Frost Mage Seeking Advice

[Geers]

Hey All,

So I got sat for heroic Gul'dan today. First time since playing wow I have been asked to sit, and it sucks. Looking if you guys see any glaring issues or advice that I could use to inch up my dps. Here are the logs for the last raid night:

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/JFhpW6gqTb3y9Kvz#


If you have any advice it would be greatly appreciated.

[JesusTheRaptor]

I'll preface this by saying I only looked at your Star Augur kill, but most of these things will likely carry over to other fights...

1) Your opener needs a lot of work. Instead of spamming FB for the first 7 seconds, a more optimal way to open on fights is to do something similar to...
-4s Pre-pot > -3s Pre-cast Ebonbolt > Flurry > Icy Veins + Ice Lance > Frozen Orb > Frostbolt > Water Jet > Frostbolt > IL to infinity
This allows for maximum usage of EB/FO/WJ, and gives you a solid amount of FoF procs to pad your IV uptime. There are two small risks to overlapping the waterjet and frozen orb, that being if your RNG is godly, you'll possibly munch a FoF proc from frozen orb and if you proc 2 brain freezes off the FB you'll munch one. Luckily both those things happening is about a 1/100 chance statistically, so it's a pretty safe bet.

2) You look to be munching A LOT of empowered Ice Lances. If you're at a point where you're just spamming FB and you get both a FoF proc and BF proc, hit IL > FL > IL. There are quite a few points that you seem to just hit FL > IL which wastes the FoF proc (since the IL is already empowered after the BF proc).

3) It looks like you're losing out on a couple more FoF procs from Water Jet. Wait until you have a FB cast at ~75% then hit WJ and start casting another FB. The first one will hit as the water jet starts the cast and the second one will hit before the end of the cast, giving you 2 procs of FoF instead of one.

4) Tighten up usage of Frozen Orb and Ebonbolt a little bit. Most of the time you were fine on the cooldowns, but there were 1 or 2 that look delayed by about 10-15 seconds.

5) You took Arctic Gale as your tier 6 talent but didn't cast Blizzard a single time. Blizzard can be pretty useful on some fights for reducing frozen orb cd and inching out a bit more damage, but Star Augur doesn't really have enough adds to warrant taking Arctic Gale over Unstable Magic, especially if you're not going to cast Blizzard.

6) Consider using Mark of the Claw as your neck enchant of Satyr. Satyr is a tiny bit better than Claw on pure ST but doesn't translate at all to cleave. Considering every fight in NH has some form of cleave, it could be beneficial for you to switch.

I can't really tell from the logs (probably because I'm lazy and also tired) but make sure whenever you cast EB you immediately follow it with the BF proc and IL, since Blizzard has made it possible to 100% guarantee a shatter on every ebonbolt cast this way. Similarly if you have a BF proc, cast a FB before hitting flurry/IL as you can also shatter the FB which reduces the cd on IV.

Hope some or all of this helps you out. Feel free to ask any questions!

P.S. For reference, I'm an 897 mage and my average parses for H NH at ~87 across all fights as frost. So far I have been raiding with Prydaz/Shard, but I finally got Mag bracers so hopefully my parses will be going up 5-10% this week.


*quick edit* additionally, I'm not entirely sure why your guild chose to sit you for Guldan, as you seem to be holding your own compared to your fellow raiders. If you have any logs from Guldan attempts that you were part of please link them and I can give better advice for that fight alone. Otherwise, make sure you talk to the raid leader(s) and try to get an idea of why they chose to sit you.

[Isoge]

I'll preface this by saying I only looked at your Star Augur kill, but most of these things will likely carry over to other fights...

1) Your opener needs a lot of work. Instead of spamming FB for the first 7 seconds, a more optimal way to open on fights is to do something similar to...
-4s Pre-pot > -3s Pre-cast Ebonbolt > Flurry > Icy Veins + Ice Lance > Frozen Orb > Frostbolt > Water Jet > Frostbolt > IL to infinity
This allows for maximum usage of EB/FO/WJ, and gives you a solid amount of FoF procs to pad your IV uptime. There are two small risks to overlapping the waterjet and frozen orb, that being if your RNG is godly, you'll possibly munch a FoF proc from frozen orb and if you proc 2 brain freezes off the FB you'll munch one. Luckily both those things happening is about a 1/100 chance statistically, so it's a pretty safe bet.

2) You look to be munching A LOT of empowered Ice Lances. If you're at a point where you're just spamming FB and you get both a FoF proc and BF proc, hit IL > FL > IL. There are quite a few points that you seem to just hit FL > IL which wastes the FoF proc (since the IL is already empowered after the BF proc).

3) It looks like you're losing out on a couple more FoF procs from Water Jet. Wait until you have a FB cast at ~75% then hit WJ and start casting another FB. The first one will hit as the water jet starts the cast and the second one will hit before the end of the cast, giving you 2 procs of FoF instead of one.

4) Tighten up usage of Frozen Orb and Ebonbolt a little bit. Most of the time you were fine on the cooldowns, but there were 1 or 2 that look delayed by about 10-15 seconds.

5) You took Arctic Gale as your tier 6 talent but didn't cast Blizzard a single time. Blizzard can be pretty useful on some fights for reducing frozen orb cd and inching out a bit more damage, but Star Augur doesn't really have enough adds to warrant taking Arctic Gale over Unstable Magic, especially if you're not going to cast Blizzard.

6) Consider using Mark of the Claw as your neck enchant of Satyr. Satyr is a tiny bit better than Claw on pure ST but doesn't translate at all to cleave. Considering every fight in NH has some form of cleave, it could be beneficial for you to switch.

I can't really tell from the logs (probably because I'm lazy and also tired) but make sure whenever you cast EB you immediately follow it with the BF proc and IL, since Blizzard has made it possible to 100% guarantee a shatter on every ebonbolt cast this way. Similarly if you have a BF proc, cast a FB before hitting flurry/IL as you can also shatter the FB which reduces the cd on IV.

Hope some or all of this helps you out. Feel free to ask any questions!

P.S. For reference, I'm an 897 mage and my average parses for H NH at ~87 across all fights as frost. So far I have been raiding with Prydaz/Shard, but I finally got Mag bracers so hopefully my parses will be going up 5-10% this week.


*quick edit* additionally, I'm not entirely sure why your guild chose to sit you for Guldan, as you seem to be holding your own compared to your fellow raiders. If you have any logs from Guldan attempts that you were part of please link them and I can give better advice for that fight alone. Otherwise, make sure you talk to the raid leader(s) and try to get an idea of why they chose to sit you.

Thank you for this. Don't want to hijack this thread but it's a related question so I hope it's okay. But with the legendary bracers, do you still want to cast an unprocced ice lance every 6th second to keep the 6 stack buff up? or how does the bracers change the rotation ?

[kzn]

Thank you for this. Don't want to hijack this thread but it's a related question so I hope it's okay. But with the legendary bracers, do you still want to cast an unprocced ice lance every 6th second to keep the 6 stack buff up? or how does the bracers change the rotation ?

I'm fairly sure casting a non-crit lance has never been a dps increase under any situation.

[Isoge]

I'm fairly sure casting a non-crit lance has never been a dps increase under any situation.

I know that, but since 6 stacks with the wrists gives 18% increased ice lance that must be worth keeping that up in case you don't get a procc within that 7 second window, hence my question... but I am new to the mage scene so have no idea how the wrists change the rotation. Do you know perhaps?

Cheers <3

[a0kalittlema0n]

You are munching so many FoF procs its sickening. I'm not sure if you know you can cast an IL after a FL and it'll be like you had a FoF buff, but you had a total of 81 chances to correctly use IL on Krosus, and you only cast IL 50 times. That is literally the single most improvement you can make. Watch a basic frost mage video guide or something to see how the rotation goes. I have one on my youtube channel if you wanna check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9vUkJLMiQ

4 minutes into the video

[JesusTheRaptor]

Thank you for this. Don't want to hijack this thread but it's a related question so I hope it's okay. But with the legendary bracers, do you still want to cast an unprocced ice lance every 6th second to keep the 6 stack buff up? or how does the bracers change the rotation ?

In a perfect world this will never be an issue since you'll get a FoF proc or BF proc before the time runs out, but it's all too common (even with the 2 piece) to cast 7 or 8 frostbolts and not have a single proc. RNG is still RNG I suppose. My gut tells me that using the GCD on an unempowered icelance over casting another frostbolt is a waste.

I added this line into sims to see if maintaining the buff at 6 was worth it or not, and it returned a ~1.5% lower value than the sim operating without this condition, so at least some lazy math checks out.

actions.single+=/ice_lance,if=buff.magtheridons_might.stack=6&buff.magtheridons_might.remains<1

[FrostyButt]

Biggest advice I can offer people since the new Flurry changes for rotation when you get double Flurry.

This is incorrect.

Frostbolt - Flurry - Ice Lance - Flurry - Ice Lance

This is correct.

Frostbolt - Flurry - Ice Lance - Frostbolt - Flurry - Ice Lance

[Isoge]

In a perfect world this will never be an issue since you'll get a FoF proc or BF proc before the time runs out, but it's all too common (even with the 2 piece) to cast 7 or 8 frostbolts and not have a single proc. RNG is still RNG I suppose. My gut tells me that using the GCD on an unempowered icelance over casting another frostbolt is a waste.

I added this line into sims to see if maintaining the buff at 6 was worth it or not, and it returned a ~1.5% lower value than the sim operating without this condition, so at least some lazy math checks out.

actions.single+=/ice_lance,if=buff.magtheridons_might.stack=6&buff.magtheridons_might.remains<1

Thanks a lot for your help! I'll just have to pray harder for those proccs I guess...