Frost DPS needs to increase by about 20% -- that would put it about 6% behind Arcane and about 5% behind Fire. Fireball makes up about 8% of our damage. Brain freeze would have to increase Fireball damage by about 250% to achieve the 20% increase. That's obviously impossible for PvP reasons.

Until Cataclysm allows for significant changes to the trees, it is impossible to make Frost raid-viable without significant buffs to Frostbolt. And of course any buff to Frostbolt makes the required buffs to other spells to make them worth using even larger than now.

Personally, at this point, I expect (and am fairly content) to wait for Cataclysm for changes to Frost PvE. It's a golden opportunity to do things right and make the spec work the way they want it to.

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.

I just wanted to quote this to emphasize it, as I think it has a very nice idea for both buffing damage and adding at least slightly more variability to the frost mage rotation (as did the earlier suggestions of nudging ice lance/FoF and brain freeze damage up so it's at least a slight increase over frost bolt spam). But this is the first time I'd seen the Deep Freeze suggestion.

A stacking damage debuff from Deep Freeze is a fabulous idea. The mechanic seems sound as a way to A) not muck with PvP too much, B) provide a frost-specific buff, and C) make frost's 51 point talent actually useful in PvE. It also means it's something besides icy veins/water elemental cooldowns that you have to keep an eye on.

While I think that Tiga's and others' feelings of despondency over providing new suggestions are warranted, it's still nice to see new ideas out there... and you never know which ones might somehow make it onto a developer's palette.

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.