums.
Finns are known for being rather stubborn once they set their mind on something and setbacks usually just push us to go harder. So for me, it's frost raiding or no raiding at all. Time will tell which way it will go. Having to use the frostbolt glyph to stay competitive already felt like I had compromised too much on my principles.
In my opinion these problems will not cease to exist until they finally separate arenas and PvE once and for all with different talent trees, and different mechanics. With the way things are happening, like arenas going professional and lots of sponsorships going around for cutting edge PvE, I see that happening before WoW closes its doors for good, though. Don't really know when.
They do not even need to go that far - they could just do what that pile of a game Star Wars Galaxies did back in the day and reduce damage output for PvP only.
If I recall, all damage done to other players was automatically reduced 75% so even if someone had a lot of burst DPS they were not going to burn you down in a few seconds. And it made it valuable to have a healer around - unlike now in PvP where a lot of teams just load up on heavy DPS.
And surprisingly they even tried to do that with Ice Lance glyph. Do more damage to PvE targets and less damage to PvP targets (unless you intent on PvPing @ level 77). I don't know why they keep saying they cannot buff PvE frost damage without overpowering PvP frost damage, besides the fact that they did exactly that with the new glyph?
And surprisingly they even tried to do that with Ice Lance glyph. Do more damage to PvE targets and less damage to PvP targets (unless you intent on PvPing @ level 77). I don't know why they keep saying they cannot buff PvE frost damage without overpowering PvP frost damage, besides the fact that they did exactly that with the new glyph?
The most recent blue post would imply that they don't want to make Frost too good for leveling solo. Apparently he has never leveled a Warlock or Hunter, both of which are far superior at soloing over a Mage.
The Frost tree seems to be collateral damage to making the game enjoyable and accessible for the entire player base, not just the 2% that try to maximize their capabilities in a PvE 25 man raid. I think it is clear that they do not intend to make any significant changes to make it any more raid viable than it currently is. They seem happy with 3 raiding specs for and 1 solo/pvp spec for Mages so we shouldn't get our hopes up for any change to this situation.
I suppose I'll be doing like a lot of you and have a boss spec (Arcane?) and a frost spec for everything else (Trash, 5-man runs, infrequent PvP, etc). So lets see what a Frost off-spec would look like.
If you decide ahead of time that you won't be downing bosses, that does free up some talent points (precision) - I'm also thinking its safe to ignore most of the cool down reducing talents (Ice Floes and Cold as Ice). How often do you use cooldowns on 5-man runs, PvP or trash - maybe once, right? This should allow you to get back to having a fully synergized blizzard and some more snares.
I'm also not seeing the point in putting more than 1 point in enduring winter. 33% should be pleny to keep replenishment up all the time. If they don't fix the replishment bug then any more than that will just cause more relishment munching. Even if they do fix it, the next 2 points only buy you more WE up time. But I'm also going to avoid the cool down reduction from cold as ice. So that should be 50 seconds of up time, and a cool down of 2:40. I'm not worried about sustaining the damage in a boss fight type encounter, so it shouldn't effect our bust DPS either way.
I'm not really sure what I would want to do for glyphs - but I know I'll be avoiding the frostbolt one. Unless I end up with a lot of spirit that I can't get away from I don't see molten armor or mage armor glyph being that useful. Maybe just take some PvP style glyphs? Thoughts?
I end up with 3 points to spread around to cover everthing else I want: Improved Counterspell, Permafrost, and Shattered Barrier. I guess at that point it depends what you want to do with your char. If you still want to down bosses, then you toss them into precision. If you want to PvP, then imp couterspell is nice. If you are soloing then permafrost or shattered barrier can be nice. I think I've ended up with something like this. http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...&version=9704#
shoot - I guess I just went full circle and came back to a pretty standard PvPish build.
Besides, they chose a very strange way to determine what bosses are. Sure, they are usually of higher level, but wouldn't it be better to determine boss status through snareability? My guess is that they "lack the technology" and are unwilling to develop it for this purpose. Even the "is higher level" check may have required "new technology" though.
Putting the new ice lance effect on a glyph was potentially a good way to test the idea, because glyphs are easy to turn on and off (if you could find one on the PTR), but as a glyph, it has to compete with 2%-5% DPS glyphs and as such doesn't help frost DPS. In order to buff frost DPS with it, you would have to buff it beyond crazy. Far better to wrap the effect into the deep freeze talent (making us cast a deep freeze once per minute on boss fights), so it only costs one talent point (which we can afford with less than 1% DPS loss).
I hope I can cool off a bit this weekend...I have a work deadline coming in 10 days and more than half of my ability to concentrate ends up going into this stuff.
It is fairly strange - we know Blizzard has the technology to distinguish between a root on a mob/player and an "allow root-only effects" buff on a player and to be able to match this information up versus a mob that is not rootable in the first place.
They could have added a glyph that adds (the original) damage to deep freeze on a non rootable mob. This would allow frost more dps vs the normal sort of mobs you find in instances, trash and bosses, while not affecting pvp or levelling at all, while at the same time adding a little bit of rotation in pve casting.
That sort of suggests that there was a different intention with the current ice lance glyph, at first atleast, but maybe that wasn't possible due to time constraints.
Truly a disappointing post to stumble upon this morning. Beyond the "content" of GC's post, which many people have already thoroughly addressed, I am really put off by the "tone" of his comments. His attitude, from my reading, strikes me as being truly dismissive, like he has better things to do than to review our math or read our concerns. (Like discussing shaman changes with the devs, apparently).
Anyway, while reading all these comments, I came to wondering: does anyone know why Blizzard implemented Ice Lance to begin with? Did they ever explain the purpose or rationale behind it? Currently I only use Ice Lance in BGs to blast down someone who's frozen, but I've never really seen the overall "point" of Ice Lance from a PvE perspective.
Truly a disappointing post to stumble upon this morning. Beyond the "content" of GC's post, which many people have already thoroughly addressed, I am really put off by the "tone" of his comments. His attitude, from my reading, strikes me as being truly dismissive, like he has better things to do than to review our math or read our concerns. (Like discussing shaman changes with the devs, apparently).
Anyway, while reading all these comments, I came to wondering: does anyone know why Blizzard implemented Ice Lance to begin with? Did they ever explain the purpose or rationale behind it? Currently I only use Ice Lance in BGs to blast down someone who's frozen, but I've never really seen the overall "point" of Ice Lance from a PvE perspective.
It was actually added to help with what was thought to be an exploit in classic. I remember when I froze a mob, I would rotate either frostbolt + immediately fireblast or close range frostbolt + cone of cold to 'exploit' the time it took for the server to realize that the mob had sustained enough damage to become unfrozen. Ice lance made us able to do that consistently with one spell.
Edit: Over time it became more of a PvP tool, but I'm just posting why >>I<< thought ice lance was implemented in the first place.
Well, the technical explanation for shatter on frost novas or frostbite is "spell travel time", but it's different for Fingers of Frost. It was validated in TBC, but ice lance had no function in raids. Ice lance is a great spell for solo play and PvP. Fingers of Frost must have been the first attempt at getting ice lance shatters into raiding and the glyph was the second. Blizzard should just round a couple of us into a teleconference some day and we could blamestorm (err, brainstorm) a bit about what could maybe work.
That's not the reason I'm here again.... I tested replenishment again, since i hadn't had time to try it after the latest PTR patch. I geared up for more than normal haste to simulate raid buffs and got my frostbolt down to 1.97 seconds. I didn't use IV and casted for 2 minutes 12 seconds. I got 85 ticks of replenishment during that time, which is a measly 64% of what it should be. Pretty much proves that the problem has not been fixed.
EDIT5: Redoing the whole post
Considering that we use WE, Frostbolt and Molten Armor glyphs, I think that creating a glyph for icelance is a bad idea to "fix" a spec. These ideas could be baked into FoF, a new rank of Icelance or into a glyph. Raid bosses are currently showing as skull instead of 83. If there is a difference (code wise) for the engine, they could use "if target is a boss" instead of "if target is higher level than you" for these ideas.
1- Casting Icelance on a FoF proc on a target higher level than you gives you X% haste that lasts Y seconds
2- Casting Icelance on a FoF proc on a target higher level than you makes your next 2 frostbolts receive a Z% haste bonus
3- Casting Icelance on a FoF proc on a target higher level than you causes 4-5x damage against frozen targets
3 could be mixed up with 1 or 2
The haste % could be tied to how much crit rating the mage has to make it scale better.
I prefer 1 or 2 with or without 3 thrown in the mix.
3 alone wouldn't fix the scaling issue frost has atm.
03/19/09, 12:36 PM
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