Yeah, there were spots like that quote about the tree pass that made me think, "OK, bigger revisions coming down the line." But then when taken in context with:

- The fact that he seems to be looking at the stat problem as "Spec A values Stat 1 much higher than Stat 2" rather than "Spec A values Stats 1, 2, 3 and 4 much higher than Spec B does"

- The fact that he talks about Arcane bloat as a problem, with no mention of the fact that Fire and Frost haven't really any more points to spend on optional stuff than Arcane does -- not because their own trees are bloated, but because so many points must be spent in Arcane

- The fact that he says "it's not weird for Fire and Frost to off-spec in Arcane," while totally ignoring the important part of the question, which is the fact that many of those 18 points aren't useful except as filler to reach tier 4.

...these make me wonder if that pass will matter, because it doesn't seem to be being made with a clear understanding of what needs to happen.

I mean, I get that his perspective is different from ours. From his perspective, Frost is not a dead spec, because people in PvP are using it. From our perspective it is a dead spec, because we can't use it. From his perspective, there's a mountain of things to accomplish, and this just isn't a priority. From our perspective, we've been waiting 15 months, so it seems like it should be a priority.

Is there anything more we can say that would be productive? Are there any arguments remaining to be made? Or have we stated our case as strongly and persuasively as it can be made?

Uh, pet scaling with Hit Rating has been around for quite a while. It's nearing a year I think. What pets don't get is your 3% hit from Precision (Hunters had some buggy issues with their 3% hit talent that only partially affected your pet, only if you were really low on hit rating; was some pretty brain-twisting bug). Your Mini-Me pets also inherit your hit rating, they just don't get raid auras - the Draenic 1% Heroic Presence.

They only added Resilience and Spell Penetration scaling in the recent announcement. I guess they simply overlooked that hit rating scaling is already in. That's why you see 2.8% misses in Simcraft, the pet has 14.2% hit from your gear, you are 0.2% overcapped with 3/3 Precision.
So, I guess they forgot that it was already in when announcing the other changes.


Fire/Frostfire have a good gameplay, that requires some reactions and decisions on the fly. No, it's not rocket surgery and will likely never be - Affliction Warlocks used to be like that and they were deemed too difficult, being overwhelmed by options.

Arcane has the AB3[ABar; on procs: MBAM] reactive style, Frost has the FrB[on proc: BFFB; on proc: FoFFrBFrB+IL] reactive style, with the question how to mix BFFB and FoF when both proc at the same time. They work from the gameplay perspective, they provide a better, more responsive gameplay. But they don't work on the mathematical level. AB3AM spam regardless of procs, and FrB spam regardless of procs offer the best sustained DPS*.(It's a bit more complicated, but the bottom line is that reactive styles perform worse than the spam styles.)

With some adjustments, they can be made to work. ABar needs just a mana cost reduction to get back into cycles. Brain Freeze Fireballs need some more Oomph, and so does Ice Lance, at least the glyphed Boss Lance. It's not easy to tune correctly since there are so many different factors that easily sink a previously working solution.


[Edit]:
No worries, the panel people forgot about it too They also claimed that Mirror Images were splitting your threat *cough*

Oh, duh. That fact completely slipped my mind. I remember testing it myself in the 3.0 beta, too. That's what I get for not being active, I forget stuff.

Actually, when I read the notes I thought they meant that the pets were finally benefiting from our talents and external buffs as well, instead of the exisisting gear-only scaling. Of course, that may just be wishful thinking, but it would be nice to reward intelligently gearing around our talents with actually capping the MIs and WE. Even assuming WE is 10% of our raid DPS [for quick-and-dirty calculation], that would still only cap out at around a 0.5% DPS increase. Frost needs quite a bit more than that...

It of course goes to show that no good thing goes unnerfed, as the supposed reason to include us [Frost Mages] as a source of replenishment has basically recieved a 20% nerf...and a raid was better off having replenishment and a half before that. If it fixes the replenisment-loss bug from fast frostbolts, however, I suppose I'm all for it. Naturally, however, so far we've only seen mana considerations for Arcane and Fire...not that Frost really needs mana consideration. Everyone else who's happy to see that the devs are happy to throw more mana at the other specs, absentmindedly backhand Frost again, and still not take a look at us? Yeah, me either.

I really, really hope that they actually do something soon. So far they've been plenty willing to shuffle talent trees and spells for other classes, so we can at least hope they simply haven't gotten around to it yet -_- *mimes blowing on lucky dice* come on, Deep Freeze change and new spell...

Here are some undocumented changes datamined from the 3.2 files, from MMO-Champion:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=67249.0

The Enduring Winter change, along with the change to Replenishment, should minimize the chance of ticks being munched. The changes to the Fire talents look like a straight-up nerf to the glyphed Living Bomb effect (that's the first one that comes to mind), but that's off-topic...

It is just as much a nerf to the damage from glyphed Living Bomb as a fix to the issues caused by glyphed Living Bomb.
With the change to Empowered Fire we want Ignite to actually tick more often, rather than accrue large amounts to come out in a smaller number of ticks.
The change to burnout says LB tick crits don't charge mana, that is a good thing.
It is also possible that the changes to glyphed Living Bomb will lead way to a buff for Combustion.

Glyph of Living Bomb will remain as amazing even without it causing ignite damage.

edit: I just realized this is the Frost thread (I thought I was in the General Mage Discussion thread, sorry for continuing the off-topic discussion.

Boldings mine. So basically, you're talking about three other trees out of the 30 talent trees that exist, one of which has the same problem as Frost [or should say, as old Frost], which is powerful PvP without looking good on PvE, a caster and a melee/cast hybrid tree for shamans getting rebalanced, and overall healing mechanic methods to balance in PvP. I wouldn't say that there are 'too many glaring issues', because Frost has BEEN a glaring issue. I'd say 'Frost will always be low-man on the totem pole for fixes or rebalancing unless it does something like screw up a raid mechanic [Replenishment]'

Frost needs help, yes. It underperforms, and it's boring to play.

That being said, think about it in terms of classes, not specs. Shaman and Paladins don't have the option of respeccing (or dual-speccing) for good raid DPS. Mages do. For better or for worse, Blizz has made a design decision that all classes should be capable of putting out competitive raid DPS. Mages can. Shaman and Paladins can't. At least, that's how they see it.

Until they introduce a "dual-class" feature, smart money says they're going to focus their efforts on an entire class that's uncompetitive over one of three or four arguably viable DPS specs for a "pure" class that has other options. The unfortunate consequence is that for the forseeable future I imagine that at least ONE of the four mage specs will be neglected from now to lv100+.

That's not to say that you don't have a reason to demand change. Just that Blizz has designed themselves into a corner with too many options and not enough manpower to tackle them all in a timely fashion. It's triage. They've gotta go for the most glaringly broken issues before the ones that are just barely limping along.

I see your point, but I was under the impression that at least Enhancement was viable DPS...shows what I know about classes beyond Mage and Death Knight, I guess. The real ache of it is that it doesn't really require an episode of Extreme Game Design to fix Frost, at least in the short term. I'm not especially fond of a series of band-aid fixes each raid to do something like make Ice Lance make up for the loss or something, but it's better than being ignored if they can avoid mechanics trouble like with Refreshment.

On the other hand, I have been forced to re-think some of the position of Frost in a raid setting since the design of fights seems to be changing. If Frost at least pulls out 'not suck' DPS and is better suited to handle certain tricky boss-fight phases or mechanics [namely, adds and their freedom of movement or kiting]...then great. It's just that last I checked, there wasn't supposed to be that much discrepancy or desire to use a differing spec among DPS specs and classes related to AoE, control, and survivability. Seriously, please make it one or the other, especially now that we have dual-spec [and hopefully, as-many-the-hell-specs-as-you-can-afford feature in the near future *crosses fingers*], cause it's getting old getting ignored because other classes keep breaking trying to have things three different ways at once.



And yeah, they do, but that's part of the EJ mind-set...apparantly, mind-bogglingly wall-of-text post is better than chain-posting when padding the post count has nothing to do with it.

How's this?

Enduring Winter (3 ranks): Each frostbolt critical strike extends the life of the Water Elemental by 1/2/3 seconds. (feel free to leave the replenishment ability as it's proposed for 3.2 - that's a whole seperate argument for another day.)

That should be almost neutral to PvP. How many frostbolt crits do you land in 45 seconds of PvP? What are the odds your WE will be alive after 45 seconds anyway? I'm not suggesting that we change the health bar of the WE (although we may need to adjust its mana supply. Maybe make it share your mana pool or regen somehow? I'm sure we could make the WE pretty much ignore its mana bar like we do now easily enough)

With an extra 3 seconds per frostbolt crit: even if you only crit 50% of the time and you are casting at 2.5 seconds per frostbolt - that means you'd extend the life of your WE by about 1 min. (45 seconds divided by 2.5 seconds = 18 frostbolts, 9 of which would crit. There's 27 more seconds from the initial 45; i.e. 60%. Recursively, 27 * .6 = 16.2. 16.2 * .6 = 9.72. 9.72 * .6 ~ 6. 6 * .6 ~ 3.5. 3.5 * .6 ~ 2.1. 2.1* .6 ~ 1.2. 1.2 * .6 ~ .75. That's 27+16.2+9.72+6+3.5+2.1+1.2+1=66 seconds). RNG would certainly play a part, but you're already close to keeping the WE up full time.

More realisitically with 75% raid buffed crit and a cast time of 2.2 seconds (no IV or blood lust), you'd be able to keep your WE up permanantly unless he gets specifically targeted. I haven't done the math, but with BiS Ulduar gear and buffs you could probably take only 2 points in the talent and still keep your WE up full time, or at least only worry about recasting him evey 2 min.

I think in all blue leveling/early heroic gear you're critting more like 30% of the time and have minimal haste - call it 2.4 seconds per cast. When you multiply it out that would only extend your WE by about 20 seconds - currently the talent gives you 15 seconds so it's pretty neutral at low levels, but scales nicely with crit and haste.

I believe currently our WE currently accounts for 10% of our DPS and we can keep him up somewhere between 35% and 50% of the fight. So this would be a buff to our raid DPS somewhere close to 10%, probably like 15% on long fights if we did a good job managing our pet.

That doesn't completly close the gap, but it takes us about 1/2 way there with minimal impact to solo PvE or PvP.

I'd also suggest a change to Empowered Frostbolt.

Currently it allows for 2 points and each point increased the damage of your frostbolt spell by 5% of your spell power and gives your frostbolt an additional 2% chance to crit.

I'd change the crit, from a 2% chance to crit to an additional % damage on crit. Number wise 1% chance to crit is almost exactly the same as 1% additional damage on crit - at least for us frost mages where our crit does 200% the damage of a non-critical strike. But this does has PvP implacations for burst damage. I'd like to replace the 2% chance to crit with a 3% additional damage on crit (i.e. a 1% DPS buff per talent point). I'd also add a 3rd point to this talent. So overall we'd use 1 additonal talent point, but we'd be gaining an additional 5% spell power scaling and 9% crit scaling at the loss of 4% chance to crit.

That would be about a 10% buff overall, although we would have to give 1 talent point elsewhere. It would work well with the above change to enduring winter - i.e. we'd be critting a bit less. Those two tweaks alone would pretty much make up the difference in DPS by giving us some improved scaling.

In terms of adding complexity, this doesn't do much - although we would have to do a better job managing our pet (not impossible now that they are AOE immune.) But it also doesn't require any changes to game mechanics. No new spells required.

jak: Good suggestions. I'm feeling pessimistic about how much resources Blizzard is going to put into doing anything at all to frost though.

Edited (didn't consider that crits beyond the original 45 seconds would work too):

Frostbolts will crit once every 4 seconds on average (more frequently during heroism and iV), which means you'll get 11 time extensions on average per 45 seconds of water elemental lifetime. At 3 seconds/crit, that's 33 seconds of time, which is 18 seconds (or 30%) more than now. The extra 33 seconds will buy you another 24 seconds etc... Sounds like a differential equation... The water elemental might essentially become a permanent pet. A quick spreadsheet gave me 171 seconds as the total duration at one crit per 4 seconds, which would make the water elemental permanent (but possibly very OOM).

Changing the WC and EFb talents to increase critical strike damage instead of crit chance are the types of changes I have been suggesting for a long time. The PvP implications are unclear...not sure if it's a buff or nerf. Crit modifiers are tricky though: compare the chaotic meta gem with the 4xT7 set bonus...which one sounds better? Which one is actually better... Ouch. It could also go horribly wrong and end up being a PvE nerf if done by someone incompetent.

If I may make a suggestion, it would be to break off this discussion into a different thread. I don't care what the title is, "Frost in 3.2?" "3.2 changes for Frost" etc. The discussion here makes it unwieldy for someone who wants to read about currently raiding as a frost mage. We have class forums exactly for this, to move away from one massive megathread that covers everything. It's a broad enough subject to allow for a different thread.

This way people who come here for advice/theorycrafting about the existing frost mage can get it here. If they're interested in possible changes in 3.2/discussion of it, they can venture over to that thread.

I'd agree with that - the only issue is that we haven't really progressed past what was mentioned on Page 1. We should probably update the first page with some of the spirit changes in 3.1. But it's still a pretty meaningless stat and we're better of finding gear that was itemized without spirit. But it does change the scaling a little bit - some of the Best In Slot gear was changed.

Ever since page 10 or so the discussion has been entirely about "how to fix frost" - although there are a few good posts about replenishment munching in there somewhere. Currently that means raiding Frost mages can only spec 1 point in enduring winter, but it looks like blizz is trying to fix that in 3.2.

Reguardless, some flavor of 18/0/53 is the accepted best DPS spec. You do have some flexibility in how you spend those points though. There are only about 47 "core talents" in the frost tree - although you need to spend 50 to get through maxing out chilled in the bone with 1 point in Enduring Winter (52 points with 3 points in Enduring Winter). So there are a few non-dps talents in the frost side that worth taking. The 18 on the arcane side is debateable too. If you take Brain Freeze on the frost side, then put 3 points in spell impact. Otherwise put 3 points into student of the mind.

I'm not sure how [student of the mind] compares to [ice flows] in terms of DPS. Both are very marginal. RAWR doesn't seem to be modeling ice floes at all, but I do get about an additional 25 DPS with my gear when I swap from 18/0/53 to 20/0/51.

RAWR does calculate Brain Freeze as a DPS gain (at least with my gear - BiS Naxx-25 and a few Ulduar-25 pieces), although spell impact is about 1 DPS less than student of the mind. RAWR is telling me the best Frost Mage DPS build is 19/0/52, but that's assuming they fix the replenishment bug in 3.2 (feel free to move that 1 point in improved blizzard around too).


**edit**
Since we have had a lot of changes in 3.08 and 3.1 - maybe its time to start this thread over? It's a bit much to ask someone to read through almost 40 pages of stuff to get the info that can fit on one page. Lots of stuff in the first 10 pages is obsolete now anyway.

Here's a discussion on raiding with frost in Ulduar (EU Mage Forum), which then evolved into a "what to do to fix frost" discussion".

World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> Frost in Raids, viable or not?

The WoWWiki page on mage specs includes a bit of information on frost as well (I contributed some of the information):

Mage builds - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

I was tempted to start up a new thread on "what to do with frost" a while back, but frost discussions aren't really welcomed with open arms here, so I've held back and actually also cut down on posting ideas & replying to ideas other people post.

I'm still going with the idea of using Spirit as a way to help with dps increase. Currently in my Ulduar gear, I have between 805 and 811 Spirit Raid buffed. I was looking at a high-end Human frost mage pvper in my battle group, Reroute. I wanted to get a Human because of the Human racial as well to see what the high-end spirit would be on a pvper. If I gave her mark, Kings, and Spirit, she would be at 356 Spirit. Now what I'm thinking of is to convert spirit into Haste or Crit rating, most likely Haste. If we converted just 25% of our spirit to haste, in PvE, (going with the 805 Spirit), I would gain 6.1% Haste (about 24.13% Haste). While in PvP, they would gain 2.71% Haste (about 14.15% haste). We could move around the percentage but I'm just throwing out ideas here.

Or even treat it as a crit multiplier of some form. Something like convert 1% of your spirit into Critical % on your Frostbolt, Icelance, and fireball crits. For PvE, that would equate to a 6-9% Crit Multiplier, but for PvP, that would equate to 1.8-3.6% Crit Multiplier. But since most people would be less likely to be crit, that crit mulitplier wouldn't matter much.

This thread has gotten very bloated and has several pages of outdated information. This thread goes back to the 3.0 beta days. With the signifigant changes in 3.08 (Torment the Weak) and 3.1 (Spirit = DPS) it was due for a re-write.

I'll post the re-write in a new thread, but if someone would like to merge my changes back into the opening of this thread - feel free