I sit about about 2250 spell power and 700 haste (unbuffed). I generally consider spell power = haste, and crit is 1/2 of that. But I'm also at the point where I'm staring to push some soft caps on both crit and haste. When we have blood lust, Icy Veins and everything else popping, I can hit 1.0 sec frostbolts. Fun, but that does tell me that I'm getting close to whatever the soft cap actually is.

I'd suspect once you get to BiS T9.5, then you may be at the point of diminishing returns on haste.

I have never bothered with flamestrike - pure blizzard on trash. I suppose I've never really tested it though. My thought would be that the sooner you start blizzard the sooner you start chaining together the frostbite procs and that's better DPS than the burn effect from starting with a flamestrike.

I have never been a fan of the FoF ghost proc's. I do however spec into brainfreeze and do what I can for brainfreeze shatters. I only toss out ice lances when I'm moving for an extended periond of time (like the Heigan dance). For short movements like getting around Yogg's clouds I'll try to save my brain freeze, but I'm pretty much in position after 1 or 2 GCDs have passed. (If I don't have a brain freeze proc stored up I will of course Ice Lance insteand and hope for a proc - but that's pretty situational.) For me I think a lot of it is slowdown in my reaction speed compounded by lag that just doesn't make Ice Lance worthwhile. It seems like I have about a 1.6 second frostbolt, and I can pretty much put one on the target every 1.6 seconds. I don't feel like the 150-200ms latency I have really impacts my pure frostbolt spam. But everytime I switch to an instant (Brain Freeze, Ice Lance or even Fire Blast) it chains onto my last cast correctly, but then I end with a bigger delay in getting back to my frostbolt spam (i.e. 1 sec GCD + 200ms Latency + reaction speed).

IMO, there is only one solution to frost DPS with the current tree and 3.X mechanics, and it doesn't lie in the frost spells sadly enough.

The problem with frostbolt is making it more powerful would encourage a pure frostbolt spam. Stand still, blow frostbolt after frostbolt after frostbolt, and top those charts. This however isn't what Blizzard (or most players for that matter) want. It's boring, brainless, and just too easy. We need other spells.

The problem with ice lance is adjusting the damage (at least to the point to make frost competitive in raids) would give frost a stupidly good advantage in PvP. The glyph of ice lance is a decent step, but I think ice lance is fundamentally broken from a design standpoint to be any good for PvE without having a major impact on PvP, or having wonky mechanics affecting it. Sadly enough, it needs to be ignored for the purposes of PvE.

Now, this leaves us with no frost spells to boost or modify, so what should Blizzard do? Well, Blizzard, through brain freeze, has given frost mages access to another spell in their rotation. I think this is where the answer lies. Give the brain freeze talent this: "and any fireballs cast using this talent have their damage increased by X%/Y%/Z%." I don't know what numbers would go towards pushing frost in the right range of DPS. They may need to increase the damage of those fireballs by as much as 20%/40%/60% or even 33%/66%/100% to get frost DPS to where it should be. As well, perhaps the DOT length could be modified to produce better DPS.

The problem with this is, this would give frost PvP that major instacast nuke we were trying to avoid with ice lance, even if it is a completely RNG one (as opposed to being able to use frost nova and nuke with lance in PVP). To prevent this, I have put in the brain freeze fireballs "unable to crit" clause. This rather sucks, but if you had these monsterous instacast fireballs critting for stupid amounts in PvP, that would be too much, especially looking at ignite. The way I have proposed, you just spam frostbolt and wait until you have brain freeze up, but no fingers of frost, and let loose the fireball. Having instant castable solid, reliable damage seems like the fix frost needs, at least until 4.0 changes come sweeping through. As well, having the DOT from fireball on the target (if it would also be increased by this talent) could go quite a ways towards fixing frost DPS.

Another proposal could be to make the talent use Frostfire Bolt. Maybe something could be done talent wise with increasing the DOT length and/or damage. Then the focus could be on using procs of brain freeze only to keep the frostfire bolt dot up. Here's how the frostfire bolt version of the talent could read and function: Gives your frost spells a X%/Y%/Z% (or ppm) chance to cause your next Frostfire Bolt to be instant cast, but incapable of a crit. As well, the damage over time portion of your Frosfire Bolt is inceased by 2/4/6 seconds, and the damage is increased by X%/Y%/Z%." The DOT increase could be held in another talent for the simplicity of the tooltip if needed (Winter's Chill?). The talent should be made (since it is incapable of a crit) to not consume fingers of frost charges.

Overall this seems like a more intuitive and smoother change to how frost would function, giving us a nice DOT and using a half frost spell (as well as making use of the underused frostfire bolt in top DPS rotations). You would still (like the above example) spam frostbolt until a brain freeze proc, and wait until the DOT falls off and use it. This style could also lead to other interesting things, like having ice lance do slightly more damage to targets with the frosfire bolt DOT on them. This would make for a more normal style of DPS for frost mages, and give more incentive to a slight setting up situation in PVP, making focusing on one target and getting off all your spells more important (a lost frostfire bolt would mean loss of a good DOT and ice lance damage).

As well, frostfire bolt already has some scaling in the frost tree, so why not put it to good use? Since frostbolt scales better than frostfire bolt's initial damage (through the empowered frostbolt talent) and its incapability of critting, the chance of this spell becoming a meganuke is nil, and I have intentionally made this not work with ignite to prevent a massive set of DOTs being applied to a target with one instacast. As well, since the damage bonus only applies when it's cast with a brain freeze proc, frostfire bolt wouldn't become the main spam spell (as well as the whole DOT clipping component). I'm not quite sure if the DOT or the entire instacast frostfire bolt should get the damage bonus, but that would be more up to the people balancing the talent to find that sweet spot either way.

My apologies if any of this is incredibly far off. I'm not 100% familiar with endgame mechanics from all classes, and mages are one I'm rather new to, and this is only from reading expierence only, not actual level 80 raiding mage expierence.

I agree that brain freeze would one of the talents to boost for PvE. In particular, what needs to be improved is the critical strike damage from brain freeze fireballs.

This actually works really well for PvP balancing as well, because fireballs are extremely unlikely to crit in PvP. If you have a chance to shatter in PvP, you are more likely to use it on an ice lance and save the brain freeze proc for extra damage after the shatter. In PvE, frost mage fireballs will typically have a 50+% chance to crit, but on targets with resilience in PvP, the chance is a whole lot lower (maybe as low as 10%?).

So my suggestion has been to make brain freeze fireball crits have a scaling DOT component that scales based on your spirit.

I think with 2-3 talent changes, frost would be fine in both PvP and PvE.

Currently frost suffers from very poor scaling. Due to our passive (talented) crit buffs, taking additional crit or spirit (which is converted into crit) on our gear helps very little and as we approach higher and higher amounts its relative value diminishes. When you compare this fire/frostfire specs that scale exponentially with crit it seems pretty rediculous.

Haste scales well for us because we don't have to worry about the loss of mana, but we're already approaching some soft caps for haste as well. Once you get above about 700 unbuffed haste rating then in conditions with icy veins and bloodlust used together you hit the GCD limit on frostbolts.

The only way I see to fix this is to give us something that scales exponentially. This is easily done by giving a buff that happens every time something happens. Then as you inprove your haste, you make that effect happen more often. If you make it scale with crit as well (like pyroblast), then you can improve your scaling with both crit and haste at the same time.

Rather than just add more DPS to one of our current spells which has impacts on PvP, I'd like to tie it to the WE. Increasing its uptime (so long as we provide it with more mana as well) will help our raid DPS nicely now that there aren't a lot of raid encounters that kill pets, but it could be done in such a way to limit any impact, if any, to PvP.

Back in the old thread I suggested chaning the old Improved Water Elemental spell. Instead of adding 5/10/15 seconds to uptime per point, it could be changed to provide an additional 1/2/3 seconds of uptime per frostbolt crit. In PvP you don't generally take more than 1 point in the talent anyway (Enduring Winter now), but even if you did you wouldn't land enough frostbolt crits to make it worthwhile. Even if you tried, the WE generaly can be killed quickly anyway. But for PvE in the span of it's initial lifespan you can chain together several frostbolt crits to keep it alive much longer. And in that amount of time, you'd extend it further. In something like a stand and nuke patchwerk fight you'd keep if up full time which would be around a 15% DPS buff overall (more for long fights, less for short ones). This would help by giving us a talent that actually scales with both haste and crit combined.

It's not hard to come up with other relatively simple ways to improve our scaling without impacting PvP performance and without introducing new abilities. But Blizz has directly stated that Frost PvE performance isn't a priority for them. We already have 2-3 other specs that work well.

That's where I was headed in the direction of the brain freeze swap to FFB. If the DOT scaled a little better, and then you did something like a warlock where once the dot was down it would give you some sort of buff, that would indeed be a very good way to make frost scale correctly. However, like was previously mentioned, hitting crit and haste softcaps is an incredibly bad thing in a sense. This means we need to look for scaling elsewhere besides just a pure stat conversion talent. I certainly think using FFB or FB with brain freeze (maybe not just giving them the damage buff to make up the % of DPS we are behind. I didn't have all the information to run the numbers and see how much it would take... sheesh) and some added adjustments, frost could be a fun and good DPS spec. As it stands now though, anyone who raids frost you can pretty much point and laugh at unless your raid is in dire need of replen.

I agree with Livhera though. We may just have to sit the tail end of 3.X out (and it's coming close) and scoff at our arcane raid specs and frost PVP offspecs until 4.0 and pray the massive array of changes brings about something to be desired in the frost raiding enviroment. I don't see blizzard implementing any suggestion, even if it is great, this late in the game.

As well, running some calculations myself, I don't see how ice lancing on every FoF proc is not a DPS increase. I saw it somewhere buried in this thread last night at 2 AM if I remember correctly in my sleepless haze, but I can't seem to find it again. Links to any parses or information besides theoretical spreadsheet runs would be greatly appreciated.

I think there's room for an overall 2-4% DPS increase from brain freeze crits. It certainly wouldn't buff frost enough on its own, but it's clear that if frostbolt damage increases any further, the brain freeze also needs to go up or we really do end up with a frostbolt spam spec. I think brain freeze combined with trying to fish for FoF ghost charges makes a decent (if somewhat unfair) "skill" component for frost - the scaling from that skill component just needs to be better than it is now (higher reward for actually making use of ghost FoF charges).

The rest could come from better scaling (pet included) and possibly even a new spell mechanic. The spell mechanic could be something like a stacking damage increase debuff from deep freeze, which wouldn't affect PvP significantly, but would increase frost damage significantly on longer fights where you can use more than just two deep freezes on the target.

If I had to place odds on frost buffs, I would say 10% chance of getting a proper overhaul for 3.3, 30% chance of getting "crumbs" (tiny changes) and 50% chance of no changes and 10% chance of getting nerfed.

I have almost stopped posting ideas on this forum, because it just doesn't seem very productive. A lot of ideas have been posted and yet Ghostcrawler has said that classes that feel that they have an issue should talk about the issues rather than propose solutions. I think our tendency to post ideas comes from the repeated statements from GC that they would like to fix frost, but do not know how. In our eagerness to solve a problem Blizzard has been unable (or unwilling) to solve, we forget that they do not want to hear our ideas.

Thanks for the kind words. I came up with the deep freeze debuff idea several months ago. It requires a spell change (new spell mechanic code), so i haven't pushed it as hard as before.

A debuff that takes a GCD to apply and does no damage on its own also adds a decision-making process. You have to figure out if the target is going to stay up long enough for you to catch up with the lost GCD (and lost FoF proc). That's why the duration needs to be long enough: one lost GCD every 30 seconds is already an up to 5% damage loss (with zero haste). If you risk it and apply it on a FoF ghost charge, you don't lose any FoF damage potential.

If the debuff per stack is a 3%/6%/10% (or 4%/8%/12%) damage increase (maybe as increased crit damage rather than straight up damage), then once you have three stacks up (within ~45 seconds of entering combat), further refreshes of the debuff are worth much more. It might make sense to make the duration of the debuff really long (like 2 minutes), so that you wouldn't have to worry so much about luck (getting FoF procs to apply it) and you could also reliably keep it up on two different targets.

Let's try and see what the tooltip for the spell would look like:

"Stuns and freezes the target for 5 sec. In addition, the target becomes brittle for the next 2 minutes (15 seconds on PvP targets), increasing the damage of your critical strikes by 10% for one debuff, 20% for two stacks and 30% for three stacks. Only usable on Frozen targets."

A fully debuffed target then has a 2.717 crit modifier for frost spells (2.09 * 1.3). Assuming a 64% chance to crit (frost soft cap), the DPS increase is (64% * 2.717 + 36% * 1) / (64% * 2.09 + 36% * 1) = 123.6%. However, that's with a ramp-up time of around 45-60 seconds even when you use cold snap and it means you have spent three GCDs and FoF charges for the ramp-up and have to keep using one GCD and FoF in less than every two minutes (per target).

I'm tempted to implement this in SimulationCraft and see how it would affect our DPS. Based on the calculations above, I think it would put frost neatly where it should be on boss DPS.

I would also put a spirit scaling component on brain freeze crits - just to make spirit more useful to frost and help keep brain freeze an interesting talent.