Sorry about being unclear about replenishment in bigger groups... It's just never been 100% clear to me either how the buff works when the lowest 10 on mana already have it. It really doesn't affect the frost replenishment problem very much and what I didn't answer is how the buff gets refreshed if every mana user already has it... Does it refresh on those lowest on mana or those who have the shortest duration of the buff remaining?

On Raely's ideas: I kind of like arcane subtlety where it is...it offers and an easy way to get dispel protection if you want to go really deep frost for PvP. It's actually how my deep frost works.

You're adding a lot of changes that would buff PvP quite a bit as well.

Also, I think you just added 3 DPS points to the frost tree... which doesn't help at all when the mage is trying to get some flavor on top of all the DPS talents there.

I think 51 point talents should have as few requirements as possible...you already invested 50 points in the tree, so why force the mage to pick 5 specific points (and in your case, points that both PvE and PvP tend to take anyway)?

Student of the mind is a very weak talent, but I suppose people would take it, if they could take it without losing DPS. However, I think putting it where it's the only DPS choice is kind of a dirty trick and it doesn't make the talent less bad.

So, I guess you asked for it: no, I wouldn't vote for those specific changes.

I'm starting to think that it might be wise to have a separate thread on the "fantasy" issues (how to fix frost) and on actual discussion based on upcoming or live features. (Yes, I like posting ideas & reading them, but the thread is getting messy.)

As far as simple fixes though I'd love to see another rank added to Empowered Frostbolt. I'd also like to see the 4pc T8 bonus apply to Fingers of Frost, not Brain Freeze. Leaving a target chilled for an additional spell would be a much nicer DPS boost than an extra unsynergized fireball. But anything that buffs frostbolt DPS that can be used by a standard PvP will probably be ignored - as that that could make us OP in PvP.

I'd also like to see spells like TTW and Netherwing presence (3 ranks for 2% spell haste each level) swap locations on the Arcane tree. I'd also like to see things like Mind Mastery, Incanters Absorbtion and Arcane Mind moved down toward the first few ranks so us Frosties could have a shot at one or two of them. I wouldn't mind if Forus Magic and Student of the Mind got bumped up higher in the Arcane tree. If you slotted one of the DPS increasing talents at the same level as clearcasting, that would allow us to snag it and it would probably keep the Fire mages from taking it too as they need the mana.

I guess my point is that there are lots of easy ways to buff Frost Raid DPS without haveing major effects of the other trees or on Frost PvP. But GC seems unwilling to look into it. Sure I'd love to have a new spell to work into the rotation, something that would be a nice DPS boost, but with a long cast time and a small cool down would work great. But it's a bit unrealistic to see drastic changes like this, so late into the game. For 3.1 I think the best we can hope for is a very simple fix to our DPS issues. Some small buff to at least make us competative with the hybrids (not that I even agree that we should be considered as a hybrid) would at least allow us to keep raiding. I'll agree that the lack of any thing resembling a rotation is an issue, but in my mind, that's secondary to the lack of DPS.

I'll also agree that this thread has gone completely off target. It's kind of odd though Frosts issues are mostly ignored in the larget 3.1 changes thread. Even when you see DPS comparisons they only list Fire, Arcane and FFB.

@Tiga:
Yeah, I added 3 points to it, but I don't necessarily feel this is bad, since some people might be willing to forgo a point or two in a pure DPS talent, if they preferred some form of utility. At the moment the tree feels very much like "you'll take these 50 talents for top dps, and that dps is gonna suck compared to other specs." :/

Student of the Mind may be bad, but with frost using Molten armor, it's certainly preferable to having to pick up Arcane Focus.

Admittedly, there are PvP buffs in there as well, but I find that option preferable to blizzard's way of handling it (namely the Ice Lance glyph). Preferable in a sense that it can be made up for with tweaks to other talents.

What I did in those changes was essentially force the PvP guys to give up point in some dps talents if they wanna get Deep Freeze (and gave the PvE ones better dps talents, since they don't). Whether or not it would actually result in a PvP spec doing more or less damage is very much speculative.

@jak:
I very much agree that tweaking numbers and talents is the way to go, since it's far too late to expect whole new mechanics and spells from the devs, when they've said they're effectively not that concerned with the state of things.

And yeah, a thread for ideas on how to fix frost would be more appropriate, but in light of this being the only frost thread, I figured it belonged here. Running it by the guys here seems much more productive than posting it on the official forums, at least as far as constructive input is concerned.

Basic ideas I'd like to see them play with:

- Move some of the talents that only a deep Arcane spec cares about (Stability, Focus, etc.) deeper to make room on the shallow tiers for talents every spec would care about. There should be something on Tier 1 that is attractive to Fire and Frost Mages, and something on Tier 2 that is attractive to Frost Mages who take Brain Freeze and thus don't want Clearcasting.

- Put a Spirit-to-Haste conversion talent on tier 3, to compete with Spell Impact. This gives Frost Mages something useful on that tier other than Focus Magic, but Fire and Frostfire builds couldn't take it without sacrificing points in Spell Impact (which they could do, if they had enough spirit and weren't running out of mana).

- Reduce TTW to 2 points for 6%.

- Add a deep Frost talent that causes your Frostbolts to stack either a damage buff or a cast time reduction buff that affects your next Frostfire Bolt cast, to encourage a 3-4x Frostbolt to one FFB rotation.

You know, Lhivera, the changes may be easier than you think...but unrelated to frost.

Now, I'm not sure how much I can trust Blues, but, what is their primary justification for not making frost stronger in PvE? Primary PvP spec? Superior AoE? These are not problems with frost being too strong, these are problems with Arcane and Fire being too weak.

Fire has the worst AoE of any of the single target dps specs. Perhaps if they changed fire to have some better burst aoe while frost retained some of its control oriented aoe, getting frost buffed wouldn't be so difficult. As far as PvP goes, guess you would have to set the trees in such a fashion that PvP frost is unattainable in a PvE frost build.

Like some have suggested 18/0/53 needs some use for higher arcane talents; but I would personally like to see frost not be so filler.

I feel as though Frost needs a new spell in it's rotation. Like Lhivera suggested a week ago, shatters in PvE aren't the way to go. Frosties need something else. I say, Get rid of Frozen Core and give me a Hail Storm that deals 1000 frost damage over 15s applied slowly at first (like CoA). After 15s the target is "wind burnt" for 5s. Wind burn allows your ice lances to do 4 x dmg and your frostbolts dmg increased by 35 %.

The talent probably seems terrible, but I just feel that Arcane and Fireball/FFB have multiple attacks (grant it there is a spam aspect to all specs), whereas Frost has Frostbolts and WE .

I'd like to see Brain Freeze and Deep Freeze combined into one talent. A 3-5 second stun and a brain freeze effect would not be overpowered in PvP (Frost PvP mages have these talents as it is, anyway) and might just make both talents sorta-kinda usefull in PvE. More importantly, the combination of the PvP talents in an appropriate tier on the frost tree might be able to open up the 51pt talent for what frost mages really need: a spec defining ability.

There have been multiple suggestions on a new frost flavored spell (I'd love to see a variation of Frozen Orb from D3 myself) that has a long cast/channel time to bring frost mage damage back up into raid viable ranges and allow a variation from frostbolt spam. Most all of the suggestions here have minimal impact on PvP frost mages and would be very welcomed by all raiders.

I'm just hopeful the tree can get some proper attention after 3.1. It appears to be consistently passed over as 'fine enough to fix later' despite the general concensus concerning frost PvE.

It would also be interesting to see them reduce the discrepancies in survivability, since that would reduce the validity of the argument that Frost's survivability is why they receive less DPS benefits.

Even if the rotation never gets more complex, it would be nice to see Cold Snap become a base ability, Ice Barrier/WE/Deep Freeze shuffle downwards appropriately, and the addition of a 51-point talent that has meaningful value for PvE as well. If that new 51-point talent just makes Frostbolt better yet again, so be it - I'll take competitive DPS and a boring rotation over the alternatives (including the status quo).

I also thought a Spirit to Haste conversion for Frost would work out well to improve PvE damage output but give nothing to PvP damage output since PvP gear lacks Spirit. I thought it best to put it deep into the Frost tree though so as to not throw off the current established balance of the other PvE specs. Like wise a boost could be given using some multiplier effect on Frostfire Bolt's damage with a build up debuff or buff since FFB is never used in PvP. That would of course give a more interesting rotation, albeit predictable if not based on RNG. This option should not be an instant cast effect like Brain Freeze though as that would throw it back into PvP. Just add the effect onto an existing talent or move DF down and fill its spot with a new talent.

And as long as the numbers are not too inflated either way you can fix Frost PvE without out performing the other specs or increasing PvP effectiveness fairly easily. I think Blizzard is just not that interested in trying right now since Mages have other specs they can turn to.

When I first saw the changes to Molten Armor, I was worried they'd do a Sprit -> Haste conversion on the mage armor glyph, which would be a huge waste. Spirit to Haste somewhere deeper in Frost (near some of the usual bottlenecks would be appreciated) could help immensely.

While we're at the idea of making Spirit more useful (it's something we're gonna have, so why not make it better), the current Frostbolt glyph provides a flat 5% damage increase, but what if it was changed to receive a certain % of your Spirit as additional spellpower? That's purely PvE (still looses the chill), and it could (with the right % of scaling) make for a lot of dps. It could be a very elegant, very potent change to frost PvE.

The fact that the glyph removes the chill effect is already a questionable decision. Also, the problem with scaling is that it penalizes players with worse gear - the top-end raider would get a marginal increase, but it would suck for everyone else.

Glyphs should not be used to solve for preexisting drawbacks to a spell/talent - they are minor DPS buffs and/or flavor tweaks.

Glyph of Frostbolt removes the chill because of PVP balance. It is a good implementation even if they "give back" the 5% coefficient on top of it. That goes for everyone else who complains about the glyph, too.

[Glyph of Flame Shock] directly contradicts your second assertion about what you think Glyphs are supposed to be. It pretty much defines the play style of an Elemental Shaman (for a large DPS gain).

I would loved to see some sort of Spirit -> Haste talent or glyph.

I'm also not opposed to putting such a talent high in the frost tree, although it feels like it should be more of a arcane thing. Maybe low on the Arcane tree? Either way that would take some re-juggling of the trees and that's not somethign I think they want to do this close to 3.1. For that reason maybe a glyph would be better.

If they wanted to put it one of the armors, that'd be fine too. Why are you opposed to putting it on Mage armor? I'd gladly swap 5% crit for 5% haste. As it stands now, the glyph for mage armor is going to wortless for the only class that uses it (Arcane) as it would put them over the 100% regen cap. But I'd be afraid that adding it to mage armor would make arcane even more OP. Likewise we couldn't put it on Ice/Frost Armor as that's being Used by the PvPers. The only way I can see the Spirit -> Haste conversion on one of the armors would be if they made a glyph that removed some of the base ability of the armor, i.e. remove the snare from Frost/Ice armor or some of the regen from Mage armor.

"Glyph of Mage Armor: Converts 5% of Spirit to Haste rating, reduces mana regeneration by 50%"

or "Glyph of Mage Armor: Converts 50% of your MP5 to Haste rating"

or "Glyph or Frost Armor: Converts 5% of Spirit to Haste rating, reduces snare effect by 50%"

I think mage armor should remain the armor for mana-intensive fights and it already benefits from spirit, so I'm not sure it needs changing.

Ice armor currently lacks a PvE function. Making it convert spirit to haste or to pushback reduction would be interesting. Either function would buff PvP somewhat as well, but PvE would gain far more. Both functions would be logical and make sense when you think about what ice armor might do (closely related to icy veins).

For pushback, I think 250 spirit at level 80 (typical PvP amount) could give you about 10%-20% pushback reduction, so at 750 spirit (high level PvE spirit), you would get 30%-60%. I guess they could take how hit rating scales across levels and just plug spirit into that formula (with or without a multiplier). 10% or even 20% pushback reduction shouldn't dramatically shift PvP balance.

In PvE, you would have to choose between molten armor (gain crit, but take pushback), mage armor (gain mana) or ice armor (reduce pushback). Blizzard seems to like it when players have to make choices like that. I just wish the armors would cost less mana and were either off the GCD or a shorter GCD to make mage armor changing more dynamic than it is now.

The problem is that the only thing that can make a fight "mana intensive" is by making it long with 100% time spent casting (no movement), and even on those fights molten armor is at the worst around as good as mage armor, making mage armor rather useless overall. I'm not sure even blizzard know what they really want to do with mage armor, considering you can't exactly swap to it due to glyphs and that they can't balance mage DPS around needing it nor can they balance it around not needing it if it's a situational armor. Bottom line is it seems they're trying to make molten armor standard, at least for the time being (that is, since molten armor was invented until current state of 3.1).

I tend to think of AOE phases as mana intensive. I also tend to think of detonate mana as mana intensive...stuff like that.

I think people are overestimating how good molten armor is for frost. Crit has very low value for frost.

Don't get me wrong, molten armor is great for fire and frostfire and it's not bad for frost either. It's just that frost gives up a lot less DPS by using mage armor and it may allow you to not use evocation at all in a fight where you would normally need one.

Assuming a 6 second (slightly hasted) evocation every 4 minutes, that's 6 / 240 = 2.5% of your casting time. For a 20k mana pool, you gain 12k when using evocation, which over a period 240 seconds is 250 mana/5. Molten armor is 3-4% crit unglyphed and if spell crit is worth about 0.7% DPS per %, then that's 2.8% DPS at most. For some fights, it seems like an even trade in terms of DPS and it leaves you the option of using evocation in a situation where you end up using more mana than you estimated.

It is a dreadful, utterly broken implementation, one of the stupidest decisions Blizzard have made. The chill removal is just a transparent attempt to make a "PvE-Only" glyph without using the words "PvE only". And simply to avoid using these words - on a *glyph*, mind you, not a spell or ability - Frost PvE s drained of its natural character. [Any spells or effects applying to "targets of a higher level" are the same stupidity.]

If they do nothing more for frost than change the Frostbolt glyph to PvE only, I will be happy enough.

Well said Gerryq.

However, I think it would be OK to add a function to deep freeze that only works in a group context. I think having to use a glyph for that would be wrong and having to give up the PvP use for it would be wrong. Making the spell have two different effects that will only sometimes overlap would be better than being forever tuned to do below hybrid DPS in PVE.

Blizzard already twist the rules of the game when they make bosses that are immune to snares, frostbite and deep freeze... Everyone accepts it because boss fights have been balanced like that for years. In reality, making bosses immune to abilities is a game design crutch. If a crutch is used to make frost mages weaker against bosses, I think it would be fair to add a crutch to balance frost mages properly for the loss of those abilities - without having to pay by giving up abilities in other situations.

Life isn't fair, but games can be...if you design them that way.

As it stands now, all the glyph is really doing is removing the penalty from the snare (and the snare) so it is lousy.

I can live with them removing the snare since the glyph is obviously intended for PvE but it should be a 10% damage increase, not 5%.

This isn't just a "boss" problem, it's an "elite" problem. Granted not all elites are immune, but a very significant portion of them is. It's meant to prevent you from abusing them by kiting rather than to reduce your damage. Frost had always been the "gain survivability+control, lose DPS" kind of spec, and will always be unless they either re-do the talents in a way that will make 2 different possible frost specs - 1 for DPS and 1 for survivability, or give frost pve-only damage boosts. Both would probably not be a lot of fun, but I'd rather see the first option. There are endless possibilities for them to get it done right, but none of them would be simple.

They accomplished this with Cat/Bear specs for Druids. I understand the Druid Feral tree to provide either a good dps cat, a good tanking bear, or a mediocre bear/cat; neither is good at both. I don't see why Frost cannot follow this same route with PvP vs. PvE.

Other than their attempt to change ice lance, the uselessness of deep freeze in pve, and the minimal dps gains of brain freeze im pretty sure they can implement Iceform. im not gonna go on what i want it to be because it'll just be removed by reason of not being a "new and worthwhile idea" but it'll have its pros and cons in pve and pvp similar to shadowform does.

Part of the reason we want to raid frost is of course its the style we like to play as when we role play with a mage, and Iceform fills the role of an ice mage exceptionally.