I'm not sure i'd consider it "overpowered", because other classes can easily beat us on the meters, but yeah, it will probably be the dominant raiding spec for some time. I'm just happy that we're not in a situation where mages get benched because of inferior dps/raid buffs as was the case for many mages in TBC.

I'd add another point of contention:

* When is Rune of Razorice is better than Rune of the Fallen Crusader?

In particular, the Razorice debuff is 5% frost vulnerabiliy (not 10%, outdated tooltip) and stacks on top of everything.
It affects all damage that includes Frost, that includes Frostfire and whatever might get added some day.

If the 2% extra frost damage (not the debuff, but the extra frost damage on attacks) works on strikes (and not just auto-attacks), then it's breaks even with 1 mage and is a buff with 2 mages or more.


For points 2/3, Nova/CoC.
Nova/Cone scale very slightly worse than Blizzard for DPS due to a small snare/root penalty (5% or 10% I think).
If you can get Nova/CoC shatter combos off before other damage breaks the nova, it's a gain.
But only if the mobs spawn in front of you and won't gib you. If you have to run to them, it's a loss.

What is the most elegant solution to allow Heavy Frost-spec Frostfire DPS be more competitive to Heavy Fire-spec Frostfire? Is there a way to easily change/add a few deep-frost talents to make it happen, or would it require major tree redesigns? Perhaps just adding a few 5-point-heavy deep frost talents aimed at Frostfire - and if you intended to be a deep frostbolt mage you would just skip them.

I agree with the sentiment of your post fully. I would rather stay Frost/Arc and be able to be more competitive with Frostfire, than be heavy-fire again simply because the alternatives just aren't bright enough. And with so many speccing 0 53 18 only 2 weeks into WOTLK, its an issue.

We understand that frost/deep-frost frostfire might be intended to be a lower DPS for its utility and survivability, thats fine. But surely not to the extent they are now? Perhaps making deep-frost Frostfire specs more competitive is lower on their priority list than 'help pure frost spec dps, fix arcane issues', but I do hope it's something they intend to consider. Ideally I would love to see Frostfire more competitive in a deep-frost spec, even if the cost of losing some of your frost utility, like the fantastic Imp Blizzard.

I was under the impression that the OP was more concerned about arcane and frost not being viable pve dps options for us rather then being able to do a frost-centric frostfire build. Looking at how it is now, I think the reason frostfire builds focus on the fire tree is because the talents benefit frostfire in addition to fireball most of the time. If you look at the counter talents in frost, they usually just buff frostbolt only and don't work with frostfire. Empowered fireball vs empowered frostbolt etc.

Frostfire seems like it should be an elemental spell dealing a combo fire/frost damage, but at it's core seems primarily still designed as a fire spell.

Yes, it was - but that was just another point I wanted to bring up. I always considered Frostfire as a great opportunity to open up deep-frost builds to be more competitive in raid settings, yet still allow people to keep the frost playstyle. Not simply have FFB as a 'another way to spec deep fire and do great dps' spell. We already had fireball to do that.

Frostfire mages are still essentially TBC fire mages with LB/HS and a fancy new crit modifier. Frost is still 'there', but its just not shining enough. Not much has changed from TBC yet, in this regard.

I was looking over gear choices today, and it got me thinking about trinkets a lot. Here's what I see as the top 5 right now:

[Embrace of the Spider]
[Sundial of the Exiled]
[Dying Curse]
[Item not found!] (Timbal's 2.0)
[Illustration of the Dragon Soul] (Darkmoon Card: Crusade 2.0)

The first three are pretty straightforward in terms of modeling dps. The third is obviously only better if you are lacking the hit rating. The latter two really depend on a lot of things. I can see the Illustration of the Dragon Soul being best situationally, much like the Darkmoon Card was (depending on dps uptime). I can't recall if it works with every spell, but being able to start the fight off with 3-4 charges just from cooldown macros would be useful too.

The Extract of Necromatic Power, however, seems really up in the air. Because of lack of time, I used the recorded number of DoT ticks on our Patchwerk last week (21 Frostfire, 58 Ignite, 42 Pyro, 64 Living Bomb, 185 ticks total over 226 seconds). If my math is correct, this rate means it would proc every 12.2 seconds on average (no internal cooldown, correct?) for average 2200 damage, and when you factor in crit (not sure whether it gets multipliers from CSD or 4 piece t7), the proc part alone would be really good. In speculation, I think it would scale really well with more crit. More crit means more ignite uptime, more pyroblast uptime, and the more we cast pyroblast, the more time we have for Frostfire ticks in between refreshes.

I'm sure I will be attempting some more theorycrafting on these in the future, but I figured I would throw them out for discussion now.

Illustration stacks 4 times each scorch if it's glyphed because it counts each application of the scorch debuff. It really doesnt have build up time and if it does drop its easy to restack, you can also start any fight with 10 stacks from using slow fall.

It's true but it seems that the FFB is very reliant on crit rate and the fact is that with Frost spec we have a big lack of crit talents.

There is an internal cooldown on the proc, a frostfire mage tested it on patchwerk and had 4 procs over the whole fight.
This trinket is just as bad as Timbal was, even worst since the passive stat is crit rating.

Doesn't proc on impact, it proc on spell cast , any cast, even item (can proc when you summon your mount, during buff, when gathering herbs).

Does [Sundial of the Exiled]'s cooldown stack with [Embrace of the Spider]'s ?

If not, I would assume that would apply to [Dying Curse] as well?

And if that's the case, I'm not sure what to put in the second trinket slot.

You can proc both at the same time (and that's often the case early in the fight due to very high proc rate and the same internal cooldown).

It's really a simple matter of latching Frostfire Bolt onto the Empowered Frostbolt talent. 'course then Frostbolt is kinda obsolete, but ya know.... is that really so bad?

I don't think so. I mean, it's the same deal with fireball right now.

I respecced to 51/17 (as im only 77) last night before a run through Zul Aman as i was eager to try the FFB spec. I was a little aprehensive at first, iv usually been full frost and adored the immense damage from blizzard AoE, but was plesantly suprised to see that a FFB spec actually still complements frost AoE. Im considering putting my last 3 points in frost for a 51/20 spec, i cant see the need for BS, DB or BW. Surely points Frost Channeling and Shatter would be more useful. As you can see on my armory link im not exaclty high geared but still had 1.6k dps and was top of the damage charts. One thing i was concerned about was the guilds pally tank being second on the damage list, he is currently stacking strength instead of spellpower and his threat gen and damage have gone through the roof! Also i would like to ask what glyphs currently are most favored for FFB spec, i currently have scorch glyph and fire blast glyph (useless for bosses). Thanks for the work manly, found it a very useful thread.

I only use combustion after casting living bomb, when my imp scorch has 17+ seconds remaining, (the 17 seconds is so I don't have to waste any 2pct7 time casting a scorch.) I usually get my 3 crits out of the way in those 5 FFBs (thanks to just enough passive haste) before LB detonates. But even though there are times when LB will use a combustion charge, I don't recommend leaving LB off while you wait for combustion to do it's RNG thing. I imagine that all the extra LB ticks, and potentially an extra explosion in the long run, make up for the lost damage.

Also, has anyone else been pulling agro off tanks with the initial combustion at the start of a fight? I'll wait till the tank is actually meleeing the mob to do my two scorches, then LB, generally one of my two trinkets will proc, combustion / Mirror image and pull agro about 15 seconds later. At the very beginning of wotlk I got it in my mind that it was no longer possible to pull agro considering the threat (and damage for that matter) that tanks were doing, but it seems my tps is going up faster than theirs. Are my tanks just bad?

And this is probably in the wrong thread but wtf is the deal with mirror image, I swear to god sometimes I'll summon them and they will just have agro instantly. Got the raid breathed on a couple of times in The Obsidian Sanctum, even though I was pretty low on threat when I cast it. He didn't even come after me when the images died from the breath, just turned right back onto the tank. Just a buggy fight? Buggy spell?

Only fights I've noticed any aggro-issues is on fights where I can get boosts (like 50% on malygos). I put up LB if I have to move inn, scorch from the getgo, unleash trinket IV combustion and nuke from the start. Though admittadly I've never done over 3500 dps without fightspesific boosts (eg malygos spark) or BL.

They inherit your threat, but you (as in the actual player character) won't have any for 30s. So, if you overaggo during Malygos's Vortex and try to escape with Mirror Image, he will turn around and breath on the images, quite likely killing you and others as well.

* Taking BW, DB can be worthless if you have already given some points in Frostbite and Imp. Blizzard. It can also be acceptable to put some points in Shatter for extra AoE damage. But from my point of view two talents you said you already missed should be taken; Burning Soul and Frost Channeling. -10% mana cost of all spells + -10% fire threat reduction means more than a lot while raiding. Ofc, this is imo.

* Again, I would suggest 3 major glyphs from what I have read so far.
- Glyph of Molten Armor (+2% crit) (which can be traded for Glyph of Mage Armor if you are having mana issues. But a mage with enough mana pool should go for Molten Armor imo)
- Glyph of Improved Scorch (3 applications of Imp.Sc. applied by only casting 1 Scorch)
- Glyph of Frostfire (+2% damage, +2% crit with no penalties)

* Minor glyphs I am using now are mostly for fun, which are:
- Glyph of Slow Fall (Removes Light Feather consumption)
- Glyph of Penguin (It is fun to see penguins walking on ice :P)
- Glyph of Arcane Intellect (which also works for dalaran intellect and so. It is very useful imo where you need to rebuff in the middle).

It isn't just this. I've cast mirror image before on Heigan and had Heigan immediately bee-line for one of them, kill it then go back to the tank. I don't know whether they have an "auto taunt" feature that is kicking in when they are summoned or something, but they can grab aggro for no apparent reason right now.

They also seem to have the life expectancy of a chocolate teapot in 99% of raids, which is something I hope Blizzard take a look at. If it wasn't for the fact you can macro the cast to not lose you any casting time, I'm not sure I would even bother summoning them on most fights, as it's so rare for them to last the full duration in raids.

Its pretty simple. Mirror Image (spell) gives you -9000000 threat for 30s, making your images ~100 threat (or whatever low amount) surpass your own. If you cast a spell at a ranged target (not in range of images) while MI is up, the mob will attack you first (since your images aren't on the target' threat list at that point) until any one of them deals any damage/is affected by the targets aoe effects. In short, as soon as your images are on the targets threat list, they should have more threat than you.

Now the odd part I'm not sure about is that I expect the images to inherit my threat since the combatlogs seem to indicate so. However, and this is the weird part, if I pull a mob with lots of threat, then the images get aggro as soon as they do any damage. However, the weird part is that if you can follow up with again a lot of threat, sometimes you can pull aggro off your images. This isn't something I expect, but thats what happens.

FWIW, the MI will not attack mobs that are spawning but not yet aggressive (for example, stay near a mob that just spawned, it wont attack you for 5 seconds). They do attack anything that can attack you it seems.


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Also, I'd love to see more information about flamestrike and downranking. Does it really work if you do R9 & R8 one of top of the other ? I tried and it wasn't exactly clear whether or not it was actually working. Also, if it does work, what ranks are optimum considering lower ranks have 2s cast times ?


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On another unrelated note, I tried Scorchio2 and was woefully underwhelmed. 1- Theres no option to move the bars. 2- Like the old scorchio, quite unfortunately it track your scorch on all targets, which honestly only clutters up the UI rather than prove useful for 99% of cases. I only want to see the scorch for my target, I couldn't possibly care less about trying to figure out which scorch amongst the list of scorch targets is the one matching my current target (seriously). Tracking Living Bomb on multipler target is a+ OK since I can't have more than one living bomb at a time, now thats a feature I'm happy to see. 3- Slow to refresh. I mean, I understand it reads from the combatlog, but its painfully obvious that EBB picks up tracking far faster than scorchio does -- its not even close. Also, although I'm unsure if it does this, but I wonder if it shows winter's chill if its up (another reason why multi-mob scorch tracking is a bad idea).

I guess I'll go back to EBB2, my outdated version that almost got it all right.

That doesn't explain why they get aggro on a raid boss when I'm easily 50K+ threat below the tank. Unless the mechanic is that they gain an amount of threat equal to yours + enough to take them over the mob you have targetted's current target. That could account for it - if you cast mirror image, the images have more threat than the tank and the tank moves out of combat range for a second. (easily possible on Heigan, the boss where I've seen this happen twice now).

You can definitely move it. I moved mine to where I want it.

It does track your target by making debuffs on other mobs more transparent than your target one so its not hard to see.

I am not sure its scorchio that is slow to update. I have found I have to refresh scorch on mobs earlier than I did pre wotlk for some reason. Seems if I refresh with under 1 second left it falls off even after the scorch lands. Seen this from scorchio and Xperl display showing scorch falling off after a scorch lands. Might need to fraps it or something to show it happening.