You're neglecting the basic linear decay components of these stats, not even accounting for FoF (which decays crit even further).

100 haste = 100/3279 * 1/(1+haste). At the 629 haste value mentioned, that's a 2.56% DPS increase.

100 crit = 100/4591 * 1/(1/1.09 + crit chance) if we have CSD but not 4T7. 12.66% ordinary crit + 5% Emp. FB + 10% WC/Scorch = 27.66% as a conservative estimate (because we could definitely have, say, Moonkin Aura, and we're not even considering FM uptime). The other thing to consider is FoF: for Frostbolt spam, this effectively increases crit chance by about 13% if I recall (I did this somewhere, but for the life of me, searching for it has proved difficult). So, let's pick a nice round number of 40% crit, maybe 43% or 45% with Molten on? That yields a 1.59% DPS increase, such that crit has 62% of the value of haste for Frostbolt spam.

The basic point is that there is much, much more crit out there to get from raid buffs and effects, and most of the haste effects we see stack multiplicatively with gear-based haste, so they don't decay it.

I was reading some Blue posts about BM Hunters, and I noticed this:
It got me a little worried, considering the complete lack of rotations that Frost Mages have.

It's also a bit ironic, seeing as the TtW change, which made Frost do far more competitive damage on bosses, also removed much of the complexity for most Frost Mages.

I think keeping the pet alive implies some "complexity", although it doesn't come into play in a lot of fights. I think there's skill involved in doing AOE without getting killed.

Brain Freeze is the logical talent to leave out if you go TTW and it does indeed leave a pure frostbolt spam spec once you do that. You even give up your rank 1 frostbolt if you glyph frostbolt and you also lose a big chunk of your kiting & control abilities if you go 18 points into arcane. To me, that's a far more boring spec than what I have now, but it's clearly meant to be the frost raiding spec (including glyph).

The "nonqq" thread also contains the following comment:

I think frost mages can hope that there's something glimmering on the horizon. Then again, you never know.

Just wanted to give a WWS of a raid with me as 18/0/53 and the other mage as Frostfire.
Lhivera asked for frost wws's.

4600 is still very low compared to what arcane and FFB specs will do. Your entire raid has terrible dps in general which is why you are on top.

No reason to make someone feel bad for providing data. Assuming the guild is comparably geared, it at least gives us a data point that says "at this gear level, Frost is/is not holding its own".

The "all bosses" result, however, does put the Frost Mage 15% lower than the FFB Mage, and that's including at least one early death by the FFB Mage.

I disagree with this to an extent. A 2 min 15 sec non-moving fight is not an optimal way to gauge Frost vs. Spec XYZ.

1. 2'15" is a short fight. Frost's strengths come from its longevity which is another reason why it is not particularly good in WotLK so far, all the fights are short and easy.
2. Frost, while having CD's, isn't as CD heavy as Arcane or FFB specs. Short fights obviously favor these CD heavy specs since they get the most out of their CDs w/o facing an extended "no CD" period.
3. I would be willing to bet that future fights will be longer than 2'15". This makes a parse of this length much less than optimal when evaluating the usage of Frost as a viable pve spec for future raids.

We can all agree that Frost sucks for Patchwerk. More parses to show how far behind on Patchwerk Frost is doesn't do much for anyone. I think fights like Kel'Thuzad, Malygos, and Sarth 3D are likely to be more similar to Ulduar encounters.

Sorry wasn't trying to make the guy feel bad, just pointing out the other classes in his raid aren't doing anywhere near what they should be. Taking a look at the gear on some of them they must be clueless as to how to play their class so I don't think its a good comparison vs other classes/specs, but I wasnt trying to comment negatively on the frost mage himself.

How about we focus on what's wrong, instead of how to fix it? We'll just tank the thread arguing over assertions like this.

Don't forget about Loatheb's crit-fest. That skews the numbers quite a bit, especially with regard to FFB, and shows Frost's relatively poor crit scaling.

I do not know if it is of any interest to you guys but here goes.

I changed my build from http://web.comhem.se/~u43490656/WoW/Moder.xml to a frost including Torment of the Weak. That gave med 400 more DPS. Yesterday I tried out the 57/3/11 arcane build in Naxx 25.

My DPS was in the range of 1500-5400. Over the whole session I was about 3400. I havent really gotten the spell rotation perfected and used Glyph of Mage Armor since I was afraid of running out of mana. My gear is by no means fantastic and I am stunned by the DPS increase.

Here is a possibly useful data point for frost.

PUG Heroic Archavon WWS

4 Mages on the kill - 3 frost (including me) and 1 arcane.

My Armory
Decompose's Armory (the Arcane Mage)

He has a chunk better gear than me in quite a few slots, but has some interesting gemming choices. I have no idea what his skill is like - never grouped or raided with him before.

I don't know if he was flasked or not. I was not, nor did I pop a haste pot during the fight. I got hit with stones a couple times (including one that killed my mirror images 2 seconds after I popped them), and charged by Archavon once, forcing me to move out of the cloud. I also died right as he did (I was just after the tank on agro). The mage I had Focused died right at the start of the fight, but I didn't realize until about halfway through, when I dropped it on the nearest healer.

Now, not sure how useful it is, as it was a true PUG, and skill/gearing/class balance is all over the map.

I will try to get better composed WWS Naxx runs for both 10 and 25 this weekend.

I'm not really seeing what you're seeing, Jak. Looking through the Naxx parses, yeah, I see fights where the Frost Mage came out on top, but compared with the number where he fell behind, they're few and far between. It sure looks like on average, Frost is coming out around 15% behind; the few fights where it does much better can't really compensate for that.

Indeed. I wish I had more parses but WWS has been playing havoc on my Malygos and Sartharion fights. But in my experience the 15% is made up on trash because of the AoE pulls. I doubt the state of affairs is acceptable even to Blizzard.

Jak is comparing Frost mages to other classes and specs, not just other Mages. While it is true that Frost is behind Arcane/Fire/FFB; it not not necessarily behind Boomkin, Shadow Priest, Demo Warlocks, Marks Hunters, etc, etc.

I think we have to consider the raid as a whole and Frost really is comparable. It is the lowest DPS spec for a Mage, but not the lowest DPS spec in any given raid. Mages have about 4 different specs to choose from and I suppose one of them has to be lower than the rest, bad luck for frost lovers. I still feel like Frost does O.K., but I too would like to see it moved closer to the other Mage competition.

Focusing on what's wrong with frost as a raiding spec is, well, not going to be that insightful. The factors that are handicapping frost are pretty easy to discern.

1) Not enough dps
2) Monotonous playstyle

The changes to torment did help but are, imo, not enough for most raiders to choose frost. The reasons why Blizz has chosen not to buff frost dps are much less apparent. It's most likely a combination of pvp balance concerns, since frost does really well in that *cough* arena, and low priority.

The changes to arcane show that Blizz can make a demanding playstyle that results in high dps. Blizz, I think, is happy with where frost is or at least doesn't care enough to make it better. It's doesn't matter to them that frost mages are just middle of the pack dps in raids.

i'd much rather see a change in frost's playstyle AND a bigger contribution to raids in a non-dps fashion. The WE's mana regen buff is useful but not significant. Maybe deep freeze could debuff the boss (and only bosses) in ways to decrease damage output. Or buff healing or save someone by providing them with a shield. Regardless, I'd like to see some creative uses for the spec, instead of just a pure dps increase.

Even if we were within 5% of ffb and arc specs, frost would be still relatively boring. Right now arcane provides both pvp and pve viability, and to top it off a fun demanding style.

Frost is seriously lacking in many department.

Heres my take on it, of course it is by no means complete, but at least what I see as woefully wrong (in no order):

1- Frost has a soft-crit cap, because of shatter/FOF. This limits the scaling somewhat of the spec.
2- Frost has far too good aoe. How about less aoe dps more single target dps ?
3- Frost pays a far too hefty dps cost for its raid utility (WC/WE) to be truly desirable vs a boss.
4- Some talents are of truly dubious nature. I am thinking here of Brain Freeze. Sure, better damage-on-the-move is nice, but at least make it work with FFB ? You know, so that you get a talent that scales with the other talent rather than be working on its own isle alone. Look at any other talent, they all cross-multiply each other because its the concept of a tree - every component reinforce each other component.
5- WC and scorch ought to share a common debuff. Would it really kill to have 'WC' lasts longer than 15 seconds ?
6- The playstyle is extremely monotonous in PVE. FOF does not adds any depth to the spec, or makes it any fun. It fails at delivering what every other spec has had: a more dynamic play.

The problem is that I can understand that dps balancing and talent balancing depends on far more than just bosses, and as such frost has it very easy for any solo-farming content. It is extremely enjoyable -- but boy the end result makes it suffer a lot in PVE.

If you can't fix the talents because of the inherent ramifications they would have on solo-content, then how about you make the spec scale based on raid buffs ? Make frost dps scale in a way that it gains a lot from external buffs it can't provide to itself, this way you do not touch the solo-content side of things. You could also rework brain freeze to be something that truly makes your play dynamic rather than feel like an underwhelming buff. You could make FOF be something you want to look out for rather than just passively notice.

The 10% crit AOE debuff is certainly powerful and blizzard can do nice amounts of damage under some circumstances, but an equally geared hybrid destro/demo warlock doing rain of fire is still able to equal my AOE dps without difficulty. That's not accounting the 10% crit debuff, so if we targeted different groups, I'd have the higher DPS.

Even rogues do AOE now, so saying that it would be OK to lower frost AOE to make it possible to increase the single target DPS seems just wrong somehow.

My problem with the frost raiding build is that it involves a glyph that really hurts the kiting ability of the mage. Kiting in raids are part of what make frost interesting in raiding: you get to do more than just DPS stuff. I'd take the frostbolt glyph and just do something completely different that wouldn't have an effect on PvP, but would help on PvE. Blizzard may have tried to kill rank 1 frostbolt, but it's still there on my keybinds.

TTW seems like the ultimate in boring frost specs ever... You lose all the AOE kiting ability you had and the mobility from BF and just gain a bit of mana efficiency and extra DPS in a group setting.

The problem with crit scaling is one of the issues.

The way WoW is designed is that you can't simply stack a single stat and get optimal results. Instead, you have to spread the scaling around to as many stats as possible. The formula could be simplified to something like:

damage = (base1 + stat1) * (base2 + stat2) * (base3 + stat3) * (base4 + stat4) * ...

The exponential cost of stats on items means that the best items have their budget split into several different stats.

As I've said before, I like to look at how much of a given stat I need to gain 1% DPS at any point. If you just stack spell power, the amount you need for 1% gets bigger and bigger and the cost of getting more spell points also goes up because of the non-linear scaling. This means you spread it between spell power and haste, but there's a limit to how much of that is wise and haste really doesn't scale all that well if there's server lag. There's also a very strict cap on spell hit, which you reach very quickly, if you start to use that as a scaling factor instead of getting it "on the side" with otherwise good items. That just leaves crit then and crit scales very badly.

The other part is that frost has too much base crit and base damage. Part of the base damage comes from the water elemental (essentially non-scaling) and some of it comes from frostbolt itself. Frostbolt (and overall frost damage) is balanced around a certain gear level, but because the scale factor for spell power is so low, frost just lags behind after that point. Of course if frostbolt scaled better, you'd end up with a brain freeze talent that actually lowers your DPS, so brain freeze will also need some work if frostbolt is going to hit any harder than it does now.

As I said in my earlier post, the base damage needs to go way down and then the scaling factor can go up. This also works for PvP as long as the gear needs to have resilience and stamina on it, because then you are limited in terms of how much spell power you can stack.

If TTW stays like it is, but it's determined that deep frost (or nearly pure frost) should do better DPS than it does now, then people maxing out will stick with the same TTW build if they can. The way to prevent that is to sprinkle the damage buffs around so that if you max out the damage talents in frost, you can't get to TTW anymore. What this means is that some of the talents that you would currently drop in favor of having TTW would need to contribute to the DPS increase & better scaling.

I think linking improved blizzard with winter's chill would be an intresting idea (and the same thing could be done with the CoC talent). A 25/50/75% chance to apply winter's chill with improved blizzard would sound about right. That way you don't really gain much from just one point, but putting 3 points in there wouldn't make it much worse than it is now.

Frozen core would also be a good candidate even though it's already a pretty nice talent for PvP and PvE (it's just not a DPS talent, so it gets passed in a DPS-centric build).

Deep freeze is of course the #1 talent begging for more PvE utility. It's also one of the talents that are almost guaranteed to be dropped in favor of TTW.

1. Agreed.
2. What about more raid bosses that need AOE instead?
3. This is really just a different way to put the other points.
4. Brain Freeze with FFB will never happen, because then frost wouldl have instant snares in PVP.
5. WC is easier to put on, I guess Blizzard feel the shorter duration is fair recompense.
6. It would be nice to have some extra options, but I quite enjoy the relaxed frost stle to be honest!

The thing is, frost is actually fine for current content anyway, as people have pointed out. Maybe something could be done to improve scaling; but it could be that future content will play to frost's strengths anyway.

(6) Gerryq: you are not alone in liking the current play style.

Maybe Lhivera etc would be satisfied if the "ghost charge" (third charge) of FoF would be legitimate and reliable and there was an actual PvE DPS use for deep freeze. (Say, on an immune target it would "reflect" and somehow buff the casting mage for 15 seconds.)

I use the ghost charges when it's not too laggy, but not normally for ice lance (only fireballs). I only use ice lance on FoF charges if I need to move and the timing works out OK (let's say moving with Grobbulus while my spells are on GCD).

P.S. How to make the third FoF charge legitimate: after the second charge is used, reduce the buff duration to 0.5 seconds, which means you don't have time to cast any cast time spells, but you can easily do an instant cast.

This still wouldn't make the combo a DPS increase. Remember that you're not only trading 60% of a Frostbolt for that cast, you're also sacrificing a chance to re-proc Brain Freeze and Fingers of Frost. It's not a favorable outcome.

Without going into specifics of implementation, what I would want to see is for successfully executing Shatter Combos to be required to produce your best DPS with Frost, by a margin of some 5-10%. It shouldn't be a "I can maybe squeeze an extra 0.5% DPS out if I do this" sort of thing. Somebody who doesn't do it should produce clearly subpar results, just as a Fire Mage who doesn't bother to use his Pyros or keep Living Bomb up should be obvious on the meters.

Achieving this will require more than simply allowing for a "real" third charge; it'll require rebuilding the way Frostbolt and Combos work somewhat. Ghostcrawler's talked about this, only a little but enough that it seems like he may have an idea of how to do it, but unfortunately he considers it a low-priority problem.

I'm just going to pick on a couple of manly's points her since most of them have been gone over quite well thus far.

We've already seen that Blizzard has its collective eye on the spell Blizzard due to it making solo play ridiculously easy (75%+ slow and an AoE). It wouldn't surprise me if this spell is due for more nerfs as well. The fact that a Fire Mage would still consider casting Blizzard for AoE tells me something is off. (No, buffing Flamestrike won't make it better) The wider radius and channeled nature make it superior to the other AoE up front (possibly excepting AE spam from a deep arcane mage, but Blizzard is still better DPM). The way that Blizzard synergizes the frost tree together is exactly the opposite problem facing Brain Freeze.

Brain Freeze (and I would argue Imp WE too) all just sort of throw random elements into the tree that don't really add anything more to the spec. Sure increasing the WE uptime is great, but the mana restore is not powerful enough to replace replenishment (especially given that it won't have 100% uptime). Increasing the utility of the spec is a good idea, I don't think that giving it a replenishment-lite the right one, I personally would like to have seen Brilliance Aura (which could synergize with Replenishment instead of compete with it). Raid leaders looking for extra mana regen will take an SP/Ret/SV hunter over the Frost Mage, and then with replenish covered get an FFB or Arcane mage for the DPS. Brain Freeze specifically could be saved by working with FFB as stated, but I would be afraid that the "shatter combo" of FoF ->Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Free FFB (free 3rd charge on FoF) would be too bursty in PvP and doom the idea to nerfs.

Frost is in a very tough situation currently. I would love to see lots of the PvP only frost talents gain some sort of PvE viability (possibly via tacking on increased damage taken or resilience lowering effects to talents that increase damage to keep them out of PvP). However I don't currently see many places to do this. Frozen core perhaps could get a re-work entirely, or Deep Freeze could get a duration decrease to return some damage to the spell or perhaps deal respectable damage to targets immune to stuns (ie single target boss fights). The second idea might even convince a Frost mage to pay attention to FoF procs if the damage were high enough (and modified by appropriate talents).

Fireballs are "worth it" on the ghost charge of FoF, but it is indeed quite marginal and might even be just a theoretical DPS increase in a tank and spank. Ice lance would obviously have to hit for at least as much as fireball to be worth casting when standing still. The simulation I wrote accounts for fireballs not proccing FoF again and BF still comes out as a minor DPS increase. Given the number of points, it's a good mana efficiency talent and a very nice mobility talent.

If you need to move slightly, you are far better off casting an ice lance on the ghost FoF charge than just moving without casting anything. Casting a frostbolt in that situation is not an option. Frost mages asked for more mobility and while it's nowhere as good as arcane, I'm pretty happy with the mobility talents except that BF would probably need to go to make space for TTW, if I went with that.