If you mean AoE-trash, then remember that Arcane doesn't have any threat-reduction on threat for Blizzard nor for Flamestrike; and Fire doesn't have any threat reduction for Blizzard. So actually Frost spec is the 'safest' on trash except for Arcane mages who stand in melee range.

Fire is probably safer if you use Living Bomb and Flamestrike spam. I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but I think this also does more DPS than Blizzard now.

This is true. I meant it to refer to the original question of using single-target spells during trash clears, I should certainly have specified that.

Last night I ran a bit of ICC10 as Frost with the exception of Rotface, and my DPS / Damage was right about where I expected, even a little lower (though this may have been because I'm not as accustomed to the rotation / movement conventions), with the exception of one fight, Valithria. This may be due to the elemental's propensity to ignore movement-inducing AoE, and would fit with the Warlock coming in second with his Imp.

You would think this would apply to other fights that force movement, i.e. Deathwisper, Marrowgar etc, however on those fights I was at or near the bottom of the charts. I'm not sure how to explain the discrepancy right now, unless it's down to the fact that melee often has to cover more distance during Valithria, switch targets more often, and go without one target to refocus on once adds are down.

Recently my water elemental quit attacking a target unless I keep mashing his 'cast' button.
Also if I push his cast button he will not cast unless I have already cast my damage spell.
I have the glyph to keep him up. I think the problem started after I glyphed. This happens even if he is 'aggressive'.
I tried turning off my outdated addons and it did not help.
Any ideas?

Simply add /cast waterbolt to all your macros. This will force the elemental to cast continuously when spamming your buttons. As proved on the warlock forum, this also increases the number of casts as opposed to autocasting, assuming it works as intended.

I suspect "Pancreas" somehow managed to turn off autocast on waterbolt. Adding /cast waterbolt increases the elemental DPS slightly, but it should be casting waterbolts even when you are not casting.

Tip: if you want your water elemental damage to be attributed to you on World of Logs, feed the elemental a pet snack of some kind (mammoth treats or kibbler's bit etc) and it will be correctly recognized as your pet.

An earlier statement made by Ghostcrawler was that the "Cannot apply debuff while a more powerful version is active" issue should not be dealt with by the game, but by players through social means, ie. coordinating it so only the most powerful version is casted. The statment you're quoting was in response to Lhivera's question, which was what they plan to do with Winter's Chill.

Winter's chill/Improved Scorch/Improved Shadowbolt are unique in that none of them are optional talents (their "selfish bonus" makes them required for min/maxing)m but they all apply the same debuff type. This means that frost mages will constantly overwrite the 5% debuffs from scorch or ISB with their 1% stack of winter's chill, causing more harm than good.

The obvious fix to this is to simply make winter's chill a single 5% stack upon application, as stated.

Understood. What I am saying is that they are making Winter's Chill...a far easier debuff to apply, and keep applied. That is of course if it stays in it's current form, and is applied by every Frost spell.

It is not a wise idea to assume that everything will stay the same in Cataclysm except what they've told us. A more reasonable belief is that Winter's Chill will be changed in more than one way... 5% on first stack, and maybe it will only be applied when we use Blizzard or Deep Freeze. Complete speculation... so don't worry about it yet.

At what point (number of targets) does Brain Freeze/Blizzard become higher DPS than straight Blizzard (assuming 2pT10). The 12% haste on the blizzard is a notable improvement, but I'm uncertain if it's ever worth it. I suspect it would be for 3 targets... but 4? 5? 8? Rawr doesn't seem to model this rotation.

They haven't indicated that the application of Winter's Chill will change, only that all 5 stacks will be applied at once. This would be exactly how fire mages and affliction warlocks apply it now. For affliction warlocks, shadowbolt is part of their regular dps cycle, so they had the easiest time. Fire mages had to break their dps cycle, but this won't be the case in cata, as scorch will be beneficial to them so probably will be part of their rotation anyway. There's no reason for frost mages to grab a short straw here and be forced to start an encounter with blizzard or wait for deep freeze to apply a raid-beneficial debuff.

"At what point (number of targets) does Brain Freeze/Blizzard become higher DPS than straight Blizzard (assuming 2pT10)."

Use of 2t10 clearly gets worse as targets increase, since the 12% haste bonus to blizzard isn't enough to completely offset the GCD of a BF/FFB, but you aren't asking for how many, but how few. Considering that haste impacts both spells equivalently, we can get the cast-time ratios from base cast times. The 12% haste buff would reduce an otherwise 8 second Blizzard down to 7.14 seconds, and the combined FFB/Blizzard would take 8.64 seconds. Of course, haste on gear reduces the actual times, but this just gets the basic ratios. That extra time for the 2t10 Blizzard is about two-thirds of a Blizzard tick we're missing per Frostfire Bolt cast.

Kind of a weak answer, when one FFB deals more damage than 2/3 of a Blizzard tick. My own memory puts my damage from a FFB at about three to four times what a blizzard tick does to a single target, which would make BF-FFB use cost dps at 5 or 6 targets, but that's anecdote not data, and several weeks removed at that.

For more nearly-useless empirical observations, punctuating Blizzards with FFBs seems to decrease *my* total time casting, since I'm not able to target and queue my second Blizzard while the first channels. Granted, more practice could probably fix that, but this could be a case where the theoretical improvements can easily be lost due to slight player sloppiness. It doesn't matter how much better something sims or theorycrafts, if the player can't back it up in game. While the requirement that a player improve isn't a deal-breaker for EJ, it should be noted.

I personally tend to feel that the strength of 2t10 isn't that you might be able to do more damage to 4 nameless, indistinguishable targets. Rather, the strength of 2t10 is that you can pump Frostfire Bolts onto a main target of higher importance in the midst of a group of AoE targets, while loosing only two-thirds of a Blizzard tick, instead of a tick-and-a-half as you would without it.

If mana is tight, you'll get improved DPM with brain freeze/blizzard (free FFB and more clearcast blizzards). It probably about breaks even on 4 targets (on paper), but in practice isn't worth it unless you are short on mana.

If there's a target outside the group that you can hit with blizzard, it might be worth doing (you'll end up doing single target damage on that one eventually anyway and the FFBs are a single target DPS increase).

Note that you can spam deep freeze while channeling blizzard and it will only interrupt the channel if you get a fingers of frost proc (or the target becomes frozen). This can be nice when there's one big target and lots of small ones. The DPM is bad since you'll be missing some blizzard ticks.

Either. There is no reason to turn off Autocast however (which is important when you have periods of running and not pressing your attack buttons). However, a cast waterbolt macro on your main nukes supercedes (and improves upon) your pet's autocast.

If you assume a raidbuffed total haste of around 30% (a pretty reasonable number) you should be able to very safely cast your BF FFB, cast a half a blizzard (maybe even 5/8 of one), then cast another full blizzard all benefitting from the 2T10 buff. Using your BF in that manner means you get 12 ticks of blizzard and a FFB in ~9.4 seconds while just chaining blizzards gets you 12 ticks in ~9.25 seconds, pretty close, with the BF pulling ahead once you can squeeze in 5 ticks on the first blizzard. Technically 30% haste is easily enough to get that 5th tick, but laying down targetting reticules after instants and chaining channeled spells is much more of an art than a science.

This is all ignoring the value of any damage you might do with the free ffb, which does somewhere in the vicinity of 1/3 the dps of blizzard at worst.

Thx for this Tip. I used the mammoth foodbuff and it worked very good, as you can see in the logs
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Also i used the macro with frostbolt and waterbolt on one key.

At last yesterday i used frostbarrier when we made festergut. If you use this exactly when you get the confused, you won't be confused.

It might mitigate some of the damage of the Vile Gas, but I believe the disorientation is a secondary effect. Most likely it's Ice Block that he's referring to.

In my case it worked by using Ice barrier that i prevented the disorientation effect. I could go on casting frostbolts with no interruption.

Hmm... that's interesting. Latency aside, I have noticed that it always seems to take a few moments after getting the DBM notification before I start puking and being disorientated. If the reason is that the disorient effect is applied by the first tick of damage rather than the debuff, it would explain Xmasman's observation... though that would suggest that all mages could escape it escape it if they mana shielded, theoretically.

Or there is a mistake here or I dot understand something.
Using Cold Snap right after Icy Veins does not let you cast third Icy Veins sooner.
There is no point refreshing Icy Veins CD while the spell itself is active. The waiting time on Icy Veins CD starts when you use it second time after 20 seconds in battle. So you could use the Cold Snap any time within those 20 seconds (while first Icy Veins is still active).

Therefore it is best not to use Cold Snap right after first Icy Veins for two reasons:

1. If used after first Deep Freeze it is possible (I'm able to do that around 60-70% of fights) to cast second Deep Freeze right after first one with Frostbolt cast in between (Second Deep Freeze being "Ghost Hit") it is much easier to successfully use Deep Freeze as "Ghost Hit" as all you have to do is spam Deep Freeze while Frostbolt is casting, there is no need to actually time it. It is much harder not to accidentally use FoF charge on Frostbolt as soon as it procs. But even if not able to use Deep Freeze twice it is still better to refresh its CD and use it on next FoF.
2. The [Sanctified Bloodmage Hood] 4 set bonus forces us to use maximum nuke while clones are up but there is 25 second time difference in CD of Icy Veins and Mirror Image due to Icy Floes. Also there is 10 Second difference in duration. So actually there is 15 seconds time gap that you can delay the second Icy Veins and still take advantage of 4 item set bonus during whole Icy Veins duration.

The 2nd on the list is also partial answer to:
There is actually around 30 seconds time that we can wait for FoF proc. And with Icy Veins Up that is quite a lot of casts so it is very very unlikely not to get the proc.
But in any case it all comes down to fight duration. Main point of using the CD's early is to be able to use them again, but most of the fights do not last long enough to enable use of Mirror Image 3 times.
So the most fights will end with Icy Veins Used 3 Times and Mirror Image used 2 times. So if 2nd Icy Veins is delayed for more than 15 seconds we can delay second Mirror Image And use it together with third Icy Veins. There is no difference if clones disappear right before Boss dies or 1 minute before.
It is actually much more important to have clones and trinkets up when Heroism/Bloodlust hits.

Also due to the Frostfire Bolt being affected by Brain Freeze we can no longer neglect the "Ghost Hit".
I usually delay consuming Brain Freeze and wait few seconds for FoF. It is not a significant risk since the delay becomes DPS loss only if the Brain Freeze procs again before we consume the old one.