It's true that EJ forums, for the most part, focus on high-end PvE raiding.

But in terms of frost mages, it is only natural that the discussion turns to PvE. With the changes to arcane, my (limited) understanding is that for high-end arena the only choice is once again frost and only if you have a rogue partner. Frost is still considered "the pvp spec" even if GC has stated a hundred times he doesn't want one spec to be the pvp spec and another the pve spec. People either don't believe or don't want to believe him.

All of us (though I have mostly given up) that post about frost mages in raid do so against this wall of prejudice that we are trying to force a square peg into a round hole; learn to play and respec fire and all of that. While frost may need some tweaks in PvP, the real area of improvement lies in PvE and thus the concentration of posts in that area.

I'll also add that PvEers tend to care more about "silly things" like style and feel of a spec. No matter how useful, balanced, or effective, I still find Brain Freeze to be horribly out-of-place in the frost tree. If I spec frost, I don't do so to sling fireballs a sizeable fraction of the time. Whereas (if you allow me to generalize) an arena player wouldn't care if the damaging spell was "Mage damaging spell #4" just so long as it helped them get a higher rating.

Watching a few more official forum threads following the "Frost damage is too low," "tough, you can't increase it because of PvP" pattern, it finally occurred to me. We've talked about this in various ways here in the past, but I haven't seen it put like this:

The Frost Tree needs the Feral Tree treatment.

What we need in Frost is more bloat. Just as Blizzard packed a bunch of extra talents into Feral such that you simply could not spend enough points to produce a good Cat and a good Bear with the same spec, they need to do the same in Frost, except with PvE and PvP separation.

PvP frost typically specs 20 into arcane, so you can imagine how tight the points on the frost side are. Look for talents that you can't afford to take in a 51 point frost PvP build. Look at arcane too and see what points are "must have" for frost PvP there.

However, I don't think frost is particularly strong in PvP at the moment. It's not terribly weak either and is only flawed in terms of mana sustainability. In my opinion, there's a bit of room to actually buff frost in PvP as well without shifting it out of the "balanced" zone into the "imbalanced" zone.

If you increase the frostbolt spell power coefficient and lower the base damage, you'll buff raiders (with lots of spell power - especially in a raid situation) and you can adjust the numbers so that PvP damage stays where it is now. Frost mages stack haste in PvP, so the spell power numbers are typically quite a bit lower than for someone raiding a 25 man instance.

Point taken. I'll freely admit that I'm biased against PvP. I do battlegrounds casually, and even then only when I'm not sober.

However, I feel it is apparent that the frost mage is overly penalized for raiding due to arena/PvP viability. With ten classes we've got 30 top tier talents. How many of those 30 talents are virtually worthless in raids? It has been mentioned that no spec should be considered a PvP spec, but it's difficult to justify when only one (arguably) 51pt talent out of 30 is 'PvP only'.

In it's current state, the arena so-called class balance restrict any raid viable changes to deep freeze. It could potentially become too powerful, and then we'd have flocks of mages respeccing and getting nerf threads aimed their way. This is why I would like to see it replaced, rather than changed.

Replacing it doesn't neccessarily mean it has to be terrible for PvP, either. For ONLY an example, a ranged cone of cold type aoe would have ramifications for both PvE and PvP. I'm sure there are countless potential alternatives that would meet both sides of the fence and maintain a frosty flavor.

I look at this very differently. To me, the 51-pointer was an opportunity to give a tree something it didn't have before. Affliction gets a nuke. Demonology gets a DPS cooldown, the only one in the Warlock trees. Fire gets a DOT. Arcane gets a mobile nuke.

Frost already had a bunch of control. What it didn't have was PvE casting variety. The 51-point slot was the perfect place to fill this gap. You know what would make a lot of Destruction and Frost Mages happy? Swapping Chaos Bolt with Deep Freeze. They have a bunch of nukes, and weren't thrilled to get another one; they're missing control. We have a bunch of control, and those of us who PvE weren't thrilled to get more; we could use another nuke (preferably a mana-dump nuke).

There has been some, actually. Specifically, Ghostcrawler talked about Marksmanship being "about right" for Hunter DPS, and that what he would appreciate is discussion of how Beastmastery and Survival could be brought in line with Marksmanship's DPS.

Except in 3.1, Demonology's rotation gets more complex -- curse, corruption, immolate, conditional decisions on whether to cast Shadow Bolt or Incinerate, at < 35% they need to start mixing Soul Fires into the rotation while continuing to make conditional decisions on SB vs. Incinerate, and on top of that they have the only DPS cooldown talent in the class. And, sure enough, it's also projected to be very competitive DPS -- indeed, better than Destruction.

(sorry, double post)

I wrote a new shatter combo simulator from the ground up and ran it with several different scenariors. The hit numbers were just quickly grabbed off my Naxx25 WWS, but I only included 20% passive haste and ignored IV, heroism, water elemental etc... If the numbers are off (they might be), the results could be somewhat off as well...garbage in/garbage out.

I'm just going to assume that ghost shatters are made a valid mechanic and everyone will be able to pull them off.

The baseline DPS from the simulator using just frostbolts and brain freeze fireballs was 3366. Switching to do ice lances on FoF ghost charges is pretty much exactly the same DPS, so as long as it's even slightly unreliable, I'd avoid those.

The new ice lance glyph pushes the DPS up to 3438, which is a 2.1% increase. I guess that's "on budget" for a glyph, but it's not going to bring frost on par with others, especially since this is just 90% of our total DPS (elemental is 10%), so the effect is roughly 2%.

I then modified deep freeze so that it would debuff the target for 60 seconds and increase ice lance damage by 50%. The cost of casting deep freeze even on a ghost charge is rather devastating. It takes a global cooldown once per minute, which nullifies about 2% of our DPS... As expected, the DPS increase from ice lance shatters dropped down to 0.5% (over base). This alone is obviously not going to be a good way to increase frost DPS even though it adds DF and ice lance to the boss rotation without actually lowering DPS...

I then changed FoF so that you can pull off two combos per proc. This might be an issue for PvP, but given how hard a single frostbolt is to pull off, it might be OK. The idea is that you still get two charges, but if a charge is used up, you can't lose another charge for a bit under 1 second, which allows a cast time + instant cast combination on a single charge.

Double combos on FoF charges push the DPS up by 4.7% over baseline even when you have to maintain a deep freeze debuff once a minute. Removing the DF requirement and setting the glyph at +50% results in a 7.5% increase, which is probably too much.

Leaving the double shatters, but removing any extra damage from ice lance is a 0.3% increase over base.

Here's the Lua code that you can use with a standard command line Lua interpreter (I didn't document it yet, sorry):

http://wow.poista.net/theorycraft/shattersim.lua

and here's a printout of a run:

http://wow.poista.net/theorycraft/sh...im-results.txt

If you run it yourself, you'll find small random variations even though the simulations are already quite long. It assumes no shatter munching, which is currently only true on the PTR and if you don't take frostbite... Hopefully the munching will be fixed.

I think he's being clever. Right now on live, if your proc Fingers of Frost, and cast Frostbolt on the second charge, and it procs FoF, the new FoF is consumed. In other words, "munched." Huh, that's a lot harder to explain than I thought.

Same (or similar) thing on the PTR, if you have frostbite talented. It doesn't affect a non-frostbite raid build on the PTR, so I decided not to simulate it.

I get and don't get deep freeze for the reasons mentioned: Frost needed a real stun for PvP, but considering what most other trees, especially mage trees, got for their 51 point talents, Deep Freeze seems out of place as a 51 point talent because it's more of -insert-thing-tree-is-good-at-here- instead of filling a gap, or even more specifically, boosting DPS in some manner that the tree/class does not explicitly have already. This is especially the case since the trees that did get something, which usually complicates their rotation, were often already more than one-button wonders, whereas Frost, which expressly could [have and still now] use[d] somewhere to put the mana its already efficient with in PvE.

I'm going for the 'no one believes GC' option here, since I think he really is serious about it. But as I've said countless times here, the PvP forum, and in-game, it's a sad, tragic kind of cute to see devs who really are trying to balance things making mistakes a two year old could point to and ask at the time 'but wouldn't that break it?'. This is also why, although the 'wait and see' approach is theoretically good, I have serious, bordering on psychotic issues with it as it stands, because the devs effectively use it an excuse to break stuff 'on accident', causing raid and PvP imbalances for weeks/months (and in severe cases, longer, because they don't consider it an issue) that go against their own design philosophy. So now we have entire classes doing obscene/insane DPS both in and out of raids, supposedly DPS specs that just aren't cutting it, and dichotomies like Warlocks who can put out ridiculous raid DPS but are anything but PvP wonders right now (in terms of damage, anyway). Assuming they're actually looking at bringing the DPS classes [non-hybrids] and specs closer to Marksmanship raid DPS, quite a few classes and specs should be 'getting the shaft' in 3.1. All of this is completely ignoring the reward imbalances such things cause as well thanks to raid consideration and actual ability of said raids compared to what the content was designed to be. Going on to act confused about the cause of such things...well, enough of that.

At this point, I don't think it's so much a question of 'what can work and what is acceptable' as 'what the devs will choose to do and whether it will be enough or too much'.

Jak, I'm not really sure what you mean by raid viable, there are plenty of reasons to bring a frost mage to raid:

1. Your fire mages need no longer to cast scortch -This a nice boost in dps, but not sure how much
2. Some fights last long, sometimes people die and fights last even longer, then healers run oom.. extra Mp5 from the water ele helps, around 100-200mp5 for the duration depending on peoples mana pool
3.Frost mages are more likely to live during a fight
4. Frost mages are unmatched in aoe dps
5. Focus Magic

Are you raid viable if you can get #1 Dmg on Patch or KT? Well I did, in our 25m nax pug, and it really wasnt that bad its the 1st time we finished in 1 day, which was about 4 hours.
Other fights like gluth and any sarth 1-3d should be a cakewalk in topping the meters because a very high percentage of your damage is coming from blizzard. It's the same with trash in most of the raiding instances

So if frost mages are up there in Overall Dmg among the whole instance, it shouldn't be because they arn't "raid viable". And, yes, I agree a boost in the lacking frost dps would be greatly accepted. but whats going to happen when most frost mages are surpassing other mage specs. Oh, I Think I see the Nerf bat in the distance.

According to my Rawr the fire and arcane specs are 300-500 dps ahead. The results are about the same with the current Google wow simulationcraft spreadsheets.

This begs the question: Is the frost pve spec worth cutting that much dps?